Havening Techniques (Psychosensory Touch)

Ruden’s protocol (Ruden, When the Past Is Always Present, 2011) typically runs:

1. Identify and rate the distress. Bring up the troubling memory, fear, or emotion and rate its intensity (a 0–10 SUDS-style scale), to track change.
2. Activate the feeling briefly, then leave it. You bring the emotional content up enough to “tag” it — Ruden’s model holds that the memory must be momentarily activated to become modifiable — and then you deliberately turn attention away.
3. Apply the “havening touch.” With your own hands (or a practitioner’s, with consent), apply slow, soothing strokes to: the palms (rubbing hands together), the upper arms (stroking shoulder-to-elbow), and the face (gentle strokes down the cheeks / around the eyes). This continuous soothing touch is the core somatic input.
4. Run distraction / attention tasks simultaneously. While stroking, you do simple absorbing tasks — e.g. count steps while imagining walking, visualise a calm scene, hum a tune, or say the alphabet / numbers, sometimes with eye movements (look left/right, blink). The point is to occupy attention elsewhere while the soothing touch continues.
5. Re-check and repeat. Periodically re-rate the distress. Repeat cycles of touch-plus-distraction until the SUDS rating drops (ideally toward 0).
6. Optional “positive havening.” Pair the soothing touch with affirming/calming statements or imagery to build a resourceful state (“affirmational” or “outcome” havening). (Sourcing note: the touch locations, “activate then distract,” and SUDS-tracking structure are Ruden’s taught protocol. Descriptions are a faithful summary, not a reproduction of copyrighted text.)

Ronald Ruden, MD, PhD (an internist) developed Havening in the 2000s, with his brother Steven Ruden (a dentist), originally naming it Amygdala Depotentiation Therapy. Ruden set out his model in When the Past Is Always Present (2011).

The method sits in the broader energy/psychosensory psychology family that descends from Roger Callahan’s TFT and Gary Craig’s EFT (tapping), but Havening substitutes stroking touch for tapping and leans heavily on a neuroscience narrative (delta-wave generation, AMPA-receptor depotentiation in the amygdala, “internally generated electroceuticals”). It gained pop-culture visibility (e.g. celebrity endorsements).

The shared move — soothing sensory input to settle a threat/emotion response — recurs:

• TFT / EFT (tapping) — same “activate the issue + apply a body input + re-rate” structure, with tapping instead of stroking.,
• EMDR (Shapiro) — recall distressing material while doing a bilateral, attention-dividing task (eye movements/taps). Havening’s “activate + distract + soothe” closely parallels this; EMDR is the one psychosensory method with strong PTSD evidence.
• Self-soothing touch / co-regulation — stroking, holding, swaddling, “butterfly hug” — long used across caregiving and somatic therapies to down-regulate distress.
• Comfort touch in bodywork / massage — slow skin stroking reliably calming via the parasympathetic and C-tactile afferent system.

Believing the neuro-marketing. The brain story is sold as established fact; it isn’t. The technique can still be worth trying as gentle self-soothing — just hold the mechanism claims lightly.

• Going too hard at heavy trauma alone. Briefly “activating” a serious traumatic memory without support can flood vulnerable people. For real trauma, use a qualified clinician.
• Treating it as a cure. Symptom relief in a session is not the same as resolved trauma. Don’t drop appropriate care.
• Skipping the re-rating. The SUDS check is what tells you whether anything is shifting; without it you can’t tell soothing from suggestion.