HAVENING


Kate Truitt (2022). Healing in Your Hands: 

                              Self-havening Practices to Harness 

                              Neuroplasticity, Heal Traumatic Stress, 

                              and Build Resilience. 


Truitt has a PhD and MBA and is a licensed clinical psychologist and neuroscientist.

Self-havening is a light, gentle, stroking touch on one's body, especially the palms, arms, and face. When combined with "protocols" (e.g., breathing, positive affirmations, imagery), it creates documented empirical electrochemical changes in the body-mind via neuroplasticity to calm and heal when the amygdala signals a reactivity/stress response.

The amygdala part of the brain Truitt affectionately calls "Amy" and its primary job is to keep us safe, comfortable, and secure...Amy operates with an instinctual negativity bias, working four times faster than our thoughts (which operate at the blink of an eye), and calling up memories of past trauma which kicks in our fight, flight, freeze, fawn response--all designed to help us survive. 


One valuable practice is to simply notice when Amy is triggered, signaling that Amy needs reassurance that we have heard her and will take care of her. This triggering happens when we are hyper- (overstimulated, e.g., anger, severe anxiety) or hypo-aroused (depressed, extremely bored) and not in the ideal resilience zone (functioning at our optimum)...once triggered, we reassure and calm Amy by engaging in self-havening (gently rubbing the palms together as if washing our hands, hugging ourselves at the shoulders and letting the palms smoothly ride down the arms to the elbow, caress the area under our eyes with our hands from inner to outer, and likewise above the eyebrows across the forehead) AND combine the self-havening with one of many protocols:

  • smiling
  • breathing...trace a finger of one hand up the index finger of the other hand and back down, inhaling on the upward movement and exhaling on the downward movement, then proceed to the other fingers in turn and back again, ending on the index finger
  • imagine any kind of movement (picture yourself dancing, walking through a garden, playing tennis, basketball, golf, bowling, swimming...)
  • counting backwards by 7's from 1000
  • singing a favorite song
  • humming
  • naming all the colors you see in your immediate environment
  • see the book for many more ideas...

There are MANY activities in the book that invite deep self-reflection and the development of competencies in the self-havening protocols.





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