Trauma impacts every part of our lives—our thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and even the way we interact with the world. Over the past decade, significant advancements in neuroscience have transformed how we understand and approach healing, offering new opportunities for recovery and resilience.
The Havening Techniques®, introduced in the early 2000s, marked an important step in integrating mindful touch and visualization into therapeutic care. These psychosensory tools gained recognition for their ability to calm the nervous system, reduce emotional distress, and activate neuroplasticity, the brain’s capacity to rewire itself. However, as trauma research and neuroscience have advanced, so too has the need for more comprehensive and trauma-informed approaches to healing.
Today, methods like the NeuroTriad Model and the Healing in Your Hands program reflect the next evolution in trauma recovery. These approaches build on the early foundations of Havening while addressing the need for modern, evidence-based practices that prioritize safety, empowerment, and a deeper understanding of trauma’s effects.
The Havening Techniques®: An Important Early Step
The Havening Techniques® were developed to leverage psychosensory inputs—gentle touch, visualization, and attention—to help individuals reprocess distressing memories and find relief from trauma-related symptoms. By calming the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center, Havening introduced many to the idea of using touch as a tool for emotional healing.
This early approach served as a foundation for integrating mindful touch into therapeutic care, drawing attention to the importance of regulating the nervous system in the healing process. However, since its inception, Havening has remained largely unchanged, with its science and applications not evolving to align with newer research and trauma-informed principles.
While Havening offered valuable insights at the time, modern trauma recovery requires approaches that are more adaptive, comprehensive, and rooted in the latest neuroscience.
For decades, trauma treatment has primarily relied on exposure-based and talk therapy techniques to address symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, and other trauma-related conditions. These traditional approaches focused on gradually exposing clients to fear-inducing stimuli with the aim of desensitizing them to trauma triggers. While effective for some, these methods have been challenging for both clients and clinicians, often involving significant emotional pain and, in some cases, inadvertently retraumatizing clients or causing vicarious traumatization for clinicians. These trauma treatments emphasized executive processing centers of the brain, using logic, language, and reasoning to mitigate trauma responses. This approach, while valuable, did not fully address the underlying neurobiological mechanisms driving trauma symptoms.The introduction of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) marked a turning point in trauma treatment. EMDR introduced a novel way of addressing trauma by targeting electrochemical activity within the central nervous system. By using bilateral stimulation, EMDR supports the brain in reprocessing traumatic memories, reducing the intensity of fear-based responses associated with PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias.
EMDR’s groundbreaking approach represented a shift from traditional exposure therapy to a more neuroscience-driven method. By working with the brain’s innate ability to heal itself, EMDR laid the groundwork for a deeper understanding of how trauma can be rewired at a neurological level.
Building on these advancements, the Havening Techniques® brought attention to the importance of psychosensory inputs, such as touch and visualization, in calming the nervous system and reducing the impact of trauma. By focusing on the amygdala—the brain’s emotional center—Havening highlighted the role of neuroplasticity in depotentiating traumatic memories.
This approach introduced a way to safely deactivate the receptors and neural pathways that encode traumatic experiences, offering relief from symptoms such as hypervigilance, emotional dysregulation, and phobic responses. While Havening played a foundational role in integrating neuroscience into trauma care, newer advancements have taken this work further, addressing its limitations and expanding its applications with more comprehensive trauma-informed methods.
As our understanding of trauma and the brain has advanced, so too has the need for treatments that address the full complexity of trauma’s impact. The NeuroTriad Model represents the most recent innovation in trauma-informed care, offering a comprehensive and adaptive framework for healing that builds on the foundations of EMDR and Havening. Unlike earlier methods that focused primarily on one aspect of trauma, the NeuroTriad Model integrates cognitive, emotional, sensory, and physiological processes to address trauma holistically while curating brain partnership and the development of personal empowerment. This trauma-informed, neurobiologically-driven approach ensures that both safety and empowerment are prioritized, reducing the risk of retraumatization while fostering long-term resilience and healing.
Trauma impacts every area of life, often manifesting as:
Left untreated, these symptoms can seep into every aspect of daily living. By utilizing modern approaches like the NeuroTriad Model, EMDR, and self-healing tools from the Healing in Your Hands program, clients can safely process their painful pasts and begin building a future of emotional balance, resilience, and empowerment.
Take the next step in advancing trauma recovery. Whether you are seeking to heal from trauma yourself or want to equip yourself with the latest tools as a clinician, these innovative approaches offer a safe and effective pathway to freedom from the past.
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Dr. Truitt is a co-developer of the Havening Techniques and is the creator of the Healing in Your Hands Programs. Havening Techniques, Havening, and Self-Havening are registered trademarks of Dr. Ronald Ruden.
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