Midwest Haven
Become a Certified Havening Techniques Practitioner: Elevate Your Practice, Transform Lives.
About Midwest Haven
Midwest Haven’s mission is to alleviate suffering resulting from traumatic events/adverse experiences, and to build and strengthen resilience to protect from future stressors. Midwest Haven was founded as a training clinic dedicated to educating providers on the groundbreaking advancements in the Havening Techniques® treatment modality, ultimately leading to better outcomes for individuals and communities.
This ensures that providers can offer the most advanced and compassionate care, transforming lives and promoting well-being.
Nicole Carreon, LMTF, and Holli Engelhart, LICSW founded Midwest Haven to support the healing process of clients, and to share and educate fellow clinicians, medical professionals, and many other professions on Havening Techniques.
Havening Techniques is a type of treatment that uses touch, and other sensory inputs, to support the healing of trauma, adverse experiences, and multitude of emotional/mental health conditions. It was developed from advancements in neuroscience which has determined how particular touch points release chemicals in the brain; and when paired with specific working memory protocols, allows neurons to release previously encoded trauma. Havening Techniques was developed by Dr. Steven Ruden and Dr. Ronald Ruden, who originally called it Amygdala Depotentiation Therapy. Extensive research and studies have determined these protocols support relief in a myriad of conditions that involve emotional and mental health concerns.
Touch is a powerful healing tool. For many years touch was disconnected from the healing work of psychotherapy. Now thanks to deeper understanding from neuroscience, we are seeing the efficacy of integrating self-applied touch into the work of psychotherapy.
Havening Techniques
What is Havening Techniques?
Havening Techniques ® can be described as a type of psycho-sensory (touch) technique based on the fields of neuroscience and neurobiology which uses sensory input in order to alter thought, mood, and behavior. Havening is designed to make changes in the brain in order to remove from both the psyche and the body the emotional memory of a traumatic or stressful life event and its negative effects. When a person experiences a traumatic or stressful event, it becomes immutably encoded in the psyche and the body. Once encoded this can manifest as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxieties, phobias or other psychological disorders. Havening Techniques promotes rapid, gentle and permanent electrochemical and physical change by combining specific touch with guided cognitive exercises that creates a chemical response in our brains that allow emotional responses to traumatic memories to be removed.
Havening allows us quickly and effectively to take a traumatic experience and release the traumatically encoded components so it becomes just another memory. What that means is that specific memory will not activate the entire physiology of fight/flight/freeze when a person encounters a stimulus similar to one in the traumatically encoded experience. It will no longer burn out the adrenal system (panic) or cause the person to reach for food or alcohol, etc, to soothe their nervous system because of the impact of that earlier trauma. So the individual is back in a place of empowered control.
“When an event or experience is perceived as traumatic or very stressful it becomes immutably encoded, often with life-altering consequences. However, recent research from the field of neuroscience has shown us how it’s possible to modify this encoding. The Havening Techniques are methods which are designed to change the brain to de-traumatize the memory and permanently remove its negative effects from both our psyche and body.”
~ Ronald A. Ruden, M.D., Ph.D.- Co-founder of The Havening Techniques www.havening.org
Holli Engelhart, LICSW(left)- Dr. Steven Ruden, Co-founder of The Havening Techniques (center)- Nicole Carreon, LMFT (right)
“The Havening Techniques engage our inherent biological system to permanently heal, strengthen and empower our minds and bodies.” - Dr. Ron Ruden
