What is the difference between EMDR and Havening Techniques®?

Two approaches. Different doors into the same nervous system.

If you’ve been researching body-based therapy for anxiety, trauma, or burnout, you’ve likely encountered both EMDR and Havening Techniques®. Both work with the nervous system. Both reduce the emotional charge of distressing experiences. Both produce changes that talk therapy alone often cannot.

But they are not the same — and understanding the difference can help you know what your nervous system might need.

Somatic therapy provides a bridge between the nervous system and the psyche — so that healing happens not just in understanding but in muscle, breath, and bone. EMDR and Havening Techniques® are two of the most precise tools available for working at that level.

What is EMDR?

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing was developed by Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s and is now one of the most extensively researched trauma treatments available. It uses bilateral stimulation — typically guided eye movements, alternating taps, or auditory tones — to engage both hemispheres of the brain simultaneously while the client holds a distressing memory in mind.

The theory is that trauma gets stored in a fragmented, unprocessed state — frozen in time, unable to integrate into ordinary memory. EMDR helps the brain complete the processing that was interrupted by the overwhelm of the original experience. The memory remains, but its emotional charge — the way it activates as if it’s still happening — diminishes or resolves.

I use EMDR to help women reprocess specific traumatic memories — so that what happened in the past stops activating as if it’s happening now.

EMDR is highly effective for:

—    Specific traumatic events or memories

—    PTSD and acute stress responses

—    Phobias and specific fears

—    Anxiety rooted in identifiable past experiences

—    Performance anxiety and stage fright

What are Havening Techniques®?

Havening Techniques® were developed by Dr. Ronald Ruden, a physician and neuroscientist, based on decades of research into how traumatic experiences become encoded in the brain — and how that encoding can be permanently changed.

Havening uses gentle self-administered touch — to the arms, face, and hands — combined with guided distraction to produce delta waves in the brain. Delta waves are the slow brain waves associated with deep sleep and, critically, with the brain’s capacity to restructure memory. When delta waves are present, the amygdala — the brain’s threat-detection center — becomes accessible for depotentiation. In plain terms: the emotional charge attached to a distressing memory or pattern can be reduced or removed at a neurological level.

The memory doesn’t disappear. The terror attached to it does.

I use Havening Techniques® to help women de-traumatize painful memories and accumulated stress — gently and without requiring them to relive what they’ve already survived.

Havening is particularly effective for:

—    Accumulated, diffuse distress without a clear origin story

—    Anxiety that has been running so long it feels like personality

—    Phobias and specific fears

—    Traumatic encoding that doesn’t have a single identifiable event

—    Nervous systems that have been on high alert for decades

—    Clients who find verbal reactivation of trauma too activating for EMDR

The key differences.

Mechanism.

EMDR works through bilateral stimulation of both brain hemispheres during active memory processing. Havening works through psychosensory touch that generates delta waves, creating a neurological window for amygdala depotentiation. These are distinct processes producing distinct kinds of change.

What they target.

EMDR works most effectively with specific, identifiable memories — a named event, a concrete experience. Havening is specifically designed for traumatic encoding, including the kind that is diffuse, accumulated, or without a clearly remembered origin.

Verbal activation.

EMDR requires holding the distressing content in mind during processing — which can temporarily increase activation before relief follows. Havening uses guided distraction during touch, which means the nervous system is calmed while the neurological change occurs, rather than activated.

Permanence.

Both can produce lasting change. When Havening successfully depotentiates a traumatic encoding, the change is typically permanent — the amygdala has been restructured, not temporarily calmed.

Why I use both.

I came to Havening Techniques® after training in EMDR, and I have used each with hundreds of women over 25 years.

EMDR is powerful for specific traumatic experiences that have a clear memory attached. For women who can identify the event, who have enough nervous system capacity to hold it in mind during processing, and whose distress has a definable shape — EMDR often produces profound and lasting relief.

Havening reaches something different. For women carrying the accumulated weight of decades — anxiety that doesn’t have a single origin story, a nervous system that has been running on high alert for so long it no longer remembers another setting, distress that is diffuse and pervasive rather than specific and identifiable — Havening often reaches what EMDR alone cannot.

Together, EMDR and Havening Techniques® provide access to the full depth of the nervous system — EMDR reaching specific traumatic memories, Havening reaching the diffuse accumulated distress that doesn’t have a single origin story. In my practice, I use both — not interchangeably, but in response to what each woman’s nervous system needs in each moment of the work.

Does this sound like what you’re looking for?

Sara Anderson, MA, LPC offers EMDR and Havening Techniques® Intensives and ongoing therapy via telehealth throughout Georgia — integrated within a somatic depth psychotherapy approach for women in midlife navigating anxiety, trauma, burnout, and life transitions.