Finding Your Way Home; The Secrets to True Alignment

Podcast Short - Gillian Stevenson, How to heal your trauma through the somatic practice of Having

• Anthea Bell

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Gorgeous listeners, welcome to this week’s episode of Finding Your Way Home

On this week's Podcast Short, we sit down with Master NLP Coach, Hypnotherapist and Trauma-Informed Havening Practitioner, Gillian Stevenson. 

Gillian is an incredible resource on the intersection between neurology, biology and the sustained healing of complex trauma. As you’ll hear in this beautiful excerpt, Gillian has spent her career pursuing not only the tools for creating deep emotional change, but understanding (and sharing) the science behind them. 

In today’s episode, we dive into her favourite focus topic - a powerful somatic practice called Havening, which is increasingly used in therapeutic interventions for both “external” traumas (PTSD / family conflict / war etc) and perhaps more internalised challenges such as chronic pain, phobia and mental illness. 

You will hear how exactly Havening works physiologically; why it’s so effective in the navigation of sustained mental or physical challenge; and how we can practically apply Havening in any moment we find ourselves to be activated by old / practiced neural pathways. Whether you’re someone working to reduce anxiety, retrain your beliefs or improve sleep, or a practitioner looking for additional somatic tools to support your clients with, this is a powerful and insightful Mini to learn from.  

To find out more about Gillian and the Havening Technique: 

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Sending care, wherever this finds you.
 
 Anthea x

Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. Always consult with a healthcare professional if seeking tailored 1:1 support. 

and it's interesting you talk about pain because the physiological pathway that trauma is encoded through, which is the AMPA receptors, that occur at the synapses. Effectively, what happens when we, we have a traumatic event is the AMPA receptors are upregulated, so we get lots more of them embedded into the synapse. which means that if we get slightly triggered in the future, all these alarms are set off and they start a physiological response in your body. Interestingly, pain receptors are also AMPA receptors. And.

Anthea:

welcome to Finding Your Way Home, the secrets to true alignment. I'm your host, Anthea Bell, movement teacher, mind body coach, and lifelong spiritual seeker. This is a podcast about the depth, weight, and profound healing power of connection between mind and body, spirit and soul, and from one human to another. Together with an incredible range of inspiring guests, we'll explore just what connection and alignment mean. How to get there in a world full of the temptation to conform, and how great challenge ultimately can lead to life changing transformation. Get ready for groundbreaking personal stories, conversational deep dives, and a toolkit of strategies to build not just your inner knowing, but your outer world. Let's dive in.

MacBook Air Microphone-2:

Hello. gorgeous listeners and welcome to this week's special mini episode of finding your way home. This is the second of our series of 2025 shorts. Really aimed at giving you the deepest, most meaningful snippets of inspiration reflections and guidance to fuel the week to come. We'll be releasing these every Monday, followed by a full brand spanking new interview on Friday mornings. Today's episode is with a profound expert in the realm of mind and body. Gillian Stevenson is a decades long practitioner in coaching, in hypnotherapy and in a ream of different somatic practices, really aim to support recovery from different forms of trauma. And today she goes deep into the topic of Havening, which is one of the practices that I personally use. We teach it in the embodiment training at Gillian actually comes and teaches a special module on it. And, uh, it's really widely used increasingly in a formal scientific study, but also to support people in recovering from things like fibromyalgia. From, um, childhood trauma. From, uh, disruptions in the family, even for things like war conflict, it's a really very simple technique, but as you'll hear the neurology behind why it works so well, So sustainably and how you can really integrate it into your own practice is fascinating. I cannot wait for you to lessen. Do you let us know how the episode lands, give us your feedback, share this with a friend. If you think it might be supportive. And if you would like any actual guidance on how to do the practice, we have a series of resources for you. So just send us an email to the address listed in the show notes, or drop me a message on social and that that will be with you in your inbox as soon as possible. I sent you so much love on this incredibly frosty Sunday. And, I hope this finds you well, wherever you listen.

Havening really is set in the neurosciences, and what we have learned in neuroscience over the last five years has really framed this particular technique. And the basis of this is really that we've got a little part of our brain called the amygdala, and the amygdala is very ancient. It's been there since we were running around as cavemen and women. And It is really there to scan the horizon and to pick up things that might be of danger to us. And the thing with the amygdala is that it's got a great memory. So it picks up things that it perceives might be dangerous and it puts it into encoding in the brain so that in the future, if something quite similar happens, we are able to react quickly to that situation. And it puts us into a sense of Fight or flight, which I'm sure many people have heard of, or at its extreme, freeze or flop. so basically, the amygdala is there storing that encoding of trauma. And trauma can be as small as a, you know, a young child being frightened by a dog that happened to yap at it. Or it can be as big as, um, being assaulted. Um, being raped or losing a child or having a miscarriage. And all of these are things that, that kind of might hit us as life goes through. And the thing is, when we remember those things that are encoded, it is as if we were still there. Because not only do we remember it, but we have all the emotional responses associated with it. And it's that that causes the distress. Memories will be there with us. I mean, we can wipe memories, but I never recommend it. Um, but memories should be there with us because they're part of us. They're part of what helped us to be who we are. They're part of our humanity. But it's emotional attachment that can be so difficult to live with that can be wrecking of lives that can cause adverse reactions. It can cause people to become very angry. It can cause people to become very withdrawn. And it can really, really affect people's lives and how they interact with others. So what Havening does is it actually splits in the brain. When we do it, it actually splits. that memory from the emotions and it disconnects that encoding in the amygdala so the memory can float back into long term memory and the emotions associated with it are no longer present and that is the release and the liberation that you get. It's amazing to hear you talking about it. Thank you for the outline. it's very, very useful to understand the background, to understand the scientific why. you and I were talking a little bit before we came on air about how important the why is generally But I also think in terms of working with clients, especially if they're coming from a place of little t trauma, big t trauma, physiological overload, because what you're talking about in terms of the emotions, you know, that's what I see on the practice side every day in people's physiology is this freezing and seizing and unexplained moving chronic pain. so utterly linked to what they've been through, or what they feel that they've been through, what they believe that they've been through. which is a subtle distinction and not one that you want to necessarily air with the client straight away, because I don't want to question their understanding of their world. I want to be a hundred percent in support of them as they do this gritty work to move through it. but I think there is something fundamental about understanding your foundations, because if someone comes to you in that state, they're going to need assurance that what they're embarking on is something that will work. And they need to understand that in terms that they can understand. And for so many people that are in pain, that goes back to a medical model. Because the idea of having faith and hope and creativity at that point is probably not for everyone, but for a lot of people going to feel emotionally too exposing, too vulnerable to have hope in something that doesn't feel like it lands in logic. So what you're talking about is a very logically grounded system. And my experience of it was, it was very systematic. and this is part of your skill, I really understood what we were doing at every stage and you walked me through it in a way that was respectful to the speed or slowness of my process so that I really came to understand it. I wonder if for those that haven't experienced havening, you might just describe a little bit what kind of nature of, of mind body work we're doing. So, and it's interesting you talk about pain because the actual pathway, the physiological pathway that trauma is encoded through, which is the AMPA receptors, that occur at the synapses. Effectively, what happens when we, we have a traumatic event is the AMPA receptors are upregulated, so we get lots more of them embedded into the synapse. which means that if we get slightly triggered in the future, you're setting off a smoke alarm. So you've got lots of smoke alarms there so that when the slightest puff of smoke comes, all these alarms are set off and they start a physiological response in your body. Interestingly, pain receptors are also AMPA receptors. And. More than that, we're now getting a lot more information about the fascia, which is the interconnective tissue that runs completely throughout our bodies, which is highly enervated and also links back into the amygdala. So when you're talking about trauma, um, and how it's picked up and how it relates to pain, we're now seeing a lot of neurobiological, um, evidence of how these things might be linked. I'm particularly with fibromyalgia, which is something that I'm starting to, to do a very, very small pilot study with at the moment. There is, because we don't really understand fibromyalgia is, but we do know that round about 50 fibromyalgia, it came on after a traumatic event. And so what I'm looking at is will the Havening techniques work with that group of, clients. Because I know that with some of the clients I work with, with trauma, as a side effect, some of their pain goes away. and this is, this is chronic long term pain. This is not pain associated with a particular injury that is still healing. So this is chronic long term pain. Um, and as we know with fibromyalgia, this is moving pain. This pain can be in your arm one day, it can be in your foot, it can be in your back, it can be in your head. and this is why we think it might be associated with the fascia, um, because that is a connective tissue that runs throughout the body. So, so back to your question, should I go back to your question, just for fun. So, basically what Havening is doing is it's working on those AMPA receptors. So we've got an upregulated. early warning system that is, that has been encoded into our brain and what we want to do is now to break that by taking those extra AMPA receptors out of that circuit. And we know that, um, during the normal day, we will have a certain amount of upregulation in the Ampire receptors anyway, until we go to sleep at night and we start to process the day. And we do that during the kind of sleep that creates delta waves in our brain. What the delta waves do is they, um, they act on the chemical bonding in the, cell surface of the neuron. And they allow that ampile receptor to come back into the body of the cell. So it's no longer active if you like, until it's next required. And we know that it's delta waves that, that that happens. So what we're doing in Havening is we are creating lots of delta waves. We're intentionally creating them and we do that through touch. And there are three ways in which we can touch ourselves which will create these delta waves. We can either stroke our faces. We can stroke the outsides of our arms from the shoulder down to the elbow and it's a 1, 000, 2, 000, we'll turn your arms up to your elbows again. It's that kind of speed it's a very, it's a very medium touch, or we can just sort of stroke palms of our hands and then lots and lots of receptors in those areas that have shown to be active if you actually stroke them. If you've got a baby a child who's It's highly dysregulated. They've got lots of receptors over the top of their heads. So stroking the face and the top of the head, you'll, you'll see their little faces sort of start to relax. Um, so we're creating these data waves. If you've got a specific experience that has caused the problem, what we ask the client to do is to briefly remember it. We don't need to work with content. And that can be really useful in trauma, because when you start to talk about traumatic experiences, there's a huge risk of re traumatizing the individual. Each time we talk about it, it just reinforces that pathway. So we don't need to talk about content, but what we do need the client to do is to be able just to recall the situation so that they can start to feel it in their body. And I'll come back to that in a moment. And as soon as they've done that, We start the Havening touch, and then I will go through a process of talking them through various, little protocols. a lot of the initial protocols for event Havening are around distracting the short term memory so that that memory pops back into long term. causing those extra receptors to go back into the cell and that breaks that. linkage between memory and emotions. That so perfectly describes what you and I went through. And one of the things that I was reflecting on after our session was a, the relief of not having to go back into the memory. I've explored that in my practice because so much of my work comes into mind, body modalities that don't take you into the story. Deliberately, deliberately, we're getting beneath the story because it's actually from beneath the story that you find the centering to connect more to, intuition, grounding, equilibrium, parasympathetic, all of those things. So I found that in my own clinic work to be profound, especially because a lot of the people that come to me are in a very excited state within their nervous system. And they won't necessarily even be aware. Of the content that's driving that scenario within their nervous system. But something that struck me afterwards was when you were distracting me, you asked me to recall an experience that I love, which is, I'm a huge, lover of walking, and I hadn't really come to walking until I started to calm my nervous system down and when I started to look into the science, the why, you know, we started looking at that rhythmic movement and it became very clear that there was genuine physiology and energetic work that was happening And for me, I used it when I first started and still to this day as a form of meditation and as a time of relative spiritual connection. And you had me talk you through. my morning walk and what I would see. And it was only afterwards that I really started to associate that also with the visioning work that I sometimes do with clients, where I allow them to start to feel the emotional state that they want to more regularly experience. But that some part of their thinking mind is blocking them off from. There's a resistance, there's a story there that they can't have what they want, for example. But when we drop away from that idea and we take them into, okay, list out everything that you want and now tell me, what does it feel like to have those things? what is that like as a three dimensional experience? Then, if I look at them from the outside, and they usually have their eyes closed, the cheeks soften, the jaw drops, you see the bones hanging differently, you see the fascia having expanded, and I work a lot with fascia, And so, would you be happy to just explain why that's quite so significant this, distraction through, positive experiences, Yeah, I mean, I think there's several things really that that I feel about this whole process I mean, a lot of what you're describing is what I would call an LP, it's It's absolutely NLP to its core and, and we use this in, in paving in terms of how we, um, get the client out, out into a positive arena. It's also concentration because when we, when we, when I talk to people about, you know, describe what you see, what you hear, what you feel, what you smell, it's engaging the different senses. And that grounds them again. when I ask them to count out loud, that is very much a distraction technique, because it moves things into a different part of the brain. So again, although we're working on the, we're working on the, um, amygdala, we're actually engaging different parts of the brain at the same time, which is, which is very useful. And in fact, um, with the Havening technique, when we use it in humanitarian Havening, we don't. Because people are, as you've just described, um, highly excitable state, you definitely don't need to ask them, remember that time because they're in it. They're in it constantly, so actually all we do with when you're talking about humanitarian havening, is we just start the havening touch, and we get them to do some counting, we get them to do some singing, or humming, because again that works with the vagus nerve, it's, it's, you know, and it's getting things moving, it's calming things down. You don't need to speak in the same language. I was doing some work with a guy, a few months ago, and He started talking German, because we were doing some past generation work. I said, do you actually, afterwards I said, I didn't know you spoke German, he said no, neither did I. So you don't actually have to, you don't actually have to speak the same language as the person you're working with. That's amazing. that that process tapped him into an area of his experience and his knowledge that he wasn't even consciously aware of. we were, if you like, playing at the edges because he asked me, can I do something and I said, I'm not sure but I'm, I'm willing to give it a try, And so we, we played together and had a really, really interesting outcome, which was healing generational pain through the issues of people being moved from town to town from city to city from country to country. and that has for me that has some really interesting implications because we have such intergenerational pain and trauma across the world. Things that we are living today that actually aren't our lives, but they're, they are related to things that happened to our parents, our grandparents, the lines, if you like. And it's either coming through telling stories, or it's coming through the genetics with epigenetics. And we know that we know that stress and trauma can come through the genetics that's been well proven now and it's understandable that it would come through at least three generations because the grandmother who has is gestating their child, was that female child is still in the womb, has already generated her eggs for the next generation. So if you have the grandmother in the state of trauma. Then there's that possibility of translating that trauma down through the next two generations. And that work has already, you know, been done in a number of places now. Um, so it's, it's interesting that we have these opportunities to not only deal with what's happening now and in our generation, but potentially to work back through some of the traumas that have happened in the past. gorgeous listeners. Thank you. So. So. much. For your ears. I hope. You enjoy today's. today's. episode. To find. More about our. Featured guests. Have a look in the show. Notes.