Coaching practices for Self Havening Calming the Nervous System Through Touch During Conflict

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • When I’m upset I instinctively want to hold my own face, the way someone would cup it if they were comforting me
  • I’m flooded and my thoughts are useless right now
  • I don’t want to only scramble for calm once I’m already in pieces
  • The upset is sitting in my body, not my thoughts
  • I’m too flooded to think my way calmer

Practices that may help

  1. Self-Havening: Calming the Nervous System Through Touch
    Self-havening uses slow, repetitive self-touch on the arms, face, and hands — combined with distraction or eye movements — to interrupt acute distress and lower arousal. The proposed mechanism (delta-wave induction via touch de-potentiating traumatic amygdala encodings) is plausible but not yet independently replicated at scale. As a brief self-soothing technique many people find it calming in the moment; it is not a proven clinical treatment and should not replace professional care for trauma or PTSD.
  2. Face havening
    Gently stroke your cheekbones and forehead to activate the facial calm response.
    Self-Havening: Calming the Nervous System Through Touch
  3. Arm havening stroke
    Slowly stroke both forearms from shoulder to elbow while keeping attention off the distress.
    Self-Havening: Calming the Nervous System Through Touch
  4. The Havening Place (safe-place induction)
    Combine havening strokes with a vividly imagined calm location to deepen resource anchoring.
    Self-Havening: Calming the Nervous System Through Touch
  5. Physical self-soothing
    Use touch, warmth, rocking, or breath to directly calm the nervous system.
    Self-Soothing, Made Practical
  6. Use soothing touch as a physiological anchor
    Physical self-touch — hand on heart, cupped hands on face — signals safety to the body.
    The Self-Compassion Break
  7. Five-senses self-soothe
    Deliberately engage each sense with something genuinely comforting to redirect attention and activate the soothing system.
    Self-Soothing, Made Practical
  8. Self-soothe through the five senses
    Deliberately comfort yourself through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch while the crisis peaks.
    Distress Tolerance Skills, Made Practical
  9. Build and use social safety signals
    Establish cues in your relationships that communicate "you are safe here" — reducing anticipatory social stress.
    Tend-and-Befriend, Made Practical
  10. Self-soothing during conflict instead of demanding partner regulate you
    Calm your own nervous system in the moment, rather than requiring your partner to change so you can feel better.
    Differentiation of Self: David Schnarch’s Framework for Passionate Marriage

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