Smoking Cessation, No Butts About It
Smoking cessation. I don’t talk about it much, but it, along with weight loss, is one of the two subjects most associated with Hypnotherapy by the general public. A lot of hypnotherapists, myself included, consider it hypnotherapy 101, something you can advertise to build a clientele but something you generally drift away from as more diverse cases come your way. (And I have.)
I had a conversation with an old client the other day and it really made me take a look at my attitude on the subject. While Stop Smoking programs are relatively simple exercises, they are programs that profoundly change the lives of the clients.
The behavior of smoking is almost tailor made to be dealt with by hypnosis. The actually physical addiction, while very strong, is actually very short lived. Most of the physical withdrawal is over in a week or less. Amazingly, nicotine is not the worst culprit with cigarettes. It’s all the other chemicals that have been added specifically to add “punch” to the nicotine hit and cause the psychological addiction. Case in point, you almost never, and I have never, seen a client with an addiction to nicotine patches or gum. So the vast majority of the addiction is not physical. It has to do with the client’s mental associations to smoking, their feelings about it and how it applies to them. It is therefore able to be dealt with efficiently with hypnosis.
So, smoking is mostly a learned behavior and smoking cigarettes is literally one of the worst “lose-lose” behaviors a person can have. Smokers may believe that it: calms them down, suppresses their appetite or just makes them look cool, but it actually does none of those things. It is a stimulant that, instead of calming them down, actually “jacks them up.” It only seems to suppress appetite because it deadens the taste buds, suppresses the sense of smell and generally makes food taste crappy. It doesn’t look cool; it looks nasty and smells even worse. And of course it has the pesky little issue of causing SLOW PAINFUL DEATH. This makes smoking cessation one of the more profound programs a hypnotherapist can do. Instead of helping cancer patients with pain and the nausea of chemo, wouldn’t it be better to stop the cancer from happening in the first place?
With that in mind and with the RelaxNow program up and running, I have started taking Stop Smoking clients for the first time in many years. Since my schedule only allows for a few individual clients, I’ve also started putting my mind to creating a recorded program to take it past what can be done one on one. I’ll post more as things develop.
hypnoenergetics 