My clients fill in an intake form prior to their quit smoking session. I ask them to list all of their reasons for quitting in order to use those reasons as leverage within their hypnosis session.
I was surprised on one man’s form that his only reason for quitting was because his wife said he had to. He told me she was a fierce anti smoker. The curious thing was that they had been together for 35 years.
35 years is certainly a long time to have a major point of disagreement, and at 64 I wondered why he finally gave in.
The problem is I doubted that he had really given in. 15 years ago one of my first smoking clients came to me with the same reason for quitting.
My lack of experience with addictions at that time dint work well for me but suited his cause perfectly well. Only later I realised that he didn’t want to quit, but he paid his money and did the hypnosis.
It didn’t work, and he was delighted to tell his wife that he had done his best and that he couldn’t be helped. So that he could go back to sitting outside in the sun for a smoke.
I didn’t want to enable another guy, so I made it clear that quitting for his wife wasn’t likely to succeed, even if he meant it. This was a tough one because even though he was a long time smoker, his health didn’t appear to be suffering, and he only spent a few dollars on smokes per week as he rolled his own.
Is any of this familiar to you? Are you being pressured to quit to please someone else? Your spouse, children or your doctor? The only pressure I’ve ever seen work is where a grandparent is only given access to a new grandchild providing they quit. Of course pregnancy usually does it as well.
If you don’t have a reason to quit, but you think logically you should, you may need to project your imagination into the future, to imagine the worst outcomes for your health.
This may help, or talk to some smokers who are suffering, whose health is seriously declining, and put yourself in their shoes to see if this helps you to arrive at your own reasons.
This will be far more powerful and hopefully give you the emotional leverage you will need for your hypnosis session.
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Wishing you the best of health
Ian Newton