From the #AskCaronMargarete FAQ…
“Hey Caz, at Christmas we were talking about hypnotherapy. My step-brother’s wife’s friend said that hypnotism didn’t work for her, she still smokes. So does it?”
In answer, yes. Yes, it does. And no, no it doesn’t. Let’s tackle the ‘no’ first since I know it’s BS.
In hypnotherapy, you’re relaxed to the point of trance – like a really, really deep guided meditation – which allows the hypnotherapist the ability to make suggestions to your unconscious mind.
If you, the client, do not believe you can be hypnotised, you won’t be able to relax and trust the therapist to guide you to the deepest, relaxed state. You’ll be too conscious. If you do not believe that it’s possible to access and communicate with your unconscious mind, then the suggestions that the hypnotherapist makes will not work because your conscious mind will decide they won’t work.
The key words here are ‘believe’ and ‘decide’.
The fourth person account of the lady who didn’t quit smoking doesn’t really tell me much. But I can make an educated guess that she didn’t believe it was possible.
And, I would also question whether the hypnotherapist had sourced the root cause or reason she had started smoking in the first place. Addiction to nicotine aside – which is a limiting belief I’ll reserve for another post – there’s an emotional association linked to the behaviour of smoking. The smoking makes her feel something today and that feeling is associated with something from the past.
So to answer the “yes, it does…”
Given the opportunity to do so, I would work to unlink the emotional association and work to ensure she made the decision to believe hypnotherapy could and would work for her, and then create powerful suggestions to guarantee she didn’t need to smoke anymore.
This isn’t just for smoking either. The same applies to any behaviour that you want to change: weight loss (which I prefer to call ‘health gain’), swearing, anger management, biting nails, and so on. I use hypnotherapy as one modality of my services. To book an enquiry call, shoot me a private message.
