Smoking Control hypnosis

Some hypnotists don't like working with smokers because they think that smokers are all the same. They treat every smoker with the same routines. I don't.

I find smokers endlessly fascinating: every smoker is unique. They each have a unique reason for smoking and a unique reason for keeping on smoking. When you find the reason you have found the solution.

I dealt with a smoker today who wasn't able to give up. She was a middle aged lady who could stop but always started again whenever she got stressed. I spent some time talking to her about why she smokes and particularly why she always starts again and she really had no idea. She had spent many hours thinking about it but never came up with an answer.

Smoking Control

But when I started probing when she started smoking, a pattern started to emerge. She started at school, with a few sneaked cigarettes with the other girls. She did not start smoking properly until she was eighteen. After leaving home, she got a job and a flat, and was having a lovely time away from the controls of her parents. She then shared that her dad hated smoking, and always had, and her mother thought it was unlady-like.

What I think was actually happening was that she was flouting her parents' rule, showing independence and even rebellion. She was having a great time doing it. Unknown to her, she was actually anchoring that feeling of independence to smoking. So later in life, whenever she felt things getting on top of her, when she felt put down and out of control, she reached for a cigarette. Smoking unconsciously reminded of those times and that feeling. The feeling therefore got reinforced thousands of times.

Smoking control pattern

When she gives up, she is fine for days or weeks or even months. But then some situation comes along that makes her long to be in control again, to assert her independence, and the cravings for a cigarette start again. I think that her mind was dwelling on the missing feeling, and that was anchored onto smoking, so she found excuses to smoke.

Once the origin of the pattern had been established it was easy to target it with metaphors and suggestions.

Feedback is wonderful

Feedback is wonderful. Sometimes I get the nicest emails:

Hi David,

I cannot continue studying your site, your words, your scripts, your material without expressing my profound gratitude to you for your generosity in sharing your wisdom. I am a new consulting hypnotist, certified with the National Guild of Hypnotists in the State of New Hampshire, USA.

Last night I gave a seminar at the local library and when an audience member asked me to help him overcome a lifetime habit of nail biting - I was aware that I needed ideas.

Your site and you are wonderful. I have created a shortcut to your material from my desktop and will be forever grateful to you for taking the time to help others in this wonderful field. If I make it to NZ I'm taking you out to dinner. if you make it to NH let me know - I owe you so much. As soon as I pay the rent and get a few bills paid I plan on ordering your books. Once again thank you from a grateful novice to a master Hypnotherapist. Have a wonderful day knowing that you have made a difference half a planet over.

Barbara

Thoughts on feedback

Feedback is wonderful. It is a lonely business publishing a web site. You seldom know how your efforts are being received, so it is great to get feedback. I mostly write this blog to clarify my own thoughts. I was a university professor for much of my life. It is a strange fact that the best way to learn something is to teach it. The other strange fact of a life in university is that the best to find out what your think and what you think you know is to write about it. Errors in logic, faulty thinking and gaps appear all too obviously.

So I write to find out what I think. Like all bloggers, I hope that this interests others. But you don't often get to know what other people think of it, so this email was a lovely surprise.

Thank you Barbara.

Unqualified Trained Hypnotherapists

Are there too many unqualified trained hypnotherapists? Students rely on hypnosis schools to teach them what they need. But are they missing out something important?

I was looking over the exam for my local hypnotherapy association and I decided I didn't like some of the questions. That got me thinking about what exactly should be in a professional hypnosis exam.

Basic Competence is OK

Obviously the person has to be able to put someone into trance. But should the candidate be able to demonstrate some minimum number of different inductions? It is hard to say exactly.

They also need to be able to demonstrate competence in dealing with the normal range of problems they are likely to be presented with - Smoking, Weight Loss, Phobias, Confidence etc.

It seems to me that Hypnosis schools do a reasonable job of teaching these things. But they actually do a poor job of teaching what not to do. I know of no hypnosis training school that teaches their students how to recognize the most common mental illnesses. I have seen any number of weekend certificate holders on discussion boards asking for advice. For example, on how to deal with 'a client who has trouble staying in the present, who cannot concentrate and keeps going over and over the same thoughts'. Or 'my client comes to see me wearing two sets of clothes'. Another said 'my friend is always late for everything and needs two alarm clocks to waken up'. Anyone with a minimum of knowledge would recognize these as symptoms of common mental illnesses.

Avoiding knowledge

This lack of knowledge seems to be particularly prevalent in the USA. The trade protection legislation in the US has got hypnotherapists terrified of doing anything that could be interpreted as 'practicing medicine without a licence', even expressing an opinion. And yet refusing to recognize clear symptoms is just as bad. Using parts therapy or NLP on a client who has depression is pointless. It will be ineffective and therefore, in my view, unethical.

Recognize your limitations

Hypnotherapists do have to recognize their limitations. They are ethically bound to refer clients with organic issues to qualified medical personnel. But if they have never been taught the symptoms of say schizophrenia, paranoia or bipolar depression then they won't know it when they see it. Therefore they won't know what their own limitations are.

There is nothing wrong with saying to a client 'you appear to have many of the symptoms of severe depression, and I think you should see your physician immediately'. Recognizing a common condition is not the same as doing diagnosis. Proper training is in the best interests of the client, and society in general.

In my view trainers need to make a point of teaching trainees when not to do hypnotherapy.

Hypnosis 100% success

Who get hypnosis 100% success?

It was originally believed that anyone could be hypnotized, and then that only a few could be, and later most could be, and to today we are back to thinking that everyone can be. But how realistic is that? Who gets hypnosis 100% success rate?

The first issue has be - what do we mean by 'everybody'?

The original Stanford Hypnotizability Scales were mostly used on students. They sat student volunteers in a chair and played the same taped induction to all of them. Some were hypnotized, some fell asleep, some thought about their lunch... and from this it was concluded that only a third of people can be hypnotized. Not very good science in my view.

As far as hypnotherapists are concerned, it really doesn't matter whether the general public can be hypnotized or not. What is important is whether the people who come to our offices are getting hypnotized. The people who come into my office have self selected. They expect to get hypnotized, they are happy to be hypnotized, they have come precisely for that reason.

Can your clients be hypnotized?

The question then is 'Can the people who expect and want to be hypnotized, be hypnotized'? The Stanford type experiments insisted that every person be treated exactly the same, which is why the inductions were done in the same chair, in the same room, with the same taped message. In our offices we have no such restriction, so we should get 100% success.

And in fact I find that I do get almost 100% success. I certainly don't expect any client not to go into trance, and I test each one to be sure that they are actually in trance. It might take me several goes at it, and I might have to try several different styles of induction before I get a result, but hypnosis what they want, and hypnosis is what I try to give them.

Clients who can't be hypnotized

However there are a few clients who I just cannot get into trance. I am talking here about maybe two or three a year. With some of these I have tried for up to three hours, and still never got them into trance. The common factor seems to be a terrible deep seated anxiety. Some of them have depression, but most are just hyper anxious. They tell me that they can feel themselves going into trance, but then panic and snap back out of it again. Even with instant inductions such people go into trance for a fraction of time and then snap back into control.

At the moment, my strategy is to give such clients three CDs to listen to in their own time. By playing them over and over, at some point they drop their guard and the next thing they remember is my voice counting them out, and they realise that they actually were in trance. After that they can go into trance as easily as anyone else. But I would like to find a better way of getting to them, so that I can have that elusive 100% success.

Smoking to relax

I had another interesting client today. This was another smoker who just can not give up. His story was that he was smoking to relax. He doesn't smoke a lot, five to fifteen a day, but must have his cigarette at various times of the day. He smokes on the walk between the train and his work, then at break times, at lunchtime and on the walk back to the train. But he does not smoke in the house. The reason he gave was that smoking was his time to himself. I have heard this many times and never paid much attention to it.

Smoking to relax?

However I couldn't find any reason why this man was smoking. I will not go on with hypnosis until I know why they smoke, or I get a way into their world that I can use. This man said that he gave up once for a week, when he went on a camping holiday in Scotland on his own. He stopped for the whole week and never gave it a thought until he returned home. And immediately lit up again. He also said that he gave up when he came to this country for a job interview and spent three days in a hotel preparing and actually forgot that he smoked. He does not normally smoke as a response to stress at work, and if he is really busy will forget to smoke all day. Not smoking on a plane for ten hours doesn't bother him either.

I have a theory that you always have to examine the other side of the coin, what people are not doing, as well as what they are doing. I asked him what it was that he needed time to himself for. He said he had responsibility for his family and always worried about them. I pointed out that this could not be true when he started smoking. We pursued this idea of what it was that he was trying to avoid. I asked how he got on with his parents and siblings. He said he never got on with his dad. Then I dug into that and discovered that his father had divorced from his mother when the client was thirteen years old. He also said that he was afraid of his father. And that put the whole thing into perspective.

Reason for smoking

As a boy he felt he had to defend his mother in her time of need, and look after her, but he was not prepared for it at that age. He also knew that he could not in fact deal with his father and protect her, so he had he classic childhood trap. He had to do something but was prevented from doing it. This set up a life long anxiety. The only time he got away from it was when he had a smoke. It started with being with his friends as a teenager, and carried on. The reason he gave up in Scotland was because he was totally on his own and no one was relying on him for anything. So he had no anxiety, and no need for time out, so no need to smoke.

Knowing this I knew how to tackle his smoking - remove the source of the anxiety.

I did that and he is now a non-smoker for life.

I felt that this case has given me an important insight into the motivation of a lot of smokers.

Fear of Public Speaking therapy

Fear of public speaking

Today's client was very nervous and fidgety when she sat down. She told me she's got a new job, and hates it when they all sit around and everyone has to introduce themselves and say who they are. So it seems that she has a simple fear of public speaking. That is usually easy to clear, and very quick.

Finding a feeling to work with

I explained about metaphor replacement therapy and how it works. I told her what I was going to do. Because I expected this to be a very short session, I treated this is a bit of an experiment in getting people to go into trance without formal induction. I used a breathing induction to settle her down. Got her to take two big deep breaths and then on the third told her to close her eyes. I told her to think about being in a large room with many people It was slowly coming round to her turn to speak. The start of the sort of therapy is to try to get the client to move into the feeling. Once the client is fully experiencing the feeling, they are pretty much in trance. It is then easy to manipulate images in the unconscious mind.

In this case she said she was feeling the anxiety. But it was very difficult to get her to say anything. I kept prompting her about the introduction ceremony, checking that she was feeling the anxiety and she just wasn't speaking at all. I wasn't getting any feedback from her.

Finding a different scenario to recreate her fear of public speaking

So I decided to offer her a different scenario that would generate her fear of public speaking. I asked her to imagine being the bridesmaid at a wedding. She had to stand up and address the whole audience. To increase the fear I said "everyone is looking at you". "You are the center of attention, the success of the whole wedding depends on you getting it right". "It will be remembered forever".

I asked what she was feeling. She said "a little nervousness, tenseness". I asked her where she was feeling it, and she indicated it was in her chest. So I went on with that and after a lot of prodding, persuasion and encouragement, she finally said "it's like a cloud".

I asked her what she would like to have happen to the cloud and she said "go away". Then I asked "what would that mean for you", and she replied "no fear". And finally, I asked her "what could you do then?" And she replied "anything". This set up the logical link between her actions and the outcome.

Reluctance to speak = reluctance to change?

I tried to get her to make the cloud bigger. After a lot of prodding she could get it to become a little bigger, but she could not get it to go any smaller. I explored the properties of the cloud with her. It was a black cloud, heavy, floating in front of her, it was round. I asked her to look at it from the back. After a long, long silence she said " it is just the same". I asked if she could move it to one side of the other. "No." I suggested the cloud might rain. it might shrink. it might get thinner, it might change colour. all the things I could think of. Still she sat there absolutely silent. Eventually in desperation I said just imagine that you could push that cloud. That seemed to work. She eventually said, it's much further away. I kept persuading her to push it away more, but was getting no response. "How are you experiencing that cloud now?" "What does it look like now?" After another long silence she finally said "It's disappeared".

Clearing her fear of public speaking

Something that usually takes two minutes took over forty. This woman seriously did not want to talk about her problem even in the metaphor. However, I tested her by making her think about the whole wedding thing again, and she said "the feeling has gone, just not there". I tested her again later on, and she said "no is definitely gone". "I usually get the feeling of tension in my chest. That just isn't happening now".

My feeling is that the fear of public speaking was actually linked to a much earlier fear from somewhere deep in her childhood. I think that she was afraid of something very much deeper, and was not going to allow me to get anywhere near that feeling. When I put that to her, she agreed. She couldn't say how she knew, she just felt that that felt right.

Her experience of trance was interesting

That would have been the end of the session, but I was anxious that she did not leave with the idea that she had not been hypnotized. So I told her that what we had done was a form of hypnosis. And she said something very interesting. She said "when we were getting rid of the cloud I felt that I had gone inside myself. That I was very small and my body was very large. In particular I felt my hands were huge".

I commented "you're a very unusual client, this usually doesn't take very long, and the client talks all the way through it. You seemed very reluctant to speak?" She said that she wasn't speaking because she felt she was not sure what to say or what was wanted. I wonder if that had anything to do with her reluctance to speak in public. Although I did not pursue it.

Given that I was trying out ways of inducing trance without a formal induction, her reaction was very interesting.

Past Life Regression Case Results

Past life regression is a fascinating part of hypnosis

This client wanted to do a past life regression simply out of curiosity. She felt that there was more to life than appeared on the surface. I explained the procedure for past life regression to her and in particular about using Clean Language so as not to lead her.

I used a progressive muscle relaxation induction and tested several times to make sure that she was in trance. Then I deepened her so that she was relaxing in some safe place. "In that place you can forget about your body, you can forget about who you are, you can forget about everything."

The next stage was to suggest that she was floating in a cloud. I then told her "that cloud is thinning and clearing. As the mist clears you find yourself back in a place before you were born".

Past Life 1

She said that she was looking through a hole, like in a wall. Everything was purple. There were people on the outside looking in at her. She wasn't sure what was going on. I tried to get her to explore her surroundings, but she couldn't get anything else. She told me afterwards that this was a dream that she had quite often.

Past life 2

The second regression started with her saying "I feel I am underwater. I can't see anything". Then she found herself at ground level looking at horses. She was aware that there was a war and she was helping one side against the other. But the people they were going to fight were not people. They actually were monsters , they were very big, like dragons. "I have no idea what I'm doing here. I have no idea how I'm going to help anyone else." And then she said, almost laughing, "I am a blade of grass. I can see it all but I am a blade of grass".

Past life 3

The third regression took to her to a place in Dakota. She was a man. She was some sort of shaman or medicine man. I asked her how she was dressed. She said "I am all dressed up in ceremonial gear. I'm wearing feathers over my usual clothes. A full Indian headdress." "And what is going on in that place?" "I am leading my people in a ceremony. We are begging for rain. The land is dying". I asked her "and how does that make you feel?". She said "lonely". Then she she said, "I know that everyone else is going to die. I am the only one who will survive. And that makes me sad".

Past life 4

The fourth regression took her to a place that she described as "beautiful, beautiful, beautiful". She seemed filled with wonder at being in this place. She sat in the chair and her head was moving with her eyes closed, as if she was looking around someplace that she was in. I asked her to describe it. "It is a temple filled with gold. I am dancing in the temple. I am sad because there is a man going away. A man I love. I cannot love him. I am not allowed to love him". And she said, "I am too old to do magic. I cannot prevent this. I want to be with him but I have to stay in the temple." She went on to describe the temple "it's a beautiful place, a wonderful place. And I will be forever dancing in the temple. Because I am trapped here now".

Fascinating.

Google Diagnosis

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

I had a client come in last weekend who reminded me of the dangers of Google Diagnosis. He told me he had OCD and wanted me to cure it. I asked him "How do you know you have OCD?" He said "I started making a list of my symptoms, and then I looked them up on Google". He went to lots of different sites and the more he read the more he was sure that he had OCD. And now he wanted rid of it.

I started asking about his symptoms. He told me what they were. I pointed out that in fact there are many things that could be causing them. And some of the symptoms he was listing were contradictory. But he was adamant. He had OCD. Here was here to get me to fix his OCD. He wouldn't hear of anything else. OCD was it. He wanted cured. My job was to get on with it.

Don't do Google Diagnosis

It took a lot of patience and counselling and persuasion to get him to consider that perhaps he did not have OCD. What he actually has is a form of depression. When we went over that, he found that all of the symptoms were better explained by that. And just as importantly, there were other symptoms he had been ignoring that were predicted by the depression.

We then sorted out a plan for him.

But it is just too easy to get information from the Internet and half understand it, and then base your life on that. How many other people have convinced themselves that they are suffering from this thing or that thing, and are self medicating themselves into ill health?

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.
Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744). An Essay on Criticism, 1709

Simplest way to improve Hypnotherapy?

A simple way to Improve Hypnotherapy?

What is the easiest way to improve your hypnotherapy results? I asked this in a discussion recently. The group agreed the simplest way to improve hypnotherapy was avoid talking too much.

We all do it. We are supposed to find out what the client really needs so we can plan the session. But the therapist's enthusiasm often results in talking instead of listening.

True, hypnosis is one of the talking therapies. You are supposed to talk. But talking therapies are based on getting the client to talk, not the therapist. Counselling is about making the client feel heard and understood. Psychoanalysis is about allowing the client to talk about their thoughts by free associating. Clean language is about removing the therapist from the conversation as far as possible. Therapists desperately want to help. But they are human too. Therapists get nervous and flustered. So the tendency is to jabber on. It is very tempting to talk about what you think instead of listening to what your client thinks.

Silence improves hypnotherapy

Asking the right question is a key skill. Listening to the answer is a more important skill. Sometimes saying too much is the wrong thing. Silences can tell you a lot. But too often the therapist jumps in because they don't like the silence, and feel that have to be doing something. Although some therapists feel uncomfortable with silence, silence is a very effective technique to allow the client to collect their thoughts. And if it goes on too long, the right thing to do is to ask 'and what are you experiencing now?' and let the client tell you what is going in their mind.

Rule 1. Don't be the next person to speak after you ask a question. When you ask a question, and the client does not answer immediately, the silence can be deafening. Many therapists feel uncomfortable with prolonged silences. They panic, thinking that the question was badly worded, or the client has and understood it. So they say "What I mean is…" and either answer the question themselves or dilute the power of the original question.

Rule 2. After a brief reply to an open-ended question, wait a few seconds before saying anything. Very often, this will prompt your client to expand on the question, to tell you things that were being held back, to open up about their worries and reservations. Clients are also uncomfortable with silences. They will usually blurt out something that they were keeping back just to fill the silence. This technique can be very useful, but don't turn it into an interrogation method.

Rule 3. Allow some silence after you have delivered bad news. When the therapist has to deliver some bad news, sometimes it is the therapist who feels nervous, and talks too much. If you have to tell a client for example, "you have depression", it is better to say nothing more and give the client time to process this information.

The hard case smoker

Last weekend I had the kind of client we all dread. The hard case smoker: Someone who didn't believe that he could give up, ever. He had tried everything. He was only coming to hypnosis because it was the last thing on the list of all the things he had tried that didn’t work. Now he wanted to be able to show that he done everything possible and nobody could get him to stop smoking.

He started smoking at 15. As a teenager, he was rebellious and resentful at home. He didn’t get on with his dad. He reckoned that as the youngest child his parents had expended all their energies on the older kids and he was of no interest to them. Smoking started when he joined the rugby team. He loved being part of the team, of feeling he belonged and was part of a group. He left home and joined the army. The Army made him feel included, somebody, a tough guy, always loved the camaraderie, the inclusiveness.

He later returned home and from the moment his father picked him up from the airport they began to reconcile. As time went on they became closer, and then his father got throat cancer and died suddenly. He was devastated by this. It was in 1982 but he still feels it keenly.

He is scared of dying and convinced that he cannot stop smoking and that the smoking will kill him, but he is powerless to stop.

Finding a metaphor for the hard case smoker

I ask my clients a question to establish their feelings about smoking. I say what comes to mind when I say ‘You will never have another cigarette as long as you live’? When I asked him what he felt he said "dubious".

I asked what smoking looked like and he said a group: him and all the group smoking. Then I decided to develop this and got him to describe the feeling he got with the group. He said the feeling was of being at peace, happy, not wanting it to end. I asked what colour that feeling was and he said red, and square. I asked if he was inside that square. He said, Yes, with all the group. Then I asked if he could drop his cigarettes and get everyone else do that too. He said he could. What has changed? He said nothing.

So I developed that in metaphor. I got him to imagine that they all dropped all the tobacco and lighters and stuff and there was everything on the floor, ash, ashtrays, cigs etc. I asked if he could sweep it up and throw it out of the red square. He said no. So I used incrementalism and got him to put one shovel-full out and if that was OK. He said that would be OK. And then another shovel, and then more shovels, and then all the group were helping and cheering on and he was a leader and the most popular guy in the red square. He eventually cleared out all the smoking stuff and still had all his friends with him in the red square room.

Anchoring the hard case smoker

What was particularly interested about this process is that he had gone into trance with no induction. I notice that when I get a client to focus on a feeling, and follow that feeling they normally go into trance. As long as I do nothing to break the spell, they will stay in trace and not even notice. In NLP this is called revivification. NLP asks the client to think about a memory and get into the memory so as to anchor the feeling. Then when you fire the anchor the client goes into the feeling, in effect goes into trance. This method just starts with the feeling.

To finish the session I got this client to go on a journey where he met his dad. His father released him from the smoking and told him that he could live a long and healthy life. I finished off with my standard stop smoking direct suggestions.

It remains to be seen if this client has in fact stopped for ever, but at the end of the session he said ‘It is weird, but I feel different. When I left that square room it had changed color!’

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