My clients complete an intake form prior to their smoking cessation session. I ask them to list all the reasons they quit smoking in order to use those reasons as leverage within their hypnosis session.
I was surprised by the form of a man that his only reason for quitting was because his wife said he had to. She told me that she was a fierce anti-smoker. The funny 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 was wondering why he finally relented.
The problem is that he doubted that he had really given up. 15 years ago, one of my first smoking clients came to see me with the same reason to quit smoking.
My lack of experience with addictions at the time didn’t work well for me, but it was a perfect fit for her cause. Only later did I realize that he did not 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 all he could and it couldn’t be helped. To be able to sit back in the sun and smoke a cigarette.
I didn’t want to allow another guy, so I made it clear that leaving him for his wife probably wouldn’t succeed, even if he meant it. This was a difficult question because even though he had smoked for a long time, his health did not seem to be suffering, and he only spent a few dollars a week on cigarettes while he rolled his.
Does any of this look familiar to you? Are you being pressured to quit to please someone else? Your spouse, children or your doctor? The only pressure I’ve seen work is when a grandparent is only given access to a new grandchild as long as he steps down. Of course, pregnancy usually does too.
If you don’t have a reason to quit, but you think logically you should, you may need to stretch your imagination into the future to imagine the worst outcomes for your health.
This may help, or talk to some suffering smokers whose health is seriously deteriorating, and put yourself in their shoes to see if this helps you come up with your own reasons.
This will be much more powerful and hopefully give you the emotional influence you will need for your hypnosis session.