Stop Smoking.
Hypnosis has a good reputation for helping people to quit smoking and deservedly so. However, no matter how good the therapist, you will only be successful if you really want to quit and you're prepared for the rest of the battle.
Thats why I believe that preparation is so important, its as important as the hypnotherapy itself. If a client stops smoking for 6 months and then starts again, I consider the therapy to have been a failure.

The key to this work is understanding that the smoking habit gets into our very psyche. We must be aware that once we quit it will try to make us start smoking again at any opportunity. It will be there hanging around for a long time. I always tell my clients that they should be aware that they need to remain vigilant for at least a year after they’ve stopped smoking. In fact the only way that you’ll know that you’ve truly cracked the habit is when you can really see that cigarettes only take from you, they don’t give you anything, and when you really realise this on an emotional level then you will truly have no desire to smoke again.

When you have this nasty habit inside your psyche it can be really difficult to believe that you won’t actually be losing anything by stopping. You feel that life could never be quite as good in one way or another... THATS THE ADDICTION TALKING - ITS RUBBISH. Life in fact becomes so much better in so many ways, but you’ll just have to take my word for it! (for now...)

The only way to stop smoking forever and to get rid of the nasty lurker in your psyche is to say “never again”, not one puff of another cigarette ever again. If you would like to be able to say that, but don’t think you have the strength, thats fine, thats why you’re here looking for some help.

People generally start smoking again for two reasons..
1. The habit creeps back at the moment you thought you had it beaten. That quick drag of someone else's cigarette means that you're a smoker again… that’s all it takes.
2. Something happens in your life that leaves you feeling you have nowhere to turn, so you go back to your old friend … the cigarette.

Hypnosis can help you to change the way you look at cigarettes and smoking and it can help you make a committed and permanent decision to stop. Once the decision has been made and the cut is clean it can further help by eliminating the desire to smoke. It can also help us find alternative patterns of thought (often deep in the subconscious) that can be called on to replace the need for smoking as an emotional crutch.

For suitable clients I can offer a single, stop smoking session tailored to you during which we cover all the above and more. You will leave my office as a non-smoker with a cd to reinforce the session.

You will often see hypnotherapists saying 8 out of 10 smokers quit straight away. Ever wondered about the 2 in 10 why didn’t they quit? Well, some people realise that they never really wanted to quit in the first place, maybe they were being pressured by someone close to them. The rest I would suggest are more compulsive in their smoking, they have emotional needs that are met by the smoking or maybe being kept at bay by the habit. These people can still give up, but the work needs to be a little more careful, often we will need to see what it is that they haven’t faced in their life, that the smoking is helping them not to have to face.

This sort of work leaves us with the choice of either dealing with the emotional issues which can take a series of sessions to clear up and then focussing on the habit, or reducing the smoking gradually and using ego strengthening in place of the cigarettes while they are being reduced and finally stopped altogether.