Smoking

Perhaps not surprisingly, in hypnotherapy for quitting smoking, the very same methods that work for most people may not work for others. In choosing just what methods to use for a person, I offer various options and follow the person’s gut level response. This is because there is such a wide variety of personal tastes and belief systems among people seeking hypnotherapy and because a gut level response is much more indicative of subconscious agreement. The only way any method can work is with agreement by the subconscious mind.

Hypnosis offers means of communicating with the functions of mind that are below conscious awareness. Anyone who has ever tried to quit smoking cigarettes already knows that the urge to smoke comes from something gravitationally more powerful and monolithically more immune to persuasion than the conscious mind. These deep functions of mind are called the Unconscious, not because they don’t know what the conscious mind is thinking, but because the conscious mind is unconscious of what these deep functions are doing. A fleetingly remembered dream or a embarrassingly timed Freudian slip may give us glimpses into what’s really going on, but on the cruise ships of our lives, most of the action is not happening in the well-appointed first class dining room of consciousness, but in the unseen engine room whose vague pulse is the sound that consciousness has learned to ignore. Alarmingly to those whose identities are well-seated in their intellects, the powerful engines of these deep functions of mind can change and even cause our perceptions, feelings and thoughts.