Smoking Conflicts?

It is important to recognize that smoking serves a purpose.  If it didn’t, you wouldn’t keep spending money on tobacco and making adjustments to fit into a basically non-smoking society.  You’re just too busy to bother with it if it didn’t meet a need.

Smoking cessation work must address three things: the conflict must be resolved; the need must be satisfied some other way; and the withdrawal from the habitual behavior must be addressed.  When they are, the result is another non-smoker!

For a pack a day habit, you spent over $1800 dollars last year.  With the price increases coming, it will cost even more to keep that habit this year.  And that doesn’t count the damage to your clothes, your health, or your self-respect.

The cost of letting our lives be run by our busy-ness is unpleasantly high.  But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

My approach

First, it is important to recognize that you have stopped smoking many times.  You stop smoking every time the cigarette is finished.  You start again the next time the trigger is there.  What is needed is another way to respond to the situation that has you need to smoke.

With smoking, I  stress that the behavior serves a purpose, a good purpose.  The pain of buying cigarettes and managing to have them available  is "just the cost of doing business" to get the desired benefit.  I want to stress that buying cigarettes, and carrying them around is necessary for a person who smokes.  It is not a character weakness or lack of will-power and it is not addiction.  Behavior can only persist if it provides something useful to a person.

I make sure a person knows that I am not going to take the behavior away from them.  My intention is to help them find a better way to get the benefit; one that has less cost to them.  They always have the option of resuming the behavior if that is the best way of getting the benefit.  But if I can help them get the benefit "at wholesale", they never want to pay the full price, and so they do not go back to the old behavior. 

I use the example of buying gasoline to get around town.  I don't like to pay for gas, or take the time to fill up, but that is the cost of doing business for me to get around town.  If you will give me limousine service for a year, you can bet that I will not be buying much gasoline.  And after a few weeks, I'm not likely to relapse into driving myself to a filling station.

The non-smoking part is always the part that comes into the office.  It comes in wanting my help in coercing the other part into being good.  I laugh and say, "You know how well it works to coerce someone into being good!" 

That's when I start the work of discovering what's really going on underneath.  I use an NLP technique to find that out, and to resolve the conflict.

After that, I do hypnosis for withdrawal symptoms.  Usually there are none, or they are very slight after the work.  I do not ever give orders.  Demanding that a person change behavior never works for long.

It takes from one to three sessions, the first being about an hour and a half long, the following ones shorter.  Some people stop after the first one.  Sometimes the issue we work on was covering up a more important benefit, which shows up in the week after the first session.  We then clear up that reason and repeat the hypnosis. 

Smoking cessation can be tax deductable.  For details click here.

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