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Smoking Cessation +
Mary said that she desperately needed to stop smoking. She knew that her health was suffering and was fully aware of all of the terrible things that smoking can do to your health and your bank balance.
She was tearful when she told me about how her fiancee had told her that he would not marry her unless she stopped smoking. She was aware of his revulsion to the smell of a smoker and that he was fearful of her probable early death later on in life.
It was clear to me quite early on in the first session that Mary really did want to stop smoking. As is usual in my first session with a smoker we did a brief session of hypnosis to give Mary a tool which would help her to relax and to expel the need to smoke whenever she needed to. This makes use of the client's own imagery. As usual, Mary said that she had enjoyed the hypnosis and that she would use what she had learned.
I felt that more was needed, however. There were probably powerful reasons that kept Mary smoking and we talked in general about her life, her work and when she smoked and we thought about why. It emerged that Mary worked where there were a lot of older and more experienced women and that they all took regular breaks for a smoke outside. As a group they tended to ridicule anyone who suggested that they should stop smoking, with all of the usual ill-founded reasons for not giving it up.
Mary quite happily went along with all of this without much thought. I asked Mary to think about this some more before the next session and to practice using her relaxation method to avoid at least three cigarettes a day and not to smoke at all on the day of her next session.
At the following session Mary reported success at avoiding some cigarettes during the week but that she still always went with her workmates for a smoke. She said that it was as if there was some other reason for this apart from the need for a smoke itself. She felt that she could not offend her friends at work by going against their frequently stated beliefs about smoking.
She also said that she felt very bad about herself and that she wasn't really as clever or smart as her friends at work. I helped her to develop these thoughts a little and it seemed that it was a recurring theme in her life. Using the terminology of Transactional Analysis (TA) it was as if she always reacted to others as an unhappy child and that she had adopted a life-position of everyone else being "OK" whereas she was "Not-OK".
Over the next four or five sessions we worked through all of this in more depth and Mary began to interact with her workmates as an adult which caused them to stop treating her as a child. Along with this Mary began to change her life-position to being "OK" herself. She could now, in an adult fashion, question in her own mind whether the beliefs of her colleagues were rational. She still maintained good relationships with her friends but they began to see her as an equal rather than as a child.
During this time Mary had three more hypnotherapy and counselling sessions developing some very powerful imagery for subconscious suggestion. She said during her last counselling session, in which there was no hypnosis, that she no longer felt a need to smoke. She felt in control in a grown-up way. Her relationship with her fiancee had improved and he now treated her as an adult and accepted that if she decided that it was OK to have an occasional smoke at a party or in a pub then he would respect her decision on this.
Mary's responses to me were certainly more "adult" by now and I was happy when she said that she felt ready to stop having any more therapy. She said that the occasional smoke would probably not really happen, but she though that reserving the right to do this reinforced her new "OK adult" position. I did recommend a very useful book on TA and suggested she work through it with her partner.
(Smoking cessation can be brought about in just one or two sessions. I believe that it is more likely to happen when there is time to explore the client's background. In this case the smoking stopped and Mary found a much happier position in life as a very big bonus.
Mary might have stopped therapy and even stopped smoking after the first session and she would have had some benefit from this whatever she did. It was her choice to carry on, however. She was able to see that there was more to do.
Counselling, Hypnotherapy and TA were the main approaches used here)
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