Still smoking? Stopping smoking was very hard for me. I was very ill and had to give up but just could not do it. I was on the nicotine gum, nicotine patches and smoking cigarettes at the same time! Still, looking back, there was one saving grace that helped me. I have never enjoyed a cigarette in my life. Not the first, not the second, not the last, never. It was simply a drug I had to take to function normally in my abnormal life. It made life tolerable and often quite pleasant.
Then one day, I was ready to give up smoking for good. I was hypnotised, and it worked for two years. Then something terrible happened to me and I smoked again. This time, I solved my life’s biggest reason to smoke and there was no need to smoke again.
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I now specialise in helping others quit smoking for good. When I first started, I was a mere hypnotherapist with some NLP skills and although very successful, I failed a small percentage of my clients with consistent regularity. This was a sad thorn in my side.
I did my statistics regularly. It soon emerged that the person it was hardest for me to help was the smoker who enjoyed smoking the most. At the time, I developed a tactic of helping the “Smoker who enjoys the cigarette” to hate, fear, and be disgusted by the cigarette. This often worked, but there still were some that I felt I should have been able to help but could not. It was very frustrating.
I then also became an Emotional Freedom Technician and started making huge inroads into this elusive area. I was delighted! But there was again a problem. I learnt that for some reason, the “Smoker who enjoys the cigarette” should be asked to attend more than one session. Now that I do this as a rule, I am finally helping smokers with EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) that I have never thought it possible to help before.
So what am I doing right, and how can it help you if you enjoy smoking and would like to stop?
Well, there is something in NLP where you find out what sort of person is successful at achieving a certain goal and use them as a model for others. So if others can do and feel what they do and feel, then they should achieve this goal too.
And it intrigued me how anyone could conceivably enjoy a cigarette in the first place. For a start, cigarettes stink. They make your mouth stink. Your clothes stink. They make your teeth yellow and your dental bills high. They give you wrinkles. They make you very ill, so ill you die. They make you a helpless addict. They cost a lot of money. Towards the end, they give you real physical pain with no let-up. How can anyone possibly enjoy that?!
Well, you’re probably different. An exception to the norm. Most “Smokers who enjoy the cigarette” tell me something like “I like the taste” or “I like the way it makes me breathe” or any of the other myriad ways of saying…
… Ready for this?
… If you’re not, please stop reading and come back later, because this article says it like it is. The bare truth. In all it’s ugliness.
… All the other ways of saying “I don’t know how to be happy or have pleasure without drugging my unhappiness”.
So that’s it. That’s how many smokers who do not enjoy smoking succeed in quitting so easily. They recognise that there is an emotional driver for their smoking and are ready to have it removed. They have arrived at the stage in their lives where they are ready to solve the problems leading to the smoking. On the other hand, the “Smoker who enjoys the cigarette” is simply unaware that what they perceive of as “pleasure” is simply “not unhappiness”.
It may well be that this unhappy state has become a habit, a comfort zone, maybe true happiness had never been encountered yet. So naturally, the drug that takes away the unhappiness is seen as a pleasure.
So what do you do if you are this type of smoker?
First of all, think about what would make you happy if you didn’t have a cigarette. What is missing in your life, and what would you need to solve the situation? Look at all areas of your life and consider what areas you can change to be happier. What is your heart telling you? What negative emotions or experiences do you need out of your system? When was the last time you felt happy without a drug? What was different then? How can you be this happy again?
I hope that this is helping some people towards emotional freedom from the illusion that cigarettes were enjoyable. Once free from this bizarre mind-trick, you are then ready to move on and be truly free.
Call 0800 78 19 315 in the UK or email meÂ
Suzanne Zacharia
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