Why Hypnosis is Not the Answer to Everything

As a Certified Hypnotist you’d expect me to use the “hammer of hypnosis” to beat down every bad habit of a client asking for help. A few taps and everything is back in place.

Maybe for a brief period after I graduated I felt I could eradicate any habit using hypnosis. But it didn’t last long. Please don’t get me wrong – I believe in the power of hypnosis as strongly as I ever did.

I get emails regularly from past clients telling me how they haven’t smoked in six months or longer and it’s changed their lives. This feedback is very validating… but I also know there are others out there for which hypnosis didn’t work.

I attempt to follow-up with every person who sees me in my private practice in Upton, Massachusetts for stop smoking or weight loss. Of course I love the replies that tell me they’re still good and smoke free or getting to their right size.

Occasionally I’ll hear back from a client whose started smoking again and needs a follow-up session. This is no problem as its included as part of my stop smoking hypnosis one session program. Hypnosis is not a miracle cure anymore than chemotherapy treatment can guarantee to rid your body of cancer.

But it’s the people I contact who don’t respond that keeps me up at night and striving to learn more and do better. I always assume the worse and they started smoking again or the weight loss hypnosis sessions didn’t give them the body they signed-up to get. The reality is usually far from the truth as people are busy and just don’t respond to my emails even when they’re doing just fine.

Nonetheless, there are people for whom hypnosis did not work. It’s true for some it didn’t work because the person wasn’t ready to quit smoking or lose weight, or they didn’t really believe in hypnosis, or more frequently the habit they came to have eradicated was a symptom of the problem and not the cause. Leave the cause in place and the habit will return – even one or two years later.

But many times hypnosis works in conjunction with other mechanisms to overcome habits.

Take weight loss as an example. We know that exercise alone won’t make you slim. We also know just relying on a diet to keep weight off doesn’t work permanently either as the weight always seems to return. Hypnosis helps break down belief barriers and make the diet changes you need in order to eat healthy and exercise consistently.

I know if I just do a weight loss hypnosis session with a client and they don’t change their diet or start exercising then hypnosis alone will not get them to lose weight. Hypnosis is used to tie it altogether because it’s a partnership.

After becoming a master practitioner for Neuro-Linguistic Programming – or NLP – I began to weave the techniques into hypnosis session for my smoking clients. This is because I could see smoking is a habit with lots of triggers making a person reach for a cigarette, and NLP can be focused on changing triggers and patterns of behavior.

More recently over the last year I’ve been exposed to the 3D Mind^TM concept from a personal improvement perspective, and continue to seek ways to bring it into my hypnosis practice to help clients obtain the results they desire.

Hypnosis as a therapy remains at the core of my work with clients, but there is so much more to embrace from the work of others that can help me provide results for my clients.  I would be a poor hypnotist if I continued to rely solely on my hypnosis hammer to change the lives of my clients for the better. Sooner or later what will be staring at me is not a nail but a piece of glass.

Erika Slater, CH
Director
Free At Last Hypnosis
http://www.freeatlasthypnosis.com
http://www.smoke-free-at-last.com