Emotional Attachment to Smoking
All smokers have some form of emotional attachment to smoking. This is because almost every smoker starts smoking when they are a child and still learning how to address their emotions. Many smokers started when they were going through puberty at a time when they were being exposed to powerful new emotions that needed to be understood and learned how to be utilised and controlled.
Typical reasons for starting to smoke include: peer pressure, wanting to join in, wanting to appear adult and wanting to rebel. These are not adult emotions. Often alcohol is introduced at the same time and becomes part of the emotional process. This is why the “hand in hand” mentality develops and why some groups of drinkers seem to act more like children than adults. There is an old joke that smoking stunts your growth but in emotional terms, to some people, it does just that. An individual learns to address a particular emotion using smoking and gets trapped; never learning any other way. A person may enter a pub and fancy a cigarette. They believe that it is because they enjoy smoking but actually they desire a feeling of being “one of the crowd” and smoking is the only way they know how to achieve that sensation.
Normally the emotional connection to smoking can be easily addressed and a decision to be a non-smoker combined with hypnosis can elimiate the connection. After one session of hypnosis to stop smoking the person who had the emotional attachment between smoking and feeling “one of the crowd” can enter the pub and feel a form of elation that instantly enables them to integrate themselves into the social environment within the pub. The confident, relaxed person that had been repressed by a belief that they needed to smoke can emerge.
In a minority of cases, the emotional connection is considerably more powerful – often associated with some trauma. The person may find themselves smoking and cannot understand why. To illustrate the sort of mechanism that can operate, I will refer to an actual case. Let us call the lady involved Brenda.
Brenda worked in an office. For six weeks following her stop smoking session life as a non-smoker was a dream. It was so easy and she was thoroughly enjoying being a non-smoker. Then all of a sudden she found herself smoking and she found what was happening to her extremely distressing. There was neither sense nor reason to what she was doing. Brenda phoned me for a free backup session. During her session, we explored what was happening using hypnosis. Brenda learned what was happening and realised what she had to do to resolve it. At work, Brenda had become one of those unfortunate employees trapped between two managers. Each manager was trying to be her manager and using her against the other – she felt bullied. Brenda realised that at 15, when she stated smoking, it was a time when she was being bullied. When she started smoking, she became a member of the group of girls who had been her bullies – the bullying stopped. Subconsciously, she believed that if she smoked, the situation with the two managers would end. Brenda returned to work the next day and called a meeting with the two managers and told them to sort it out. She explained that she did not mind which of them was her manager but that she could only have one! Brenda was now free; she had addressed the issue as an adult because she had severed her emotional attachment to smoking; she continued as a non-smoker.
Emotional attachments come in all forms and hypnosis can be a powerful tool to resolve them.
Stopping smoking can be easy. Book a hypnotherapy appointment to stop smoking with Stephen Rigby at his Guildford or Woking, Surrey practice now! For priority treatment to stop smoking ring Stephen Rigby on 01483 566115 or complete the stop smoking booking form.