Helped me and my husband to stop smoking (Hypnotherapy)

Member Name: SamPerry

Product:	Hypnotherapy
Date:	12/11/08 (261 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Stopped us smoking!

Disadvantages: Expensive, but worth it in the long run

I started smoking when I was fifteen years old as I thought it was the 'cool' thing to do at the time and all my friends did it, so I wanted to fit in with the gang!! When I got to about 18 years old I really regretted my decision but by that time it was too late and I was addicted!

I continued throughout my life smoking, I actually thought that I enjoyed it and loved nothing more than a smoke with my drink on a weekend. It was only when I got married and my husband and I wanted to try for a baby that reality dawned on me. Research shows that smokers find it more difficult to conceive a baby than smokers do. Also the thought ran through my head that I better stop smoking before I fell pregnant as I knew I would HAVE to stop when I fell pregnant as the thought of making a tiny, unborn foetus smoke because I was sent shivers through my spine. I figured that it would be much easier to stop before I fell pregnant than after.

Therefore we decided on our honeymoon in May 2007, that once we got back to England we would stop. Now we hadn't really decided how to stop, we had both tried to stop previously and failed! We have tried nicotine patches, nicotine gun and Allen Carr's easy way to stop smoking book, and did stop for a short time at each attempt, but after a few weeks we always ended up back on the cigarettes.

We had heard a good report about being hypnotised to stop smoking, I was a bit pessimistic to say the least but we knew we had to give it a go, as we were desperate to be as healthy as possible before we started trying for a baby.

I looked all over the internet to search for hypnotherapists in our area, the one I finally decided upon was Karen Wilkins and her website address is Kirisw.co.uk. I already thought that it would be expensive to have this hypnotherapy done and at £150 per person I definitely knew it was, this £150 included a follow up session if the first one didn't work, so wasn't too bad really! When we worked out how quickly we would spend £150 on cigarettes and the answer was roughly 25 days we knew we had to go ahead and give it a go. So I booked for Karen to come to my house one evening to do both myself and my husband. I liked the fact that she would come to our house as it made it all a bit easier for us.

Karen arrived and immediately set us at ease, she is a very nice and friendly woman. She started off by completing some paperwork, asking us what our current smoking habits were, why we wanted stop, people we loved that we were stopping for, how much we spent on cigarettes. Some of the more unusual questions she asked us were what smells did we hate and what tastes did we hate. My answer to this was things such as I hated the smell of sweat, stale cigarettes, bad breath and I hated the taste of fish. I will explain why she wanted to know this later on.

Karen hypnotised my husband first while I waited upstairs. When she had finished I went down and my husband looked very tired, as if he had just woken up. I asked him what it was like and he said that he thinks he just fell asleep!! Karen explained that when she hypnotises she speaks to the unconscious mind, so it doesn't matter what the conscious mind does as it will still work. She said some people will fall asleep while this happens, others will hear everything that it going on, it all depends on how strong your conscious mind is.

Karen then hypnotised me, I lay out on the sofa and she started talking to me in a very quiet, calm voice. She then relaxed me into a very deep state of relaxation. I heard all of this part and remember my body feeling like lead and feeling so heavy that I could not move my arms or legs. I started to panic a little bit but she must have realised as she started to relax me even further. The rest is all a bit of a blur to be honest, I remember bits and pieces, like i remember her telling me that if I took another drag of a cigarette I would taste fish and smell sweaty arm pits and bad breath - eeuggh!!!

I also remember her telling me to just think of all the people I love and how disappointed they would be if I was to start smoking again. And how important having a baby was to me and how bad it would be to smoke in front of my baby. It was all a bit of a guilt trip really but I suppose it was what the unconscious mind needed telling in order to stop smoking!!

The session lasted for an hour which went incredibly fast, afterwards I was expecting to feel really different but I didn't feel different in any way. I am very pleased to say that neither myself nor my husband have touched a cigarette since we had the hypnotherapy in June 2007!! It is very hard to describe how this makes you stop but it just does.

After the hypnotherapy I still thought about cigarettes but unlike before, when the urge would not go away until I lit up a cigarette, this time I would think about having one for a second and then the thought would go away, therefore the urge did not bother me enough to light up a cigarette. This continued for about 6 weeks and then after that we just stopped thinking about cigarettes altogether. The thought of having a cigarette now makes me feel physically sick, so I would highly recommend this to anyone out there that really wants to stop smoking.

Summary: Dont doubt it, it really does work!!