lifeLine Psychotherapy
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In Memory of Hoang Lan, my devoted and loving mother
1937-2002
Stop Smoking
Managing Pain & Smoking Cessation
The management of chronic pain can be helped greatly by learning how to use hypnosis. Psychological approaches to pain relief are well documented, and hypnosis has been widely used for centuries in this area. Dr Milton Erickson, one of the world's leading lights in the use of clinical hypnosis used his skills to manage his own chronic pain from the two bouts of polio he suffered during his lifetime.
One of the problems with chronic pain management is that the brain habituates to pain-killing drugs, requiring higher and higher doses. Hypnosis works in a different way, causing the brain to stop responding to pain signals.
The trick to using hypnosis for pain management is to learn the skills so that you can then use them yourself whenever you need them. Many people quickly grasp the techniques and gain relief from the start. Hypnosis can be use in combination with medication. You will find that you may be able to tolerate a lower dose of medication. Numerous recent researches identified that Americans have become addicted and overdosing on Opiates. This is now an epidemic. There are now guidelines for primary care physicians to be more cautious in prescribing medications that have addictive substances.
Managing Pain
A Quote from the American Psychological Association:
"Research shows that hypnosis works as part of a treatment program for a number of psychological and medical conditions, with pain relief being one of the most researched areas, as shown in a 2000 study by psychologists Steven Lynn, PhD, Irving Kirsch, PhD, Arreed Barabasz, PhD, Etzel Cardeña, PhD, and David Patterson, PhD. Among the benefits associated with hypnosis is the ability to alter the psychological components of the experience of pain that may then have an effect on even severe pain."
Smoking Cessation
So how will stop smoking hypnotherapy help me?
Stop Smoking Hypnotherapy is particularly useful for helping people to visualize themselves in different situations and to then associate that “new vision” of themselves (as somebody who has successfully stopped) with a particular emotion (in this case, feeling incredibly proud of themselves for having had the “will” to finally quit). Therefore, it is of paramount importance that your starting point is a REAL desire to stop, not for anybody else, but for YOURSELF – you have to want to stop!
Will I succeed with stop smoking hypnotherapy?
We, know, from many years of direct experience, and also because of psychological research, that the two most important influence in determining outcomes are:
How motivated you are to stop smoking – do you have a real health problem that requires you to stop smoking, or are you simply worried about the potential health problems? (These are not the same – if it was proven beyond any doubt that the very next cigarette you smoked would ACTUALLY kill you, then it is rather unlikely that you would actually smoke it! Under these circumstances you would be highly motivated to stop.)
How much effort you are prepared to put into stopping smoking – If you are determined that you want to stop knowing that there will be times that you are “desperate” to smoke, and that you will absolutely NOT go out and buy any cigarettes, then it would seem that you are prepared to put in a LOT of effort – However, if you believe that you don’t need to make any effort because it is the job of the Hypnotherapist to do that for you, then you are certainly going to fail.