To stop smoking you need to address your true reasons for smoking. These are not necessarily the same as the reasons you give yourself. No one would smoke for the small amount of pleasure some smokers insist they experience.
Even if there were no health risks associated with smoking the small amount of pleasure would not be worth the price of the cigarette packet. Smokers don’t remain smokers for the pleasure cigarettes afford. The same is true of the physical addition: it's just not enough to keep you smoking.
Note: the single, extended session is most effective for people who are not suffering undue stresses in their present circumstances. If you are, it is more effective to book appointments and resolve these stresses before addressing smoking; you will then have a much higher likelihood of success in quitting.
One of my Touch for Health students recently stopped smoking after reading and reflecting on the ideas on this page . . .
Why people smoke
There is one significant reason why people smoke. In my experience this is common to all smokers (and I was for many years a smoker myself): smoking is a highly effective anaesthetic. While you’re smoking a cigarette the feeling it gives you overwhelms any other feeling in your body. Tobacco is legal and readily accessible. It’s a fantastic drug for the purpose of anaesthetizing uncomfortable feelings. The anaesthetic effect seems even to work while you’re not actually smoking, just by having the poison in your bloodstream.
The problem, of course (apart from the damage to health), is that the anaesthetic does not discriminate between good and bad feelings. Smoking numbs the good feelings too. However, there is a remedy for the absence of feelings: smoke a cigarette! It helps get the heart beating and adrenaline flowing. This is why smokers reach for a cigarette to help them feel good as well as to help them not feel bad. Ironically, a cigarette is the only way to stimulate feelings which smoking itself has banished.
Finding the causes
I can help you to stop smoking by identifying the bad feelings you are trying to avoid, finding out where these feelings come from and resolving them. This frequently involves visiting some significant incident from the past.
For most people it takes just one session lasting two hours or so. (But if you are experiencing lots of problems in your present life, these should be addressed before addressing the smoking. See the note above.) Having resolved the underlying (past) issues associated with smoking, even without doing any ‘aversion therapy’ at all, the relationship and attitude to cigarettes is now transformed. At this point I will ask you: ‘How do you feel about a cigarette now?’ And your answer will almost certainly be, ‘I don’t want one.’ Resolving the underlying issues in itself takes away the desire to smoke.
How do we get to the underlying causes? Through the feelings that are interpreted by the smoker as the impulse to smoke. In fact, these feelings aren’t a desire to smoke; they are a modified form of the feelings that you are trying to evade. Usually, we run away from bad feelings. Our culture encourages us to do this. We are enticed to take (legal or illegal) drugs if we feel bad. But we’re feeling bad for good reason. If – instead of running away – you turn to face the uncomfortable feelings, you will have no choice but to face your real problems, and this will give you an opportunity to resolve them.
The feelings you are trying to evade become the signal to smoke. Every time you get those uncomfortable feelings, you smoke, and confirm this causality link. If, instead of smoking or running away from the uncomfortable feelings, you stay with them, those feelings (which you thought were the desire to smoke) will transform into something else.
Becoming free
Usually, consciously, there is absolutely no notion of the factors that underlie the smoking habit, and most people need help to find and resolve them. By addressing a smoking habit in this way not only do people stop smoking (and lose the desire to smoke) but are likely to resolve some very significant issue in your life.
Nor is there a risk of overeating or substituting smoking for some other vice, since the reasons that sustained it no longer exist (except that smoking unnaturally suppresses the appetite, and so you will regain a healthy appetite).
Finally, you will be free from those powerful unconscious feelings – over which you felt you had no control – that led you to smoke.