You have to be somewhat graceful about how you do these things. I did it one time to try it. It worked very well, but the ripples that resulted from that change were a bit disastrous.
Man: Couldn't you include in the instructions that other people will assume that she has been a smoker? You would instruct her not to be too disturbed by that, just to ignore it.
Yeah, I did that with the woman I told you about, but it became disturbing for her anyway. I said "People will act bizarre and unusual about you, but you'll take it with a grain of salt and figure that they are just confused." But she began to become upset about how many of them were doing it. She thought the whole world was going crazy.
Woman; So what do you do now instead?
The simplest way is to just use reframing. You don't even need to put people in a trance; you can just use standard refraining. It works perfectly. Then you put them in a trance to remove the physical addition.
Woman: How do you remove the physical addiction in a trance? Direct suggestion.
Woman: Do you say "You are no longer addicted?"
No. That isn't direct suggestion. That's dumb. I'm serious. If you say "You will no longer have the physical addiction" you haven't said how. Some of your clients will be flexible enough to find a way, but most won't. You need to build up a context in which they can respond that way easily, If you do it too directly, you won't get the response very often. If you say "You will no longer want cigarettes" you're less apt to get it than if you say "Cigarettes taste unpleasant." You're even more apt to get it if you have the thought of smoking a cigarette be unpleasant. Better than that, you have them be totally proud every time they refuse a cigarette, even though they really do want one. You can create contexts in which the response is a natural one.
Usually I remove the addiction in this way: I go in and verify— either through finger signals or verbalization or head nods—that the unconscious knows what feeling accompanies the physical addiction. Then I ask the unconscious to spontaneously connect that feeling with another set of sensations, like pleasure or delight or curiosity, each time the feeling occurs. That way they'll end up doing something other than smoking.
You can use reframing with smoking and other drug addictions, obesity, and most other problems people want you to cure with hypnosis. You can reframe them first to solve the problem, and then hypnotize them in order to satisfy their request for hypnosis. You can make reframing a prerequisite to doing hypnosis. Rather than challenge what they came in for, hypnosis, tell them that you're a very special hypnotist. Explain that you're very thorough and don't want to use hypnosis to do anything detrimental, so you need to make lots of careful checks first. Then you go through the standard reframing. "Before I can put you into a trance, there are certain things I have to know. Go inside and ask if the part that is responsible for this pattern of behavior… . " If you act as if reframing is just the preamble, they'll hurry through the reframing so that they can get to the "real stuff."
After they are completely changed, you say "Now we can begin the trance. Close your eyes… . "Then you go through any hypnotic routine you want to. Afterwards they'll tell everyone "Hypnosis worked!"
Reframing is the simplest way you can get change in many symptoms. However, I'm not always for doing things simply; I'm for doing them artfully. Once you've done five smokers with straight reframing and you know you can get results that way, then begin to do it more creatively. Do yourself and your client a favor by doing it in a different and bizarre way. Do reframing in trance and take her to the Goddess of Cigarettes. Have her burn a package of Marlboros at her altar or something. Sometimes all you have to do for smoking is put the person in a trance and say "What I want your unconscious to do is find the most creative way for you to stop smoking without even knowing that you've done it." And sometimes you have to do a lot morel
People keep wanting to learn to do hypnosis so they can stop people from smoking and do weight control. When people ask "What do you do with smokers?" sometimes I say "Hand them a book of matches." Hypnosis is much too elegant a set of tools to think about as something that you use just for weight control or for smoking. That's like buying a Ferrari to go to the grocery store. There is something repulsive to me about using a really elegant set of tools in a trite way. Smoking and weight control are important, but the way you use (hypnosis to deal with a smoker is idiosyncratic to the person. What's much more important to me is to learn hypnosis as a set of skills, so you can use it idiosyncratically for anything.
Man: I did reframing in trance with a man on smoking, and got a lot of resistance. First he burst out of trance, and then he became a little kid. He started wiggling his feet and—
In NLP we have a principle that says "There is no resistance; there are only incompetent therapists." I mean that literally. I do not believe that there is resistance; there are only unskilled therapists. That shouldn't be taken critically. That should be taken as follows: every time you begin to encounter "resistance," you are presented with an unprecedented opportunity to delight yourself. If you say "Aha! I have done something which is incompetent, so now I am going to surprise and delight myself by doing something else1' you will continually improve. If you think "He's not ready yet" he may change, but you will be stuck.
There's no resistance if you utilize every response. If somebody spontaneously goes into any state, utilize it. If he becomes a little kid, tell him to enjoy himself, If he comes out of trance, you can say "And what can I do for you now?" To be an effective communicator, all you have to do is respond appropriately to whatever spontaneously happens. If a person comes out of trance and you ask yourself "What did I do wrong?" that isn't an appropriate response. No formula works perfectly every time. People aren't willing to do anything rigidly. All kinds of strange things happen.
Once I put a man into trance, planning to do standard reframing. I said "Lift your right index finger for "yes" and your left index finger for "no" — and the guy went "Pur–ple!" At that moment, if you don't have patterns for utilization, you are stuck. I said "That's right, pur–ple\" I just fed it back to him in the same tonality and tempo. Then he said "Au–ra!" So I said "Pur–ple! Au–ra!" I continued "Now we'll take this meaningful message … "and I gave him some bizarre set of instructions for utilization. 1 had no idea what he was doing.
When he came out of trance, he reported to me that as I told him to lift up his "no" finger, he became engulfed in a big purple aura. The more he was in the aura, the more he knew that he was making some change. The aura was somehow or other saturating him and changing him. Who knows what that was about. Some purple cloud came down and changed him before I could get around to it.
If I had interrupted the purple cloud, I would have really gotten stuck. Instead I just went along with it, and it did my work for me.