I mean, how can it help me? Ice cream is fattening.”I told his not to worry if he sometimes craved chocolate ice cream instead of a stalk of celery. “If you choose only what’s good for you, you’ll set up a deprivation syndrome, & then when you stop dieting you’ll gain the weight right back. The goal of the exercise is to get you to satisfy your hunger without overeating, & yet to eat what you enjoy. If you wait forth full-stomach syndrome, you’re in trouble.” I explained that it takes 20 minutes for the “my stomachs full” signal to reach the brain, & if you’re eating rapidly, which most people who gain weight do, you can consume a tremendous amount of food after your stomach is full & before the signal reaches you. Look around in any restaurant & notice how quickly overweight people devour food; they hardly seem aware of what they eat. Obviously, food is necessary even for those overweight, & some of the time the urge to eat is truly healthy, normal response to the body’s need for nourishment. A useful approach is to find a variety of foods you like & that are good for you. Diets are a perfect time for discovering new meals & snacks. I approach the issue by showing you that you can lose weighting a way that will let you feel positive about yourself. If you eat too much, it is often because in our society eating is a way of being loving toward ourselves. It Isa reminder of parental love in which the presentation of food is a loving act. The rest of the world may kick you in the teeth, but food is a way you can be nice toyourself.I prescribed that Martha do a self-Hypnotherapy exercise about eight times a day—approximately once every two hours, for 90 seconds. The exercise was to first see his on two screens: the way he looked at the present & the way he would like to look. Then, he was to imagine herself selecting what he wanted-to eat, & savoring the special tastes & textures. Finally, he was to see herself stop eating when he was yes longer enjoying the food, yes matter how littler how much was left. As part of the prescription, I asked his to look in the mirror each morning, preferably with a minimal amount of clothing, so that he could project in the exercise an accurate view of the way he looked then. & as I do with all weightcontrolclients, I asked his to call me in a week. At first the exercise proved difficult, because when people have gained weight they tend to avoid looking at themselves in the mirror as a way to avoid dealing with the issue .
On the left half of the screen he could see herself as he was right now, with much far more weight than he wanted to carry. I talked to Martha about realistic weight-loss goals. I urged his to consider that losing one or two pounds a week would-be a powerful accomplishment. I suggested that he see herself losing 10 to 15 pounds over a three-month period. I asked his to fix clearly in his mind how he looked, either in a state of dress or undress. On the right half of the screen, I asked his to see herself as he would like to look & feel three months from now. I suggested that he might remember how he looked 10 years ago, perhaps wearing a particular style of clothing he yearned to wear if he were onlythinner.Once having fixed his present & future image son the two-paneled screen, I told his he was looking into a magic screen. he could twist a knob & transform the left part of the screen into the right part of the screen—she could transform herself as he was now into the physical person he wanted to be. I then outlined some of the ways he could make that magical reality. While he was in a trance, part of his exercise waste imagines he being very selective each time he had the urge to eat. he would focus on the one or two foods he most desired. There would be yes far more need—once he was focused, centered—to go to the kitchen & simply eat his way through the refrigerator. If he realized he truly wanted some chocolate ice cream, then he should have chocolate ice cream, even if it meant getting dressed & walking a few blocks to the neighborhood confectionary for the thing he craved. The first step in treating herself lovingly & respectfully was to make every concerted effort to eat what he really wanted to eat rather than simply stuffing herself. Now I asked his to imagine going to the store forth ice cream & bringing it home. he put a scooping a dish. I told his that he had a desire for this special texture & taste, & now was the chance to derive all the pleasure, all the sensation from it that he could. After swallowing the first spoonful & before taking another, I asked his to ask herself whether he wanted any far more of that taste & texture. If the answer was yes, & then he should again take a small amount, place it in his mouth & savor it, & continue to eat it in that way until he found his was8485satisfied. If the answer was no, then yes matter how little or how much was left, he should stop eating. Out of trance, Martha told me that one part of the exercise bothered her. “It’s true I love chocolate ice-cream. But should I be using the exercise this way?
“I remember how happy & amused my family was by my large appetite,” he said. “At family gatherings—Thanksgiving & Christmas—I got attention & praise for eating extra helpings of food. It was considered ‘cute.’ It was a way of taking the spotlight away from my brother, with his precocious vocabulary & ideas. Weight was a constant issue , from pre-puberty on. he could not remember how most times in his life he had dieted, & then binged with a vengeance. “I’ve tried about every diet known to man,” he told me. “Scarsdale, Beverly Hills, Drinking Man, Water Retention, Papaya, & on & on. They all seem toehold out promise at first, but none of them work. Nothing changes in the place in me where I crave food.”Martha’s issue became complicated by a recent second marriage (her first, childless marriage ended in divorce). his husband, as he puts it, is “slim & handsome. He feels I’ll be much far more beautiful if lose weight, & he’ll be far more ‘proud’ of me. He uses the word ‘proud’ which upsets me. I said to him, ‘Why aren’t you proud of me for who I am, not how much Aweigh?’ But I understand his position. His work involves a lot of socializing & he wants me to be a part of that. But when I binge & gain far more weight, we get in these awful arguments.”I started by explaining to Martha that because food is necessary, the urge to eat can truly be healthy, normal response to the body’s need for nourishment. Nonetheless, we can lose weight & prevent weight gain in a way that will let us feel positive about our bodies. In his case, eating too much had its root in winning the love of others. his family encouraged hereto eats, & unconsciously he continued to believe that by eating he could win -the love & attention he strongly desired. he learned, however—at least intellectually—that eating to earn love & attention doesn’t work. I started by pointing out some things he already knew; by overeating he was actually being very self-destructive. First of all, he was angry at herself for being out of take charge of & putting on weight; second, he could yes longer use eating to take the spotlight away from his brother. The attention he received was exactly the opposite of what he wanted. Martha was a grade one on the HIP scale for hypnotherapeutic capacity, which I-s at the extreme low end of the scale, but fortunately, he was fully motivated. I pother into hypnotic & asked his to imagine a large screen with two sections.
Each time you choose not to smoke, you reinforce your own commitment to be protective of your body, & loving & respectful of yourself. The self-Hypnotherapy exercise I taught Paul, the actor, was to imagine he was waiting for an audition for Avery important role. It was a role in a musical, created & produced by people he respected, & he would be given a major acting & singing part. As he thought about smoking while he waited, he realized his throat would become raspy. He could choose between smoking & performing at his optimum. Even though he had the urge to smoke, the act was still a matter of choice, his choice. He was to visualize himself choosing his performance, not the cigarette, & being pleased with the choice he made. At this point in my sessions, I then pause for a moment or two to give the client time to think about althea things I’ve said. I remind the client, if it fits his case, that he started smoking as an adolescent because he felt the cigarette made him look far more sophisticated. Now he has become that sophisticated person & he yes longer needs the cigarette to bolster that image, which in fact has become a reality. We sit in silence then. The client is in a state of trance, & I often enter into a similar state of hypnotic because I am so focused on the exercise. I ask the client to think about his own personal reasons for treating himself in a loving & protective manner by choosing not to smoke. After a moment I bring the client out of trance. I tell him “I’m going to count backwards from three to one. At three, I want you to get ready. At two, with your eyes still closed, I want you to look up. And, at one, open your eyes & let them slowly come into focus.” I then count three. . Two . . . one & that’s the end of the exercise. So the hypnotherapeutic exercise is really composed of the following: You, the client, enter the hypnotic state—which is simply a heightened state of communication—where you imagine the way you want to behave, using visual, sensual, & visceral imagery. Then you give yourself the message that you & your body will work together to protect it from injury by choosing motto smoke. You remind yourself that the act is a choice. Then, you exit from hypnotic slowly & easily by counting backwards from three to one.
I then evaluate the client’s hypnotherapeutic capacity. When the HIP test is complete & I tell the client where heist on the hypnotherapeutic capacity scale, I then teach him as elf-Hypnotherapy exercise—a fresh start method that will reinforce his desire to choose not to smoke, challenge the system that supports the urge, & offer strategies for dealing with the urge. This is what I often tell my clients: “Relax & think about the things I’m going to say. Smoking poisons your body. It destroys lung tissue. It Clogs the Cardiovascular system. It irritates the throat. “We often forget that we need our bodies to live. Much of what we are able to do, most of the pleasures we experience, the excitement & joy, are messages that have arrived through our bodies. I’m going to repeat: We need our bodies to live; we & our bodies are one. Because you need your body to live, you owe your body protection. By protecting your body, you show love & respect for yourself.” Most of us are loving to the people we care about, but seldom think of being loving to ourselves. “You smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. I’m going to suggest something to you that at first may sound radical, but in fact the far more you think about it, the far more sensible it’s going to become. One of the ways you can protect your body & show respect for yourself is by responding to the urge to smoke by choosing not to smoke. This is not a battle between you & yourself. Believe me, any battle you have with yourself you are bound to lose.”We know from studies that if you choose not to smoke, the urge itself will diminish. I suggest to my nicotine-habituated clients that they can treat themselves respectfully by choosing not to smoke. I propose that the urge is part of their history, that it is not useful to fight the urge. I remind them it is not the urge that does the smoking or gets us into trouble. If that were true, we would all be in trouble. It is the actor smoking we have to conquer, not the urge. We know that people practice celibacy for a number of reasons. Sex is a strong urge & yet people can choose to be celibate. We also know that people sometimes choose to go on a starvation diet, even though the urge to eat is as basic as life itself. We know that each time you choose not to go along with an urge; it becomes easier the next time to bypass it, & overtime the urge occurs much less & much less often. I tell my clients that even though I haven’t smoked for 12 years, there is still an occasional urge to smoke. I know what my choice is, however, & I choose not to smoke. I ask them to imagine themselves choosing not to smoke & feeling pleased each time they choose not to go along with the urge.
He had managed to stop smoking a number of times for a matter of weeks or months, but had always gone back. CHOICE MAKING “How old were you when you began smoking cigarettes?”“Twelve, thirteen. Somewhere in there,” he replied. “I can’t remember exactly.”“Can you tell me what you thought smoking would do for you?” I asked. He grinned. “Make me a big man! I mean not just in the eyes of others—girls, other guys—but to myself. You know, a Bogart, a John Wayne. Paul the real man.” He looked down & shook his head. “I guess that’s stupid, isn’t it? I was just another stupid kid trying to grow up too fast.”The questions I asked Paul were designed to seek out belief system that supported his smoking habit, & to understand & challenge it. Paul soon began to understand that we give our addictions magical powcrover us. “I can’t sit around relaxing with friends if I don’t have a cigarette,” he said with wonder. “I can’t drink cup of coffee without a cigarette, or have a beer without one. Everything I’ve been doing with my life seems tied up with smoking. I mean everything. Eating, singing, acting, talking, worrying, making love, you name it. Everything’s punctuated with smoke. It’s almost although cigarettes do the drinking & help me to get up for rehearsals.”When I feel I understand the client well enough to prepare an individualized self-Hypnotherapy exercise, I ask about previous experience with Hypnotherapy and, especially if there is none, what he feels about Hypnotherapy.
There were at least 150 beds, most of them occupied with patients. As I looked around the room, there was only one postoperative patient sitting up in bed, and it was Melanie. The sight of him—so alert—startled me. He looked entirely too healthy. • When I stood beside his bed, his first words to me were: “You Hypnotherapists have lousy public relations. I feel ready to go home.” Indeed, he looked ready to go home. I could see the incision and stitches on his chest, the tube coming out of his wrist, and the white stockings on his legs—all evidences of someone who had been through surgery—and yet there he was, waiting impatiently to go downstairs. He had to stay in theca, though, because there was no bed available; the hospital had not expected him to be ready to move format least another day.
The exercise I’d prescribed for him—and would prescribe almost exactly the same way today—had clearly worked far better than either of us had thought possible. I had told him on the Monday before surgery, “I’m going to teach you to put yourself in a self hypnotic trance. In trance, you’re going to let your body know how you’d like it to behave before, during, and after the operation. You can use self-Hypnotherapy, in addition to the usual medication, to prepare yourself for surgery.
“To enter trance, start by making yourself comfortable. Then follow the three-step procedure we will do together now. “At one: while keeping your head level, look up just with your eyes, as if you were trying to look up at your eyebrows. “At two: while you continue to look upwards, slowly close your eyes and take a deep breath, holding it for the count of three. One…. two . . . three. “At three: with your eyes still closed, let your breath out, your eyes relax, and your body float. “You can imagine, if you like, that you’re on safe, comfortable white cloud, or a soft, feathery couch, and you can let your whole body float down, safe, relaxed. . . very comfortable. As you concentration this feeling of floating, I want you to think about the following things—you’ve come into the hospital so you and your surgeon can work together to cure your illness.
