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Should You Use Aversion Therapy with Hypnosis to Stop Smoking?

Smoking Makes You Sick!

"A therapeutic technique which uses suggestions that emphasize the negative aspects of continuing a habituated behavior in order to change the behavior."

In hypnosis, we use imagination and emotion to speak to and motivate the subconscious.

When we imagine and emotionalize pain and pleasure, it is very powerful!

When you use aversion therapy during hypnosis to stop smoking, you imagine and emotionalize the pain your receive from smoking.

Because fear is a strong emotion, aversion hypnosis uses fear as the motivating emotion to scare you into quitting your addiction.

When you see the consequences of your smoking and emotionally feel the pain, so you will not continue the addiction.

This technique is not as popular as using positive stimuli to quit smoking and perhaps for good reason.

"You will get cancer if you smoke cigarettes" is an example of a negative suggestion for smoking.

Basically, your suggestions pair the pleasurable experience of smoking with a negative stimulus of the cancer or other disease or sickness.

Your goal is to reduce or eliminate your desire to smoke. In order to do that, you associate smoking with unpleasant, negative thoughts and stimuli and your desire to smoke is eliminated.

When doctors and psychologists use aversion therapy without the aid of hypnosis, it can be quite nasty.

One way is to receive small electric shocks everytime you pick up a cigarette.

Another less painful way is "rapid smoking". You are forced to smoke a massive number of cagarettes in a very short time. The goal is to induce nicotine toxicity and make you feel physically sick!

Yikes! Neither one of those sound like anything I would want to participate in!

Results show that these techniques have no real effect in stopping smoking.

Hypnotic aversion suggestions for stopping smoking can have serious effects if you revert to your old habits.

If suggestions about getting sick, getting lung cancer or other diseases was used as a fear tactic, the subconscious mind is so powerful that it can and very well may translate that into a directive to get the disease.

If you feel you relate better to fear of pain than desire for pleasure and are intent on using aversion therapy, you should limit your "negative stimuli" suggestions to mild discomfort suggestions only. These types of suggestions would include having a bad taste in your mouth when you taste a cigarette, smelling a foul odor when lighting up, and so on.

You should NOT include suggestions for sickness, illness or other types of physical pain and disease, because there is a real chance for harm.

What is the bottom line?

Avoid aversion therapy for hypnosis to stop smoking or for any other addiction or weight loss. The dangers far outweigh the benefits.

Return to Quit Smoking from Aversion Therapy