Extracting a problem from the core identity is a critical part of eventually getting rid of the problem.
“The problem is, after all these years, I feel like anorexia is just who I am now!”
So said a young woman (not a client) who wanted to tell me about her anorexia, a condition she’d struggled with for over 20 years. We see time and time again that emotional problems, addictions, and compulsions of all kinds come to inhabit, then mimic and merge with, a person’s core identity.
If someone comes to feel they are anorexia, or smoking, or alcohol bingeing – that it’s integral to who they are as a person – then any talk of getting rid of that behaviour feels tantamount to getting rid of them as a person! No wonder people can come to fear ‘losing’ even a life-shortening behaviour like smoking!
So a therapist has a very important role in first defamiliarizing the problematic behaviour, and then removing the pattern from the person’s core identity so they can detach from it more easily.
So how do we do this?
Extracting the problem from your client’s sense of identity
I’ve written and spoken a lot about the importance of extracting a problem from a person’s sense of identity. One of the most important and effective ways we can do this is to ask questions that imply a separation:
- How do those cunning cigarettes try to convince you to go back to them?
- What messages does that depression send you and how does it try to make you believe in its agenda?
- If that anger was a person trying to get you to act out and follow its demands, what would that person be like, sound like…?
So we can begin to help our clients start to separate from a sense of the problematic pattern by the way we describe it, and by encouraging them to talk and therefore think about it as not who they are but more like an interloper – a parasite, if you will.
We can use analogies and metaphors or even therapeutic stories to defamiliarize the pattern so it starts to seem like the alien interloper that it is, rather than an immutable and central part of our client’s core being.
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When is a cigarette not a cigarette?
When it’s a bully, a parasite, a tyrant, a betrayer; a non-rent-paying, homewrecking tenant; an abusive partner… and so on. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also breeds a sense that something is natural – we often stick to what is familiar.
When we use powerful analogies and metaphors we change one thing – the familiar – into another, unfamiliar thing. In this way, we create a reframe that sticks to such an extent that it can’t help but change the client’s relationship to what used to feel like a core part of them.
I’ll sometimes say to a smoker something like this:
A wonderful mechanism for destruction!
“You know, a cigarette is, in some ways, an amazing invention. If a bunch of scientists had been commissioned to create a device that greatly accelerates ageing – a mechanism to corrupt the arteries into the eyes, heart, genitals, and skin and destroy collagen, speeding up the ageing process with remarkable efficiency… well, they couldn’t have done much better than the cigarette!”
This is such an unusual way of talking about cigarettes that it can help defamiliarize them. The cigarette becomes a ‘device’, an ‘efficient premature ageing mechanism’, and so on. I very rarely describe smoking in negative terms (because being negative about what people are drawn to can make them want it more!). Rather, I frame it in unfamiliar terms, so that it starts to look and feel different.
I might point out that a ‘panic attack‘ is really a metaphor, and that a more apt metaphor might be ‘faulty alarm system’ or even an ‘inappropriate exercise response in the body’.
When we defamiliarize, we are moving the client towards a new way of seeing the problem – and therefore a new way of feeling about it, too.
Here’s a case in point:
Destroying my business!
One guy who I had helped to stop smoking came back 16 years later to tell me he’d just started again. His friend had died unexpectedly and he’d run back to the cigarettes shortly thereafter – but at least he’d been free of them for 16 years.
Anyway, I asked about his life since our first meeting. He’d travelled a great deal before settling down and going into property. He was now a keen businessman and set great store by being efficient. He had, at this point, maybe 20 tenants, who paid him rent – “always on time!”
I asked him how he’d feel about a ‘tenant’ who, rather than paying him, charged him to live in his property. I described how this tenant might soil his walls, foul up the water pipes, discolour the inside, and rot the outside… all while demanding that he pay them for inhabiting his property. I described this scenario in some detail, until finally he interrupted with…
“Stop! I get it, and I’ll never smoke again!”
And as far as I know, he didn’t. No hypnosis, not even any direct talk about cigarettes from me – all it took was for me to defamiliarize one pattern by linking it to another he was familiar with.
So many actions and behaviours become mechanically habitual. By taking them out of the realm of the familiar, we can de-mechanize them so that they no longer run so effortlessly.
Anyway, not too long ago I had a question on a Q&A call in which I addressed some of this. You can listen to my answer here or read my reply below. I hope it’s useful.
Jeane’s question
Any suggestions to help my success rate with smokers? I have been hugely successful with the Rewind Technique (for treating phobias and PTSD), but not with smokers.
Mark’s answer
Hello Jeane.
I always go for one session, without an initial consultation. I may do a follow-up session, as with Linda in the video on the How to Stop Anyone Smoking course, but only if it’s necessary. Actually, with Linda it wasn’t necessary – but I wanted to demonstrate the difference in her a few months after stopping.
So, go for it, in a oner. After all, no one knows which cigarette is going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, the tipping point, so we need to get them out, as it were, as fast as possible. If someone were in a burning building – which is a metaphor I’ve used with smokers, because of the smoke inhalation connection – then we don’t tarry about getting them out fast!
With smoking you may be literally saving a life, because you – and they – don’t know which cigarette, on top of all the others, will be the one that ruins everything for them.
An arm levitation is not necessary at all. I did that in one session in the How to Stop Anyone Smoking course, a really old film, but that session is really to demonstrate dealing with resistance – so forget about arm levitation, unless it’s clear a client is hypnotically talented enough to experience it, and then you might use it for therapeutic gain… but otherwise, forget about it for the time being.
Stick to the principles of the course, defamiliarizing the pattern through metaphor – externalize it from their core identity through a parasite/abuser/bully/tyrant common metaphor; use the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ analogy so that the idea of ‘one won’t hurt’ is derailed; do the, sort of, somatic work; have them listen to their heart about its needs and also their lungs, so they build up a sense of loyalty to the parts of their body that have to deal with the poison. Suggest that the hands no longer need to betray the lungs and heart and cells of their body and may be, henceforth, ‘numb with reluctance’ when it comes to betraying the rest of the body… and so on. Work in that way, and I think you’ll start to have much better results.
Become a Confident Smoking Cessation Therapist
More and more people are trying to quit smoking, but many hypnotherapists struggle with this common client type. Over the years, Mark has developed a reliable system that works with the addiction rather than against it and makes stopping smoking a natural progression rather than a battle. Read more here about his online course How to Stop Anyone Smoking.
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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