You probably know someone who has successfully quit smoking with hypnotherapy or hypnosis. But how about EFT? As a hypnotherapist with 5 years' experience helping others quit, I can see a future when EFT will be the mothod of choice. So why EFT and what is so special about it?
EFT is short for Emotional Freedom Techniques. It involves gently massaging certain acupressure points whilst repeating phrases designed to free you from a bad feeling. In this case, the bad feeling would be the smoking craving. Hence the "Freedom" part of the name. Whether smoking cravings are purely emotional or not is subject to debate. I have certainly pushed the boundaries of this method for many physical conditions, and as a trained biochemist, I would seriously challenge anyone to define the dividing line between the emotional and the physical. As a matter of fact, many acupuncturists recommend acupuncture to allow the body to rebalance itself after quitting smoking. And the acupressure points that we use in EFT are the endpoints of the main acupuncture meridians. Only instead of using needles, we stimulate these points by a tapping sort of massage. We tap, usually with two fingers, on the area, thereby stimulating these meridians. So what is different about the effect of having EFT from the effect of having acupuncture? Well, with EFT, your mind is asked to bring up a bad emotional state so that the acupressure will release you from that bad emotion. It is like the mind is the office cleaner, who goes into the office unobtrusively and takes out the rubbish/garbage for the council/municipality cleaners to take away. These workers in turn come and remove the refuse and it is no longer in your office. Your office is then clean. And why use EFT instead of hypnotherapy? Because the effect of helping your physical body as well as your mind makes for a very strong combination. Although you can have EFT in hypnosis, this entails the practitioner speaking at a slower rate than using standalone EFT. With standalone EFT, because the practitioner can carry out the treatment at a much faster pace, they can get more done in the same amount of time. In other words, the treatment with EFT reaches further and goes deeper.
I estimate that within the next five years, EFT will have replaced hypnotherapy as the method of choice for quitting smoking. And when ex-smokers-to-be ask for a recommendation to help them stop, they will be asking for a good EFT Practitioner. I look forward to that day. |
