Reflective Journal Entries: Smoking and toxic relationship

From Lucy Waterhouse with thanks

I had a client who had sought help to deal with her smoking addiction and who had recently lost her mother- who was a heavy smoker- to lung cancer, She became very upset and demonstrated great shame about the fact that they were doing the same thing that had killed her mother and if she didn’t stop she would do the same to her children, about which she felt great guilt. Once I had the client in a deep level of trance I told her a story about carrying a heavy weight up a hill. 

She had already told me that she loved to take her kids up the Lickey Hills in South Birmingham, and I told her about carrying that weight up the hill then filling up balloons and visualising the toxic air in her lungs into the balloon and watching the balloon float away, becoming a speck in the distance then disappearing altogether. I had used the words ‘letting go’ embedded into the phrases that I was using with her in the intervention and described how clean the air was up the hill and how the trees were so lush, like the lungs of the earth, filling it up with oxygen, clean and pure, and that toxic balloon disappearing. I saw the client two weeks later and she had stopped smoking all together and was really proud of herself. She reported that her asthma had abated and her fitness had too.

N.B. I spoke to this client since I submitted this answer, yesterday, (17/05/2015) and she told me that she had recently met up with a man who she had previously had a (toxic) relationship with and that he had been keen to start a relationship again, and she said that she was suddenly back on that hilltop again in her head and realising that the relationship was actually not healthy and she imagined herself letting go of the relationship in the same way.