Sugar Addiction, Other Addiction

People call me and say they have a sugar addiction, food addiction, smoking problem, etc. In short, a fair number of people who contact me believe that they have an addiction.

When I work with such a client, let’s say a sugar addict, I’ll sometimes reframe the addiction as a habit. This weakens their belief that sugar is a huge, huge issue. The reframe is like making a small snowball, and rolling it from the top of the mountain.

Often the client will barely notice my remark. And that’s okay, because I don’t really care if their conscious mind notices. What I’m doing is creating a small shift underneath the surface, so that their subconscious mind notices.

In fact, sometimes I’ll just tell random stories or say silly things to throw the conscious mind off track, and to weave in these random stories in such a way as to help the subconscious mind consider things differently, to expand its views of the world.

Some of my clients don’t even think I’m using hypnosis; they just think I tell stories. Shhh… don’t tell them that sometimes the most powerful hypnosis is the type you can’t notice. 🙂

At first, the snowball rolls slowly, and it barely grows in size.
But it keeps rolling until the momentum really picks up speed. And now you have a huge snowball of change, busting through one limiting belief after another, as it rolls down the mountain. That’s what the reframe can do.

One of the challenges of the client calling herself an addict is that she believes she has an identity, i.e., that of an addict. And when someone has an identity issue, that’s harder to change than a mere behavioral issue.

Often with addiction issues, I need to help the client on multiple levels, including the more challenging identity level issues.

When the client believes that she is an addict, she may feel helpless and hopeless. 
But after the reframe from addiction to habit, her subconscious begins to realize, “Hey, I’ve changed other patterns in the past. This habit is just one more pattern. I’m not helpless. I can change this.”

Some clients realize this on a deep core level right away, and they tend to succeed faster. Others need more time to get this deep emotional realization.

But either way, once the subconscious deeply gets this core message, the subconscious starts driving the change; heck, it starts demanding change!

And when this happens, the client’s conscious mind is no longer the more motivated part. Now, the subconscious is more motivated than the conscious mind. The subconscious mind is on fire with the desire to change! It wants to change! It needs to change. It demands a change!

And the conscious mind takes a backseat, because now it’s time to let the subconscious power loose.
When you’re dealing with an addiction, the most efficient way to get rid of it is to stop trying to get rid of it. Instead, figure out how to harness that power, that desire. Then convert that power and desire to something more productive, healthier, more pleasurable.

In other words, figure out a strategy to get your subconscious to stop fighting and start uniting with you. Once you choose and succeed with one of the many good strategies, your subconscious will start driving and demanding change.

And as you know, when your subconscious really has a strong itch, it will scratch it.
I help the client’s subconscious mind to consider other ways of getting what it truly wants. Then I help it to figure out how to scratch that itch.

It doesn’t really want sugar. It just believes that sugar is the best way to get what it wants. But once the subconscious expands its vision, expands its understanding of the world and of other options, it begins to realize that it has choice.

It can choose to focus on sugar, or it can choose to focus on something even more pleasurable. And when that light switch gets flipped, watch out! Change is about to happen.