I was sceptical too

I didn't walk into hypnotherapy. I stumbled into it by complete accident, through a door I didn't know existed.

It was an Alan Carr "Easy Way" stop smoking class. You might know the name from the book, the one that seemingly everyone's mum or uncle swears changed their life. The class was honestly a last resort. I'd tried other things, was running out of excuses, and turned up mildly cynical and fairly convinced that whatever this was, it probably wasn't going to work on me specifically. I'm quite strong-willed, you see. Ask anyone.

I didn't even realise until it was over that it had been hypnotherapy. I'd just sat there, listening, and somewhere in the middle of it something quietly shifted. I left and didn't smoke again. Just like that.

Now, full disclosure. I am currently a vaper, and I have absolutely smoked again since that day. Many, many times. So I'm not standing here telling you it was a permanent miracle cure from a single session. But something shifted in that room, clearly enough that I've never forgotten it, and curiosity about what actually happened sent me down a rabbit hole I haven't quite climbed out of since.

It didn't fit with anything I thought I understood about how change worked. I'd always assumed fixing something hard meant suffering through something hard first. That you had to earn it. The idea that your brain could just be gently redirected, and would actually follow, felt almost too simple. A bit suspicious, if I'm honest.

So I got on with things for a while. But it kept nagging at me, the way unexplained things do. How had that worked? What actually happened in that room? And if it could do that, what else could it do?

That question sent me down a long rabbit hole. Therapists, teachers, training courses, my own sessions as a client working through my own stuff (we all have stuff, by the way, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't looked very hard). The more I learned, the more I understood why it worked. The scepticism didn't survive contact with the evidence.

I trained because I wanted to give something back. I'd had so much help from brilliant people over the years and I wanted to be that for someone else. To sit with someone who's struggling and help them shift something that's felt immovable for years.

If you're reading this the same way I walked into that class, a bit resistant, quietly wondering whether this could possibly work on someone like you, I'd just say: same. And then it did.