My story
From "just one cigarette"
to twenty years — and back again
I decided to "try" a cigarette when I was 30 years old. That first puff went straight to my lungs and my friends laughed as I coughed and spluttered. I thought I was being rebellious.
Eventually I realised the only person I was rebelling against was myself.
I thought I was joining the cool gang — but there's nothing particularly cool about beautiful clothes that smell of stale smoke. So I decided to rebel against the smoking instead. And just like the old friends who had introduced me to it were long gone, it was time for the cigarettes to go too.
But I needed a plan.
It hadn't taken me long to become a compulsive smoker — lighting up from the minute I got up in the morning to the last thing before I laid my head on the pillow. And every night, I went to sleep making the same promise to myself: tomorrow will be different.
It wasn't. Not for twenty years.
It was time to release myself from this self-imposed prison.
A single hypnotherapy session did what twenty years of willpower could not. I walked out feeling something I hadn't expected — not just the absence of craving, but a profound stillness. For the first time in as long as I could remember, my mind was quiet. My over-analytical, relentlessly churning mind had simply... calmed.
I won't pretend it was a perfectly straight road. Like many people, I stopped, then returned to smoking for a time. I know that journey — the shame of it, the frustration, the sense that you've failed yourself again. That experience is part of why I work the way I do — with no judgement, no pressure, no quit dates imposed from the outside.
When I later discovered EFT tapping — originally for anxiety and panic attacks — I realised it worked on the same root cause that drives most smoking: an anxious nervous system looking for relief. Combining the two approaches felt like finding the missing piece.
That first morning I woke up truly free felt like I had been renewed — released from the curse of smoking that had followed me for two decades. I want that feeling for every single client I work with.
