Giving up

IT'S hard to imagine anyone more unlike the traditional image of the hypnotherapist than Richard Jackson. Most mornings he is to be found behind the counter of his Holgate Caf in Acomb Road, cheerily preparing fry-ups for his customers. But at 2pm, off comes the white chef's jacket and he's ready to deal with a completely different type of customer.

In a small room at the back of the caf there are two comfortable chairs and a small desk with phrenologist's bust on it - a small statue of a head covered with writing.

Nothing to do with hypnotherapy, Richard grins cheerfully - but it helps set the tone.

It's here he brings those other customers; people who have come to him hoping hypnotherapy will help them give up smoking, control their stammer or lose weight.

Richard is a smallish, bespectacled man with an air of tough resourcefulness. In the course of a colourful career he's been a publican and hotelier, spent three years in the army, and worked as a taxi driver, a bus conductor, and a steward with GNER.

Now he runs his caf in the morning, and hypnotises people in the afternoon.

He trained with the London College of Clinical Hypnotherapy in 1997 after being fascinated by hypnosis all his life.

He is not, however, a conventional hypnotherapist. While entitled to practice, he insists, by virtue of having passed all his hypnotherapy exams, he gave up his accreditation with the British Society of Clinical Hypnotherapists because he doesn't like the fact they disapprove of hypnotic shows - something he loves.

And while much of his work relates to helping people give up smoking, he cheerfully admits he himself is a smoker.

"Enough," he says, when I ask how many a day. "It makes me empathise with the people giving up."

Best of all, for those desperate to kick their smoking habit, he offers a unique deal. You only pay for your hypnotherapy sessions if you succeed in giving up.

There's a big sign in the window of his caf to prove it: "You pay - only when you stop!"

Linda Bardwell swears by him. At 53, she had been smoking 20 a day for nearly 40 years, and was desperate to give up. She tried everything else - the arm patches, the nicotine gum - but none of them worked. So she turned to Richard.

The first time she tried hypnotherapy, it didn't work. She didn't smoke for a week, but then noticed she was putting on weight, panicked, and went back to smoking.

She didn't pay Richard a penny that time. But she'd been so impressed she decided to give it another shot. This time, he urged her not to worry about putting on weight, that could be addressed later. And this time, it worked. She's been off cigarettes for about four months.

The problem with earlier attempts to give up using other methods was that she always still felt that deep down she was a smoker, she said. After going to Richard, she didn't feel that. "He just planted in my brain the suggestion that I'm not going to smoke any more. And from that day I haven't."

Richard insists that the key to quitting with the help of hypnotism is that you must really want to give up.

"You've got to want to stop, both consciously and subconsciously," he says. "But people often don't know what their subconscious is saying." Which means while somebody may say they want to give up, and even believe it, at some subconscious level they may want to continue. In which case hypnotherapy probably won't work.

But if, deep down, you are really committed, he says, then it does.

Hypnosis, he says, is an 'altered state of consciousness' - neither waking nor sleeping - that people allow themselves to enter, so a beneficial suggestion can be given directly to the unconscious mind.

His technique is to lead people there gradually, talking them through a series of relaxation exercises in a deep, hypnotic voice then counting them down slowly into an ever deeper trance, while the sound of waves crashing against a shore plays gently in the background.

Hypnotherapy will only be effective, he says, if the hypnotic trance is deep enough. That's why he insists on at least two sessions with each of his clients - an initial session where he can chat to them about what hypnosis involves and judge for himself how easy they will be to hypnotise, and a second session in which he puts them into a trance.

Only when the patient is in a deep enough trance is he ready to begin implanting suggestions. He uses a basic 'script' which he adapts for individual patients. It involves telling them, over and over again, that they are now a non-smoker, that they have no desire to smoke and in fact will forget about ever wanting to smoke.

"I am going to suggest to your unconscious mind ...that you will have...NO DESIRE TO SMOKE ...and I would like your unconscious mind to ... make these suggestions a part of you ... a part of your inner world ...so that you will have NO DESIRE TO SMOKE ..." it goes, over and over again.

The technique, he says, is quite different from the 'aversion therapy' that some people use to give up smoking. "It's not about making a cigarette taste like tar, or making someone upset at the sight of smoke." Instead, it's more like a smoking patch that you put on your arm - except this one is in your subconscious mind. "It's there all the time while you want to resist the temptation of smoking, taking away the anxiety and the craving," he says.

He charges clients £25 for the non-smoking service - a minimum of two sessions. But clients don't pay until they have been off cigarettes for a month. What about if someone is cured and doesn't come back to pay?

He gives a cheeky grin. "How do I know they will come back? If I put in a suggestion about stopping smoking, do you think I wouldn't put in a thought that they have only got there when they come back and pay their hypnotherapist?"

- Richard offers hypnotherapy from 3pm to 9pm, Monday to Friday. He can be contacted on 07759 984339.

Paul Crump, a 33-year-old from Acomb who has been smoking for 18 years, has just started hypnotherapy with Richard in an attempt to give up. We will report on his progress next week.

Updated: 10:41 Monday, March 04, 2002