Our experiences and the memories they create continually shape our well-being.Who for various reason got caught up in addictive behaviours they just never let go of.

There are millions of us right now walking around in our 20’s, 30’s, 40’, 50’s and beyond who don’t recognise the feeling of being addicted, because we simply don’t or didn’t consider ourselves addicted. Not until we wake up one morning and must be brutally honest with ourselves that we are no longer in control of it, that it is in control of us. Probably the harshest realisation of my life.

My story began in 1986 when I had recently turned 16. I grew up in the hedonistic era of rave music, I was 20 when it really hit in 1990.

I began smoking hash at 16 with friends to fit in, I didn’t have many friends, and it gave me an identity and a sense of importance amongst those I lived around mainly because I knew the ‘dealer’, and I was the only one who could roll a joint! Getting stoned, and its pursuit, became a daily thing, it was considered completely harmless aside from the tell-tale holes it made in our clothes and bedding.

I moved onto occasionally experimenting with LSD, mushrooms and when I eventually went raving, I enjoyed using ecstasy until about 1994. I count myself lucky that I didn’t carry on with any of those drugs, and watched in dismay as friends went on to take cocaine, heroin and crack.

Hashish was replaced by skunk weed and this really set the scene for the next 30 years. It was punctuated by years where I would quit. I worked in a demanding high-profile job that required frequent overseas travel, and I was fortunate during those times to deprioritise it because work was far more important, but usually after about 12 months I would get this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me to rebel and smoke again.

I was never a huge fan of cigarettes, and I became increasingly concerned about smoking cigarettes with their filters removed in joints. I dwelt on that for 18 months and quit the dreaded fags for good on New Year’s Eve 2002. I knocked the weed on the head at the same time, but it came back, initially making matchstick sized joints which over time got bigger and bigger.

I was now smoking strong weed all day every day – at it’s worse I was going through an ounce of neat weed a week; I was what they called ‘wake and bake’. Little did I realise that it was starting to take a toll on my life, it was affecting my ability to manage stress,

I wasn’t exercising, I wasn’t pursuing my goals, it affected my social life because everyone I had grown up smoking with had quit and I was left like a delinquent ‘last man standing’.

I basically stank. Weed affected my relationships with my family, and consuming as much weed as I did saw me lose my driving license, because despite not having smoked in 24 hours before being randomly pulled over, I still registered as 3 times the limit and there was no defence.

I lost my license for 12 months putting strain on me, my independence and my work. I was waking up to the fact that it was more of a pain than a positive.

It was around 2019-20 that I stopped thinking about quitting because I had the honour of delivering my mum’s end of life care with my dad, and for a period it was accepted given that this was my coping mechanism, sadly it also gave me carte blanche!

Over the next couple of years, I went through the usual toils of trying to balance a work life, being a parent and having some kind of inner peace with the hassles of chasing down weed and keeping it my dirty secret.

Eventually, my dad sat me down and said I had to confront the fact that I was an addict, I had an addiction, and I had to accept that. It wasn’t easy to hear, it was harder to truly look deep inside myself and realise he was right, and I was wrong. This was spring 2022.

I had tried hypnotherapy in 2010, but it hadn’t been successful, probably because I didn’t really want to quit, I was doing it for someone else and not myself, so it was a ‘need’, rather than a ‘want’. On March 15th of that year, I attended an appointment on a cold drizzly day to meet a graduate of Quest Institute Cognitive Hypnotherapy.

I was expecting the usual, ‘you don’t remember a thing as they out you under’, but this was different. The therapist and I came across like old friends who were completely on the same page. I remember telling him ‘I need to quit weed more than I need oxygen to breathe’. We chatted casually and put the world to rights and then the work began.

The words he used weren’t meant for my conscious mind, they were targeting my sub-conscious and it completely worked. I walked out 90 minutes later wondering how long it would take for me to have a craving and I have had no such thing since! My brain now feels like weed is something I have never done. I can smell it walking down the road, I can see it, I can be aware of it, but I don’t want it, and I never ever will again. I was amazed, and I still am now, and when I think about that experience, I can’t do it without smiling because in my mind I hear a voice that says, ‘you have won the war’. I decided on the spot where my future lay…

I wanted to help fellow strugglers like me who are stuck in the cycle of addiction often without realising, who yearn for a better life where they are free to be the best version of themselves, they can possibly be, for the rest of their lives.

My life is now one of living as close as possible in flow. I accept my past, and the time I wandered the path. I appreciate it because it finally led me here, and without it I wouldn’t be who I am today. I try to embrace life a little more each day, aiming to guide others to enjoy the rest of theirs. If I can do it, you can do it! Reach out to me and let’s start building that world for you too!

Whether it is life as it is taught, as it is thought, or as it is viewed, it is perfectly natural and normal to seek therapy to help them overcome the trials that life presents us.

Therapy exists for day-to-day wants like weight-loss and smoking, but also for the deeper issues.

It provides a framework to overcome challenges that stem from limiting beliefs we hold about ourselves inherited from our formative years, it helps to remove low self-esteem developed over time, it combats trauma suffered from significant emotional events, and brings an end to behaviours that originally soothed us, which are beyond control or become addictive.

Cognitive hypnotherapy is a kind, talking therapy created to address all of these areas and more, enabling us to safely revisit memories and recode them with updated learning.

It challenges negative beliefs we hold about ourselves, and teaches us strategies to reintegrate those difficult parts, and behaviours which no longer serve us to permanently return to a path of a life best lived.