Hypnotherapy  

Imagine that you would like to stop smoking. With the old-fashioned traditional hypnosis, a hypnotist would get you into trance og give you different direct suggestions or commands, so that cigarettes would now taste bad, you would forget to even smoke and that you would be a non-smoker from now on. He probably wouldn't even test for depth of trance before he did that. However - if the trance is deep enough and if your motivation to stop smoking is 100%, your subconscious will accept these suggestions, and you become a non-smoker. "Now what's wrong with that?", you ask.
Well, first of all, if the depth of trance was not OK, it won't work at all. Secondly: direct hypnotic suggestions usually don't last forever. Over time they erode and disappear. The reason that direct suggestions still manage to help many people stop smoking is, that in the period where the suggestions are active, they help you form a habit of not smoking and help you realize how great life without smoking can be. So you form a conscious decision to continue being a non-smoker, and at this point hypnosis is no longer relevant. That's why many hypnotists still haven't taken the leap to learn about hypnotherapy or to use methods of induction that monitor the depth of trance in an accurate way.

But returning to the smoking problem: Suppose that the reason for you being a smoker is deeply rooted in your mind - on a subconscious level you are convinced that there is great value in smoking, or that it might even be dangerous for you to stop smoking! Many smokers started smoking in their teens when many of their friends also started smoking. You felt an urgent need to start smoking too, because your subconscious had a strong fear of you becoming isolated and lonely if you did not. Your subconscious feared that you would lose your friends if you didn't follow suit in this matter, and since the most important task of your subconscious is to protect you against danger - real or imagined (and your subconscious can't tell a real danger from an imagined one), it made you feel compelled to join the ranks of smokers. - Or if smoking gives you time to be alone, get your thoughts together and relieve stress, then your subconscious will be very reluctant to let you quit smoking for that reason also. 

With hypnotherapy, on the other hand - we identify and examine the reasons for smoking and correct the tiny misunderstandings surrounding smoking in the subconscious mind and thereby remove the deeper urge to smoke. There is no need to bring forth disgust or any other negative stuff. The urge to smoke has been removed. And this solution will keep and the person who has had his or her urge to smoke removed in this fashion will remain a non-smoker for the rest of his/her life. Smoking is now something that there is no need to do any longer.

Another example: Someone with an anxiety of bees (apiphobia) who wants this fear totally gone. During the session we might perform a regression to locate the primary event in that person's life, where this fear was originally founded. As a small child you might not even know what a bee or a whasp is but at some point you have a very frightful encounter with a bee or a whasp, that forever makes you afraid of these creatures from that day on. The subconscious mind will often block out the original event because it deems it too awful to be consciously remembered. So in order to protect you, your subconscious does two things: it creates a violent fear of the object, that you are afraid of (in this case bees) - to keep you safe - and it blocks out the memory of the original event, because it thinks you can't handle it. With regression work it's possible to work with the inner child who has this fear and to make it see, that the anxiety is completely out of proportion to any real danger. You proces the fear, release all the energy bound inside the mind connected to the fear, and you release it. As soon as the source of the fear is no longer there, it no longer affects the child while growing up, and the adult person is now no longer afraid of bees or whasps when he/she comes out of trance - it will be like there never even was a fear to begin with. You might compare the process to what happens in movies like "Back to the Future" or "The Butterfly Effect". Most phobias are very easy to cure and usually only require one session to be cured for life.