The Java Obsession

Well. Happy Tuesday. I have been busy researching a few thing of interest for this blog, but alas not much has come together at this point. It will have to wait then for the greater good.

Instead, you get me, pure Ellie and her tales from the sessions. Oh dear, do I see another segment forming? Hmmm.

Recently, I had a client who wanted help with giving up over indulgences, an interesting and enlightened idea. She had a caffeine habit that she wanted to quell. Hers was a problem of the old coffee pot at work thing, where there is always a pot full and ready for consumption. She would start the morning with a cup and thoughts of having just one, but the morning would pass into afternoon and she would end up consuming the whole pot. Yet, when she was not at the office, she said she would not even really think about making coffee for herself and did just fine. I find that to be highly interesting. Caffeine addiction or even a warped addiction that is space and time based? Is that possible?

I gave her a few choices in the direction we could go with the session - traditional hypnosis and suggestion work or a client-based procedure. And internally I bet she would go for traditional, but she did not. She asked for the more involved, client-based type. Using ideometric hand signals (for those new to such things, this means having the client respond to yes, no, and don't know questions using finger gesture responses), she indicated that her issues with over-indulgence was an imprint from her mother. Diving into this, the coffee over indulgence came from her mother's coping system of dealing with a large family and staying awake, as well as tossing the java back during the stressful times. Hmmmm. Sounds really familiar (well, not the large family part).

From there we began to search for solutions to help my client control the over indulgence, which ultimately became the suggestions and a plan. We worked on differentiating my client's world from her mother's and used a suggestion about enjoying a cup a day to its fullest extent and being satisfied with it. After the session, she put together a list of subtle changes she would make, like making really good coffee at home and bringing it to work in a travel mug to keeping a running count of cups of coffee she consumes.

The good thing is that she choose the direction of the session (as do all of my clients) and I would have sworn she was more of a traditional hypnosis gal, but when we were done she thought the experience was better than she had imagined it would be. Nice.