A man in his early 50s wanted hypnosis to stop smoking. He said he was haunted by cigarettes and hoped that hypnosis would allow him to forget about them. He was able to go into hypnosis readily, and willingly listened to the idea that forgetting was a common skill - we can forget where the car keys are, we can even forget why we came into a room - and was interested to explore how this might be useful for him.

A week later he reported that he was smoking just as much, but he was forgetting the names of his clients. This was embarrassing and bad for business. In hypnosis this time I offered the idea that the brain had a limited capacity and it might be possible to begin to rememberer the names of his clients so he could then forget about the cigarette.

The following week, he had responded to this weird notion and was happily remembering client names and completely forgetting the cigarettes.