We are fortunate in Australia that there are many wonderful hypnotherapists doing good, ethical work helping people quit smoking, and we are proud to count ourselves of their number. We place a great deal of importance on colleagues supporting each other, and furthering our profession in a positive way.
We think we’ve got something pretty special to offer people who want help to quit – decades of experience and collaboration creating an approach that works. It’s been quite a ride!
In the early 1990s, a clinical hypnotherapist named David Kennedy began working with people on the Sunshine Coast who wanted to quit smoking. He wasn’t following a franchised program or a trademarked method, he was developing an approach from scratch, built around what he observed actually worked. David’s clients taught him that smoking is maintained primarily in the mind, and that genuine change requires working with both the conscious and subconscious dimensions of the habit.
His reputation grew quietly, almost entirely through word of mouth. In February 1996 the Sunshine Coast Sunday ran a feature on his work. A journalist who had spent years trying every available method to quit documented her own experience with David, and wrote about what made it different to everything else she’d tried. (That article is available to read on our quit smoking page.)
David’s influence extended well beyond his clinical work. He was Queensland President of the Australian Hypnotherapists Association (AHA) and was awarded Lifetime Membership of the AHA for services to the profession, recognising his contribution to the development and deregulation of hypnotherapy in Australia. He played a role in the development of what is known today as The Hypnotherapy Council of Australia (HCA), which functions as the Peak Body for clinical hypnotherapy.
Through David, hypnotherapy became something of a family trade – a close family member who trained with David, Antoine Matarasso, served as President of the AHA, and went on to found the Guild of Australian Hypnotherapists (GoAH), an inclusive and ethical professional association for hypnotherapists. David’s daughter Rachel is now the treasurer of GoAH, and it remains the association the clinicians at Brisbane Hypnosis Centre maintain membership with.
In 1997 David founded Brisbane Hypnosis Centre, in the same building in Everton Park we practice from today.
In May 2006 his work was recognised nationally when he was approached by a production company to appear on the Channel Nine program What’s Good For You, demonstrating his quit smoking approach to a national television audience.
Glenn Chandler joined the practice in 2000. Over the next fifteen years he worked alongside David, learning, questioning, and progressively developing the method. Glenn and Rachel Kennedy, David’s daughter, who had been part of the practice from the beginning, took over the running of BHC in 2004. David continued working at the clinic he’d founded until around 2014.
This wasn’t a handover, it was a continuation. We joke that hypnotherapy is a vocation, not a job, and with a vocation there is no retiring! So it was the same people, in the same clinic, carrying forward and building on the same body of work.
Our therapist Carol Moore studied hypnotherapy with David, and her connection to this work runs deeper than her training alone. She quit smoking with a hypnotherapist who had studied under David, and that experience was what led her to become a hypnotherapist herself, eventually joining our practice.
Philip Hollingdale also trained under David, and spent countless hours documenting his training as a filmmaker, providing us with a unique record of David’s work and method. The approach at Brisbane Hypnosis Centre is not carried by one person. It runs through the whole practice.
In 2017 Glenn wrote Freedom Calling: Nicotine, Habit and How to be Free of Smoking, a clinical resource drawing on things he learned across more than two decades. The book makes a carefully evidenced case that the nicotine addiction model is largely wrong, and that understanding what is actually driving the habit is the key to being free of it. It is available as a free download from our quit smoking page.
David Kennedy died in 2018.
The single most important thing this body of work has confirmed is something David understood from the beginning: the decision to make any change has to be the person’s own.
This is why our clients almost always come through word of mouth. They’ve decided they want to stop, they’ve heard from someone they trust that this worked for them, and they arrive ready. They might be apprehensive, nervous, or even sceptical, but they know they want to quit. That’s a very different starting point to someone who has been nudged into it, or who is trying yet another method without real conviction.
It also explains something that might seem strange in a crowded marketplace: we don’t make guarantees, and we don’t compete on price. What we offer is an approach developed over 35 years, delivered by people who were trained by its originator, in the clinic where it was refined. That’s not something that can be replicated quickly.
Over the years, various franchised programs have come and gone, some promising guaranteed results, lifetime warranties, and quick fixes. Many generated considerable noise for a while, but many fade away because they’re not offering the kind of help people really need. The approach that David Kennedy developed in the early 1990s, which Glenn refined, and which Carol and Philip and Glenn collaborate on keeping updated, is still offered as a service all these years later.
If you’re ready to quit smoking or vaping, you can read more about our approach or book online. If you’re still thinking about it, Glenn’s book is a good place to start.