Hello Pray4me:
Your message has been heard and understood. You will find that on this site there are many who understand the things you say.
I hear the desperation in your words and my heart goes out to you. This addiction is a rather complicated and confounding set of circumstances for a human to work through. Thats the bad news. The good news s that once the addiction is truly understood by the addictee (I think I just made that word up), success becomes a real possibility.
My advice for you is to try to put fear aside and allow your mind to understand how the addiction works. Perhaps it might be best to begin by studying how nicotine interacts with the brain. This was a window on cessation for me. The key property that nicotine has is its ability to mask itself as a neurotransmitter that also functions as a neuromediator.
This particular neurotransmitter is the gate-keeper, if you will, for the release of dopamine and other substances that gives us a sense of well-being. Its kind of like a magic lamp. We rub it and out of the smoke and fumes of the cigarette comes a genie that grants us the feeling of well being.
Well once we discover this, we begin to develop patterns of smoking. For instance, we may feel under pressure or anxious about real or imagined events in our lives. "Who ya gonna call ? ". We call the genie of course and as if by magic, our mind and soul is soothed and lo and behold we believe that we can now slay that dragon. This is how we develop triggers that invite us to smoke.
The fact of the matter is that had we not become addicted in the first place, we would have been able to slay that dragon without the aid of the genie. But once we are addicted, we no longer understand that and over and over again we return to the magic lamp because now our mind and body believes that it alone holds the key for survival.
You are not weak, you are addicted, as is everyone else who visits these pages. You will not defeat this addiction by hitting yourself over the head with the magic lamp. You will reach cessation once you begin to understand the mechanism of the addiction. Once you understand what you are getting from smoking, you will learn how to achieve the same results through less lethal methods.
I am not saying that any of this is easy, but I am saying that this is possible. And as long as we believe in the possibility of success, it can made manifest in our lives.
stay well
nonic
