As teenagers, what most of us thought would be a brief rebellious experiment was quickly transformed into a powerful permanent chemical addiction, as occasional nicotine use became regular, and optional use mandatory.
Studies confirm that for some of us it only took coughing and hacking our way through a couple of cigarettes before servitude's shackles started tightening.[1]
Five, ten, fifteen nicotine fixes a day - when would enough be enough? "Tomorrow, tomorrow" became the lifetime cry of millions.
Welcome to the realities of chemical servitude, a world built upon lies.
Science calls our lies denial. Denial is an unconscious defense mechanism, just below the surface, for resolving the emotional conflict and anxieties that naturally arise from living in a permanent state of self-destructive bondage.
The four primary categories of denial relied upon by nicotine addicts are (1) dependency denial, (2) cost denial, (3) recovery denial, and (4) relapse denial. In each, ignorance is relied upon or truth is sacrificed for peace of mind or to justify use.
Nearly every nicotine addict we'll see today is insulated from the pain of captivity behind a wall of denial rationalizations, minimizations, fault projections, escapes, intellectualizations, and delusions.
Together, they create the illusion that a problem either doesn't exist or is somehow being solved.
The average addict musters the confidence to challenge their addiction once every two to three years. Not knowing the Law of Addiction and fighting in darkness, each year, only about 1 in 20 attempts succeed in breaking free for an entire year.
With respect to smoking, by far the most destructive and deadliest form of nicotine delivery, eventually roughly half successfully commit slow-suicide via smoke's toxins.
While COVID-19 is currently on track to kill 1 million worldwide during 2020 (as of July), each year tobacco kills more than 5 million, one-quarter during middle-age.
Yes, more than five million senseless self-destructions annually. They stand as irrefutable evidence of denial's depth in insulating us from the extreme price paid with each puff, a bit more of life itself.
Once we've accepted that the basic message delivered by thousands of old replenishment memories is false, this final layer of recovery offers the opportunity to smile or even laugh at use explanations once deeply believed.
First, let's be clear. We need not do anything to succeed except to fully end use. It's how the vast majority of "real-world" ex-users did it.
They simply remained patient and allowed sufficient time to pass until both the tease of their pile of old wanting satisfaction memories and use justifications born of them faded into calm.
Can we accelerate the process by seeing the truth about both? Absolutely!
Imagine having a brain wanting disorder, a mental illness as real and permanent as alcoholism and not knowing it.
Imagine residing inside a chemically dependent mind yet not realizing that it had de-sensitized itself by growing millions of extra receptors in multiple brain regions. Imagine zero awareness that, through cascading, nicotine controls the flow of more than 100 neurochemicals inside our body.
But we didn't need such details in order to know that we were hooked. Hundreds or even thousands of times previously we'd experienced increased anxieties after having waited too long between feedings. Deep down, we knew we'd lost the ability to simply turn and walk away.
And even though we tried to tune it out, we also couldn't help but hear the dull roar of findings from an endless stream of new medical studies. They reminded us that our addiction to nicotine was unsafe and gradually damaging us, including fostering early dementia, with memory erosion so slow that it was likely, as yet, unnoticed.
Studies warned of the deadly consequences of continuing to inhale the up to 81 cancer-causing chemicals so far identified in cigarette smoke, or the 28 found in smokeless tobacco. We knew we were slowly building cancer time bombs throughout our bodies. What we didn't know was how to stop building and start diffusing.
So how did our conscious mind cope with the sobering reality that our brain was slave to its own self-destruction? How did we look in the mirror each morning and maintain any sense of dignity, self-worth, or self-respect while constantly being reminded that we were prisoners to dependency, decay, disease and death?
As smokers, how did we cope with each day bringing us closer to completing the act of committing chemical suicide? It was easy. We learned to lie.
We called upon our intelligence and conscious mind to help build a thick protective wall of denial that would insulate us from our dependency's hard, cold realities. Our basic wall building tools were conscious rationalizations, minimizations, and blame transference.
We could then hide behind the wall when those on the outside felt the need to remind us of who we really were, and what we were doing.
It was also a place to hide when craves and urges reminded us that nicotine use was no longer optional, a home to explanations for our involuntary obedience to them.
Although nicotine's two-hour half-life was the basic clock governing mandatory feeding times, we became creative in inventing alternative justifications and explanations. While most of us admitted to being hooked, we minimized the situation by pretending that all we really had was some "nasty little habit," or that we were smarter and safer than cigarette smokers.
In our pre-dependency days (if there were any, as some of us were born hooked), there was no dopamine pathway wanting motivating use. But once feedings became mandatory, it didn't matter how we felt about them. Choice was no longer an issue.
Even if we didn't fully appreciate our new state of permanent chemical captivity, we rationalized the situation based upon what we found ourselves doing.
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Published in the USA