Depression Recovery

Question:

>Yes, there are two issues here I do take seriously.

Oh dear.  I though we were "just joshing" but on reading this post I realised that you weren’t.  I apologise if I have caused you distress – it wasn’t my intention, but you did seem to be playing the game with gusto. Hold onto your quit – it’s precious. Lemming — Curiosity *may* have killed Schrodinger’s cat.

Response:

Good idea. How about getting him to think about what he’d do if he was an adult looking after a kid demanding candy from a dirty floor. What approaches would he try? How does his behaviour feel to the child? I admire your commitment to your family. K

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text ->Another way I see the addicted part of my personality is as a child who >doesn’t yet know what is good for him > Thank you for this Karen, I will share this with my son along with what > smokeworm wrote. > http://www.made2smile.com/heart/miracles/miracles.htm > Janet

Response:

Addiction took my husband’s life, my aunt’s life, my grandmother’s life. It robbed my mother of her health, me of mine, took distant relatives lives and health. Addiction is a horrible disease that spreads like wildfiire through a family. I once saw a commercial about how drugs destroy lives. It showed a house being demolished by a huge wrecking ball. That happened to me. http://www.made2smile.com/heart/miracles/miracles.htm Janet

Response:

Yes, there are two issues here I do take seriously. My quit is one; I skim and occasionally post here in AS3 not to gratify social or emotional needs but to keep the ideas which help me stay smoke free fresh in my mind. The other thing is my belief that we all grow best when treated with respect and tolerance. Both of these carry far more weight with me than quibbles about netiquette.

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text ->You really are even more delusional than I thought. > Wibble.  You’re not taking any of this seriously are you? > Lemming > — > Curiosity *may* have killed Schrodinger’s cat.

Response:

>you know you had to really want to >quit, didn’t you?  I

Dear Lemming, No I did not want to quit. I had to quit because I was supposed to be having surgery. I quit for 5 months before I found out that the doctor was not going to perform surgery. By that time, my behavior had changed and I was able to want to quit at that time. My son doen’t want to smoke, but is having a hard time quitting. He gives in to the "fiends" when they occur. My son has PTSD, anger depression. OCD, ADD. He has quite a bit going against him, and he really needs me to drag him through this quit. Especially with the OCD (obsessive, compulsive disorder), he needs every day to learn alternative behavior. He goes to a special education environment for anger management and I help with the OCD since I am a recovering addictive personality too. Addiction has had me in many different forms (smoking, drinking, drugs). I am not proud of it, and thank God I did not lose my faculties. I was able to survive this addiction and in the words of Greg Baxter "face it down". These are the things I will work with my son on. I have to be persistent. He is also on probation and has a court order to refrain from nicotine. At his age it is against the law for him to smoke. We live in a small town and all the cops know him. If they see him smoking he can be locked up. Even though they are too lazy to drive him into the city to actually do so, I use that to try and warn him away from smoking. Someone has to speak out against smoking to him, to his friends, and anyone else that gets in his path. I choose that role. His brother tells my sons’ friends "quit trying to kill my brother by giving him cigarettes – don’t let me catch you doing it". I want him to be able to ditch it now before he is the 40 year old typing to an online support group about how addiction has had ahold of him all of his life and he is finally breaking away. Before he is laying in bed suffering from osteoarthritis, degenerating joints, and who knows what lay ahead in the future. I am his parent and not his friend. I need to teach him in the way he should go. We can be freinds later, but right now he needs a parent. Janet http://www.made2smile.com/heart/miracles/miracles.htm Janet

Response:

>You asked for it….(take a deep breath)

Karen is simply trying to get you involved in the "discussion" between she and I.  She seems to feel the need for reinforcements. Karen, if you want to argue with me over absolving yourself of responsibility for your addiction, I’m game.  But please don’t try to drag innocent bystanders into it, there’s a lass. Lemming — Curiosity *may* have killed Schrodinger’s cat.

Response:

Thank YOU. The smokeworm metaphor is great! I’d love to see that page posted here in its own right once in a while. K

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to visit my site.  The notes of > support have been fantastic and most of the ideas for improvement have been > incorporated. > Best of luck to all of you, > Jonny. > www.smokeworm.com > ~J~ > {O}

Response:

You asked for it….(take a deep breath) Jonny — What Is The SmokeWorm? The SmokeWorm is a vicious parasite that lives inside all smokers. It attaches itself to the smoker’s brain where it nests and feeds on its host. The SmokeWorm itself will never kill you, but it will lock itself into your brain with the single intention of making you feed it with nicotine. It lives on nothing else and without nicotine the SmokeWorm will die. While you are infected with a SmokeWorm the only obvious symptom of infection is the fact that you are feeding the SmokeWorm and it is this part of the infection that has unfortunate side-effects. The most common way to feed the SmokeWorm with nicotine is by smoking tobacco – and one person out of every three that has a SmokeWorm will die from the effects of smoking. Other than that, SmokeWorm infection symptoms are very subtle – this is because they only affect the invisible parts of you such as your energy, self-confidence, enthusiasm, happiness and libido. All of these are slowly taken from you by the SmokeWorm as it grows bigger and stronger and eventually you will exist only to satisfy the SmokeWorm’s voracious appetite for nicotine. However, it forces you to do this in quite a clever way – by making you think that the decision to start smoking was yours and that the cigarette is in fact your friend. It does this because the SmokeWorm has two objectives – to survive and to multiply. It survives and grows strong because it makes you believe that you need to smoke and enjoy smoking. The SmokeWorm manages to multiply, not through physical contact with a victim, but through respect. Without your knowledge, other people have seen you feeding your SmokeWorm and have wanted one of their own. It is strange because they know, as you did, that the smell of cigarettes is horrible, that the taste is strong and unpleasant, that the effect is nauseating and yet there must be a reason for doing it. And that reason must be quite something for you, a sensible and rational person, to still want to smoke despite all of its unpleasant aspects. And they trust you – you are their friend, you are their parent or sibling – you are a role model. So whatever the reason is for you to smoke, it doesn’t matter. The fact is that you do and your endorsement of smoking is all that impressionable youngsters need to want to try it for themselves. It has probably happened already. If you have got young or impressionable people in your life, the chances are that you have already infected them. Obviously it is not just you, because you are not the only smoker in the world, but the fact that you smoke means so much more to that person than the hundreds of strangers they see smoking. You are the one who has the respect. By the time you and your SmokeWorm die, you will have no idea how many people you have infected – it could be a few or it could be a few dozen – but you will never know. But is there no way to kill a SmokeWorm? Yes. That is the saving grace of this vile creature – it can be killed very easily, simply by starving it of its required nicotine. And no matter how strong, mature or powerful the SmokeWorm is it can be killed in just three weeks. Not only can the SmokeWorm be killed, the damage it has already done is reversible. Once rid of the SmokeWorm, your body will repair itself, and it can repair as much as 98% of the damage caused by the SmokeWorm and its associated smoking. After it has withered and died, the invisible damage it has done will be reversed – your energy, enthusiasm, self-confidence, ability to relax, ability to concentrate and your libido will all return to the levels that they would have been had you not been a smoker. Despite the short period of time required to kill the SmokeWorm, the fight you will have for that time will vary. If the SmokeWorm is strong and well established, it will put up a much greater fight and will do all in its power to make you give in to its hunger for nicotine. But the more you smoked before giving up, the more you stand to gain from stopping. The health, financial, personal and social benefits you will receive from stopping smoking will give you the necessary resolve to fight the SmokeWorm until you have finally beaten it. When the SmokeWorm has eventually died, it can no longer make you crave nicotine and you will be free of the slavery that you have suffered for so long – at last you will get your life back and do the things that you want to do and not just the things that being a smoker allows you to do. After the SmokeWorm dies it leaves something behind, an egg that by itself will be totally unnoticed, that will not give you a craving for nicotine and will not give you the symptoms that you suffered previously. However, if, at a later date, you decide that you have control of your addiction and that you can smoke ‘the odd one’ without getting addicted again, think again. The very next time you smoke you will fertilise the SmokeWorm egg and the whole cycle will start all over again. Of course, it will be a fraction of the size of the one that you killed – so small in fact that the initial craving it gives you is almost unnoticed, but your new SmokeWorm will grow just as the last one did, getting bigger and stronger and before you know what has happened you will be a full-time smoker again. The horrible thing that you will soon realise is that the next time you want to stop smoking it is going to be just as hard as the last time. The only way to beat the SmokeWorm and keep it beaten is to always hate and fear it and respect its immense power. Only then can you even begin to think you have won. There is nobody in the world that cannot be cured – all that is required is the will to succeed – and SmokeWorm.com will give you that will. The site, and I personally, will give you all the support and advice you need to see you through to your final goal – living the rest of your life as a non-smoker… www.smokeworm.com ~J~ {O}

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> Thank YOU. The smokeworm metaphor is great! I’d love to see that page posted > here in its own right once in a while. > K > Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to visit my site.  The notes of > support have been fantastic and most of the ideas for improvement have > been > incorporated. > Best of luck to all of you, > Jonny. > www.smokeworm.com > ~J~ > {O}

Response:

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to visit my site.  The notes of support have been fantastic and most of the ideas for improvement have been incorporated. Best of luck to all of you, Jonny. www.smokeworm.com ~J~ {O}

Response: