Excerpts from STOP SMOKING AND CHEWING TOBACCO FOR:
LIFE CHANGES:

"This self-instructional workbook and tape program focuses on and underscores the importance of CONFIDENCE, COMMITMENT, COMPETENCE, and CREATIVITY. These four, interrelated skills, part of our repertoire of resources for living, are of critical importance to success with cessation and future disinterest in tobacco and nicotine products. The workbook aims to enhance awareness of these resources and skills through the use of three, key PRINCIPLES, worksheet exercises, and a core set of effective cessation strategies, techniques, and options."

Exercises, scripts, options from The Core Program: Exercise A. 2.1. "Toxic Aid."

Part of one script from more than two dozen different aversion methods for tobacco cessation:

"You have just finished overeating a very heavy meal. You slowly get up and move to your usual place to smoke. You try to settle down, but your insides are stirring. You reach for cigarettes. Your stomach is full, tight, and churning around inside. The sight, smell, and anticipated taste of your favorite cigarettes makes the throat tighten and stomach somewhat queezy. When you light a cigarette and touch it to your lips, it feels hot and harsh.

It tastes bitter, dry, stale, very stale. You have a sensation of dry irritation and an image of a long, burnt rope crawling down into your throat, forced down into an engorged and swimming stomach... Oh, aaah... Your stomach rolls and wretches now, and you want to heave it all up, heave it up, all of it, up and out of the system for good!

You try to push the cigarette farther down into the throat, but it will not enter! Suddenly,
you vomit straight up from deep within your constricted throat and shaking insides. You discharge the contents all over the cigarette in your hand. Your cigarette is soaked with food, gravy, warm soggy vomit, and tiny curdled pieces of dinner and dessert. The cigarette looks greenish-brown in a flesh-colored, creamy puddle of puke shaking in the cup of your hand. Your smoking hand is covered with a slop of vomit, cigarette, chunks of tobacco, partially digested food, and brown strings of burnt rope and soggy paper. The burnt cigarette and pack of twisted ropes in your lap are flooded with the mess, awash with bitter, raw smells of sour and very ripe soup! You gag deeply and repeatedly..."

Exercise R. 7.6. "Visualization and Guided Imagery."

One part of many relaxation routines:

"Now change the scene to one you especially like, but make it a calm and secure home place. A comfortable, serene, and peaceful scene, we'll call it, 'home base.' Your home base is a calm, absolutely secure, pleasant place of peace, rest, and relaxation.

Imagine you are at home base. Home base may be a tranquil setting you've seen somewhere, or a place you may have been before. It may be a memory from childhood, a movie scene, a picture from a magazine, or a place you make up now, but let it be a calm, peaceful, pleasant home base.

You can be in a warm, old country inn or a magnificent chateau nestled away somewhere high above in some wooded mountains. You could be secluded in a hidden, long-forgotten valley in an old, but well stocked cabin. Perhaps you are sheltered on a quiet, private cove completely satisfied in an all-purpose tent deposited snuggly on a deserted beach. Just let the imagination go to a warm, comfortable, ideal place of relaxation, peace, and enjoyment. Make it a wonderful home base..."

Exercise H. 4.1. "Light Reinforcement."

a sample from more than a dozen hypnosis routines.

"Imagine it's a beautiful, spring day. You are out on a cozy, secluded, private lake. Picture yourself lying on your back in a roomy, comfortable, inflated, rubber raft floating on the lake. You feel a moist breeze in the air as it flows softly and gently over you, blows out and across the lake. The breeze sweeps softly and quietly over you and pushes the raft ever so gently in the warm, peaceful, tranquil waters.

You feel the warm, steady currents of the lake underneath, pulling and pushing breezes too as they blow across you, out and over the glistening surface above. Feel yourself bobbing gently in the warm, soothing waves of this fresh-water lake. The sky is clear and free of clouds today. Even without looking, you feel the warmth from the sun gathering in brightness with the absence of clouds and clarity of sky. The hour turns to mid-day. You relax the body completely now, as you float back and forth, rocking effortlessly and smoothly with the subtle motions and supportive movements of the calming waters all around.

The sun's rays scatter out and spread into a magnificent pattern of light. Light reflects off of you, the raft, and the water. A light pattern so intricate, so complex, so complete, all you can think is 'gee this is neat.' The light reflects on every thing that could concern or stress you. The warmth in the light takes away all tension, all worries, cares and concerns.

Every living thing grows, is nourished, and healed by the light's reflections. The warmth in the light makes it happen and takes all tension away. Feel the light releasing, washing, cleansing away stresses, tensions, and concerns; floating on the raft, away in the water, away in the lake, away with the reflections of the day...

You allow the body to meet openly with the sun's comfort, healing aid, and energizing support. You merge with the water. You relax within the light and buoyant water's depth and reach. You are awash with insistent comfort and caring. It flows and fills you up with energy, courage, joy, hope, and love of life. Totally and completely you choose to receive the sun's natural gifts. You use this spring light to locate and thoroughly wash away self-defeating thoughts, feelings, and behavior..."

From Exercise C. 5.1. "The Tobacco Hab-IT."

in the sections with more than two dozen creativity and humor routines:

"In this creativity exercise, we want you to use your "stuff" and draw your idea of IT. Describe what IT looks, sounds, feels, smells, acts like, and so on. Write rhymes and poems about IT. See the examples below, but use imagination and creativity. Let it take you wherever it wants to go! Every "IT-ill-bit" counts!

... in a few words

Hello to you.
Good-bye to smoke.
Why the sigh?
Give IT a poke!

Watch those urges.
Find IT new ways.
Make those scourges
Stay at bay.

Have hope.
Don't mope.
Get over IT.
Just elope.

Be positive.
Don't slip on IT.
Find more ways
To get after IT!"

D. L. Johnson