Do It for Yourself Now! - Unpleasant Sensations Overview

Written by Ilan Shalif, Ph.D.

Third: acquire the habit of focusing intensively on the relevant sensations and feelings involved, starting with the introductory stage and on, until the end of the process - when the sensations become subliminal and impossible to discern.

Fourth: between eruptions of the psychosomatic process, focus frequently on the location where it takes place: on the various felt sensations, on the faint ones barely discernible, and on the subliminal ones that are always there.

Fifth: continue with a relatively intensive focusing on the location of the psychosomatic process and its vicinity, even after the "attacks" become infrequent, particularly on the first few months after they cease to occur. In this step it is most important to focus on any sensation that is even barely suspected of being related to the target processes.

It is important to remember that the psychosomatic disturbances are the results of the integrated activity of many activation programs, and that each of these programs has a large number of variations. Therefore, it is most common, that in the first few focusings you can achieve only slight relief or alleviation of the symptoms. Sometimes even that might be hard to discern, especially if the attacks are strong and you still use medical drugs to soften them.

The advanced fading of the symptoms, or even a significant decrease in them, needs many weeks of repeated focusing on them. It appears that the complete fading of the disturbance and its symptoms can be attained, but only for or at a price: you can attain success only after the rehabilitation of the main psychological factors involved has taken place. You can attain this only by means of an intensive training with the sensate focusing technique, adding to it a special attention to all the trash-programs involved with your special affliction.

2) Increasing the pleasure derived from smoking and curbing the habit

Many of the intended readers of this booklet are used to smoking nicotine mixed with various ingredients and burning materials. A significant number of smokers are not satisfied with the amount of the material smoked, the frequency of the smoking occasions and/or the sensations derived from it.

Frequently, smoking is an automatic behavior - a reaction to unaware internal or external cues. Some smokers think from time to time about trying to abolish the habit, but various activation programs prevent them from even taking that decision.

Other smokers have already reached a decision and want to decrease the amount smoked or to stop it altogether, but find that it is extremely difficult to do so - due to the trash-programs involved - and therefore cannot adhere to any of their decisions. They cannot do it at all or they regress to the old habit after a relatively short period of success. In both situations, the inability to reach a conclusive decision, or the inability to adhere to it, makes them the same as any other addict (of drugs, alcohol, etc.), who wants to stop but cannot.

I stopped smoking "cold turkey" 8 years ago while in an intensive care unit (because of a false alarm), but as a veteran of 28 years of numerous failed attempts to rid myself of the habit, I still remember what it was like. I still remember the difference between one failure to abstain from smoking and another, and how each cigarette (or pipe smoked) is a unique experience.

However, it is still possible to classify the smoking experiences into a few categories:

1. "The real one" - the first one you smoke at the beginning of your smoking day (usually first thing after getting up), or each time you feel a strong need or an intense urge to smoke.
2. "The boredom cigarette" - the one usually smoked when there is little with which to employ the brain. It is usually smoked when you are "killing time" - killing the felt sensation of boredom, or waiting without anything else to do.
3. The "substitute cigarette" - the one you light up when you are hungry or in pain or experiencing any other feeling you want to change on the spot. (It functions almost the same as a regular "cover-program".)
4. The "stimulating" cigarette - the one you smoke when you need more attentional power. You smoke it when you are not fully awake, and whenever you need to recruit resources to enhance your concentration, to sharpen your vigilance or to keep from falling asleep on duty.
5. The smoking for pleasure - the cigarette one usually smokes after a satisfying meal or other pleasures of the body to achieve a deeper satisfaction or to complete the pleasant feeling. It is really used to curb the effect of various trash-programs which are trying to destroy the good emotional climate of the moment.
6. "The automatic cigarette" - the ones you smoke without applying will power or deriving pleasure. Those are the ones you do not really want to smoke, the ones you are not really aware of and the ones you generally do not remember smoking. It is not you who really smoked them!!!. It is the pure act of your trash-programs, which serve processes not shared with the awareness.
7. "The social cigarette" - the ones offered to you and the ones you smoke from your own packet when people around you smoke. This situation as well as many others activate in you kind of social trash-programs, which initiate imitation behavior.

Actually, plenty of trash-programs are involved in the smoking behavior. When one wants to quit smoking or only to introduce a radical change in it, one has to deal with all of them. However, when one only wants to change the smoking pattern a bit, it is much easier. The mission of the person who needs to refrain from smoking in a few places or at certain periods of time or to restrict the number smoked, is an intermediate one. The focusing related to smoking is more efficient if done according to the following steps: