The Tobaccination Process
The Tobaccination Process
We are in our home on a Sunday afternoon when Dad comes home drunk and frightens everyone when he and mom get in a fight. We run from the room. Slowly we lose confidence that we are safe and that we matter as much as the drinking or the fighting.
Or, we get a hard spanking because dad has a bad attitude to girls and blames us whenever he feels upset. We become the family scapegoat. Mother stays out of it. We feel vulnerable and so alone.
In the schoolyard or at the community centre dance our friend offers us a cigarette and as we inhale and cough the nicotine wakes our brain up and makes us feel good. Now we belong and have a tool to help us get through. We never feel so alone again. We are 12.
We have become tobaccinated. Now we:
-manage our feelings with tobacco
-cope with life smoking tobacco
-regulate our emotional responses to the world with tobacco
-spend our precious alone time with tobacco
-release dopamine into our brains by smoking tobacco
-ameliorate our depression with tobacco
-calm ourselves down with tobacco smoke
-celebrate or grieve with tobacco ceremony
We do not develop normal life skills because the tobacco universe we live in takes care of all that for us. We have become tobaccinated by our culture in our families and peer group.
Gradually we migrate to a pack a day as life goes on and we become adults. Perhaps we drink too much and don’t exercise or eat properly. Yet our real health fears are around the smoking of tobacco. We just did not realize what was actually happening. We were so young.
Be happy tobacco child, because you can recover from this addiction.
More on that as the days go by. Prof. Kelly
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