Originally Posted by
Dalek 
I am reading "The Art of AVRT," since it has a section on smoking. Chapter 7 in the book is called "The Big Gun," and it deals with the morality of drinking/using. The "big gun" is moral judgment.
Without judging anyone else, it asks two big questions:
- Considering all of your experience with alcohol and other drugs, is it right or wrong for you to drink/use in the moral sense?
- How would you rate your drinking/using on a scale of immorality? Way down on the bottom? Near the top?
I think this is what tripped me up with the cigarettes. It is not difficult for me to see that drinking is wrong for me, since it causes all sorts of problems, including damage to myself and others. Smoking, on the other hand, doesn't really alter my mind as radically as drinking, and I don't do terrible things while smoking. I saw smoking as bad for me, but I never really saw it as wrong. This weakens AVRT significantly.
Saying "This weakens AVRT significantly." is incorrect.
AVRT is what it is. A simple logic engine based on the structural model of addiction to be used by a human being based on his/her value system. In AVRT utilizing morality is an essential part of making quitting for good easier. Morality is variable that may wax and wane in different ways with different people in different societies regarding different substance use or problematic habituations.
Trimpey generalizes an American Traditional Family Values morality for the purposes of broad inclusiveness and because it is what he believes.
In an Islamic society, for instance, a man who in a culture with multiple wives and where alcohol abstinence is second nature, the problem of to-smoke-or-not could be culturally more difficult to resolve. The morality of not smoking would involve staying alive longer and setting an example for his many children, not creating second hand smoke in the home, etc. - serious stuff.
Just as we can create the dissociation between I and IT, so can we utilize, magnify, and even create our morality as we choose. Both are very uniquely human capabilities.
I also quit caffeine and then chocolate. The morality around doing that just isn't very profound to begin with (and I'm not Mormon). I created the morality for myself because that made it so much easier.
I first loved and grew to hate what caffeine did to my body and state of mind. That morning euphoria over nothing, overdrinking, temporary quitting, bone and joint aches, horrible headaches, jittery, $4 for a fancy cup - I decided it was all bull*&^*. I knew AVRT intimately, and BINGO, I decided to use it and ended all that crap around caffeine once and for all.
I have learned, due to very rare work demands, that I am able to stay awake for 50 hours straight without serious mental impairment. No caffeine, no stimulants, not even sugar.
So, the real lesson I learned is that when it may seem that the morality around an addiction seems to be weak, AVRT is EXACTLY the CORRECT method to use to solve it quickly.