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I am thinking about jumping into an alligator full of swamps.  No, I guess that’s supposed to read the other way around.  I am getting past the ‘thinking about quitting cigarettes’ stage to the ‘preparing to quit smoking’ stage.  At 59, it’s not that I WANT to quit.  I’ve loved smoking since the first Kool I smoked out of a pack I bought from a vending machine when I was 16.  But as I don’t seem to be ready to die from the two breast cancers I fought and beat, it’s what seems to be coming next that will drive me to quitting.

The recent CT scan I had that showed no cancer did show early stage emphysema — and I am beginning to feel it.  In addition I have advancing osteoporosis like my mother’s mother had (badly though never a smoker), and even with treatment both of my hips and my lower back are being affected.  Cigarette smoking pulls calcium out of the bones.

I am obviously among the 20% of the population that still smokes just as I am also among the 20% of the population that suffers from depression.  But now, after all my studying about the long-term consequences due to trauma-altered physiological body-brain development during my earliest years due to severe infant-child abuse, I know very well that quitting smoking will be tied directly to my worst nightmare, my worst alligator full of internal swamps.

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Without having an safe and secure human attachments during my childhood – with the exception of the love I received from my birth from my brother who was 14 months old when I was born — I never formed body-brain pathways and circuits that would have allowed me to FEEL what it feels like to be loved.

Only those other severe infant-child abuse survivors who like me had NOBODY to turn to, NOBODY that truly loved them, will know what I am talking about.  Feeling what if feels like to be loved does NOT come automatically.  I never knew that until I began my own studies in infant-child neurological development.

Even though I have never read a developmental neuroscientist who said that the inability to feel the feeling of being loved is the MAJOR negative consequence of the kind of abuse I suffered at the hands of a man-woman-monster I had instead of a mother (an ‘anti-mother’), I KNOW I am right.

Again, at age 59 if I was going to be able to feel what it feels like to be loved by my children, siblings, friends, partners — or even to be loved by my own self — I would have felt it by now.  I search and search and search and search inside myself for that feeling — both in my memories of the past and within myself regarding my current relationships.  The feeling of feeling loved is MISSING.

I believe that this feeling of being loved is specifically one that is SUPPOSED to be built into an infant’s rapidly developing body-brain during the first year of life while the right limbic social-emotional brain is going through its foundational and extremely rapid foundational formation.

Nobody (other than my baby brother) gave me experiences of being loved that would have built those pathways, circuits and patterns into my body-brain — so, they aren’t there.  Can they be built post-infant-childhood?  Not that I know of.

I logically and ‘semantically’ know (left brain) that I am loved, but this is NOT the same thing as being able to FEEL the feeling of being loved.  Yes, this is a ‘dis-ability’ — like being deaf or blind or paralyzed — and I believe it is entirely based on trauma-altered physiological development due to the severe trauma and abuse I experienced during my critical windows of growth that, once passed, cannot be returned to at a later date and be ‘done over’.

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It is the PAIN that my inability to feel the feeling of being loved that I believe is at the root of my cigarette smoking patterns.  I am not at all sure I can find a way to live — to stay alive — with that pain unmasked by my smoking.  I believe being now absolutely aware of my missing ability means that I have to face that feeling within myself that the ABSENCE of being able to feel what it feels like to be loved has created in its place.

I call that feeling overwhelming sadness.  It is a grief that humans are not meant to ever experience, and it comes from ONE thing:  Being born to a mother so absolutely and completely unable to love her infant-child that she hates and hurts it instead.

There is no amount of ‘intellectual power’ that I know of capable of erasing the great pain that NOT being able to feel the feeling of being loved creates physiologically in my body.  Yet I am rapidly approaching a crossroads.  I can’t say that I am even capable of feeling the feeling of being loved by my own self if I am not physiologically capable of feeling anyone else’s love for me, either.  But if I want to continue living past my current age with any quality of life, I am not going to have a choice not to quit smoking.

My most important ‘coping skills’ to get through my life are very active ones.  Not to be able to accomplish physical feats that require stamina and endurance will NOT suit me at all.  I have never been a ‘sitter’.  That is not how I cope.

It also seems to me that to return to a nonsmoking state of existence is to return directly to the state of ‘being a child’.  Only as a child did I not live with cigarettes, and during THAT time I lived with horror and abuse.  This future trek will be interesting — at least I can say that much!  I have self-medicated with tobacco for a long, long time.  I cannot imagine living without it.

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