Some things need to be shared. I want to share this personal story.I met Arnold R. Beisser, MD (1925–1991), at the first organizing meeting of the Gestalt Therapy Institute of Los Angeles in the fall of 1968. Arnie was a national tennis champion, struck down by polio in the early 1950s just before the vaccine became available. After lying three years in an iron lung, he conquered the “frog gulping” method of breathing and could be without respiratory assistance for periods of time. Arnie had a presence and strength that was not diminished by his physical incapacities.Beisser’s (1970) article, clear and brief, was first written for Frederick (Fritz) Perls’s 75th birthday Festschrift and continues to be standard reading for everyone studying Gestalt therapy. Briefly, it states that change occurs when one becomes what one is, not when one tries to become what one is not. As one who has spent her whole life trying to change herself and others, that notion had turned a 24-year-old world upside down—in a good way—and it has continued to be one of the most important Gestalt concepts for me.Arnie was my first trainer, my mentor through a year studying for certification, my stand-in therapist, and later my colleague and friend. I treasure the hours typing as he dictated sentences for his last book, Halcyon Days (1994), about his formative years in Orange County, California (see also Beisser 1967, 1970, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1994; Beisser and Green 1972; and Estrup 2010a, b, c).Likely, one of the reasons I am alive today is because I embraced the paradoxical theory of change in my personal therapy. Both my mother and father smoked. My father, a pipe, sometimes a cigar. My mother, cigarettes. From the time I can remember, a cigarette hung from her mouth before she was out of bed, while she was milking the cow, making cheese, or engrossed in one of her art projects. Nothing could keep her from smoking except sleep and pregnancy. Her obstetrician recommended she stop. While studies as early as the 1940s and 1950s showed negative effects of smoking, the tobacco industry managed to subvert general knowledge until the Surgeon General’s Report on January 11, 1964. A ban on advertising did not come into effect until 1970.My friend offered me my first cigarette when I was sixteen. I remember breathing in the smoke with some delight, feeling sophisticated and adult, then a wave of euphoria. Smoking was not allowed in my high school, so I cannot say that I was smoking enough to be addicted. But I loved the process of taking a cigarette out of the pack, tapping it, lighting up, and taking that first drag.My mother was horrified, “I thought I would be an example of what not to do. It’s a horrible habit.” I responded with a disdainful look. The stresses of life (family, boyfriends, jobs, college) helped lead to a life filled with cigarettes. I do not know how much I was inhaling as I worked the next 10 years in offices where I was typing a large percent of the time: in New York City at Bankers Trust, in Florida in the NASA projects, in Montana at an architectural firm, at the University of Florida in the speech department, at UCLA in the engineering department—starting with manual typewriters and stretching toward computers. I smoked through my brother’s mental breakdown and recovery from that trauma, through an abusive relationship, through a divorce, and through the birth of my son in 1970. Unlike my mother, I was unable to quit while I was pregnant, though I had great intentions and resolutions. In the mid-1960s, I smoked through typing Robert Resnick’s dissertation; we both smoked through it. He seemed even more addicted than I. I always had a cigarette lit, but most of the time it was nestled in an ashtray, burning itself away.At California State University Los Angeles, I joined Dr. Irwin Lublin’s research project studying the effects of aversive feedback on smoking behavior. My fellow graduate students at Cal State Los Angeles scoured the halls for cigarette butts, fired them up in machines that blew the smoke into volunteers’ faces until many raced to the bathroom to throw up. I do not remember the parameters we were measuring, only that with the amount of nicotine I was inhaling, I was able to quit for the first time. I was thrilled.A few months later, at an American Psychological Association conference in San Francisco, I was chatting with a friend in the hotel bar. He offered me a cigarette. “I’ll just have one,” I thought to myself. That first drag was almost as intense as my first one more than twelve years earlier. Within a week, I was back to buying Benson & Hedges by the carton. I was shocked, embarrassed, ashamed, even though at that point none of my friends had quit.By 1968, I had fallen completely in love with Gestalt therapy, read every book available, talked with Robert Resnick 24/7 while the two of us ran weekend workshops, and started a weekly couples group. I was in individual and group therapy with Jim Simkin, who had trained with Fritz and Lore Perls on the East Coast.I complained bitterly to Jim about getting hooked on cigarettes again, especially when I became pregnant. Jim did not smoke and strictly forbade smoking in his office. But that particular day he said, “Do you have cigarettes with you?” I was dumbfounded. “Of course!” “Light one up and see what you can discover.” For the next 45 minutes, I smoked, paying close attention, helped by his curiosity, to what I was experiencing moment by moment. At the end, I knew. It was so simple what cigarettes did for me.Cigarettes were my smoke screen. I turned to them as an easy way to break contact. Not just with Jim and others but a break from myself, my thoughts, my sensations, my feelings, my experience. Having read Beisser’s (1970) article, I decided that rather than continuing to try to quit, which I had been doing for months, I would allow myself to smoke as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted. But rather than distracting myself, I would focus on my experience of smoking.I chose a chair in my dining room by the window. My smoking chair. I went there often, doing nothing but smoking. I did not drink coffee or eat food. I did not talk with anyone, in person or on the phone. I did not read. I smoked. I split away all the other activities that had been associated with smoking. At first, I enjoyed this time out. Needing to do other things, I noticed I was smoking less. A week went by. I was getting bored. But I kept to my commitment. I allowed the butts to stack up in a big ashtray where I could see them every day. More weeks went by.One day I looked at that disgusting ashtray and whispered to myself, “I don’t really want to do that.”I walked away. For three days, I looked, smelled, and walked away with that thought, “I don’t really want to do that.” I hardly slept, had horrible dreams, and my body shook sometimes and ached all the time. On the fourth day, I looked at the ashtray. Disgusting. I cleaned it and threw away my pack of cigarettes—feeling some relief. After another week or two, I took my half-empty cigarette carton from the kitchen cabinet and threw it in the garbage. I knew I could never chance smoking another puff.Often, my six-year-old son came to me with “I’m so glad you’re not smoking.” Thank you.I became quite allergic to cigarette smoke. People made fun of me, not understanding how that could be. I felt embarrassed to ask people not to smoke in my home, but thinking of my children’s health and the effects of secondary smoke, I held firm. Hardest was asking my mother to limit her smoking to one room in my home. She was so upset that she never returned.For five years, in numerous situations, I had the thought, “I wish I had a cigarette.” Then one day I realized I had not thought about a cigarette for a long time. A couple of years passed, and I realized I was saving a lot of money. I started a fund to buy myself a gift each year. My first was a Martin guitar. I began writing music and lyrics and even played with a band for a few years. Not long after, I developed a quit smoking program, based on the principle of the paradoxical theory of change, for people in remote areas of the country who had no support for stopping. Often when people told me they wanted to quit, I replied, “I want you to quit, too.” And I shared my story. It has worked for many of them.I am grateful that my children and grandchildren have never smoked. Many of my friends waited five or ten years longer to stop and developed some form of cancer or lung disease. A few months after I stopped smoking, I began to run. I like to believe all the oxygen I pumped through my body during those thousands of miles helped to clean out my lungs.I often joke about the three things in my life that I chose to do that were the hardest. First always, quitting smoking. Second, running my first marathon. And third, getting a Spanish visa.I do not know anyone who smokes any more. If you do, feel free to share my method.Arnold Beisser died in 1991. His life and writing continue to inspire. With gratitude to Arnie, and to my other Gestalt teachers and colleagues.
MA Liv Estrup (Wed,) studied this question.