John Vaughan, the new program director for Naval Hospital Bremerton's Tobacco Cessation Program, knows too well smokers' anxiousness, urgency and feelings of helplessness over lost self-control due to addiction. Our job is not to police smokers and make them quit. Rather, it s about taking a proactive approach by slowly easing away the cravings through physical, spiritual, and mental conditioning. Each tobacco cessation session will focus on the individual user's needs with a holistic approach to quitting the habit. Vaughan's own years of addictive behavior now give him insight.
Smoking is an addiction.
I struggled with these cravings for 31 years. I slept with dip in my mouth just to keep my nicotine levels high. Smokers make rationalizations, justifications, all sorts of reasons as to why they keep doing something that isn't good for them. Along with his personal journey to kick his tobacco habit, Vaughan, a Chemical Dependency Rehabilitation Specialist, uses his counseling experience in alcohol dependency to treat smokers' addictions. I am an ex-smoker who went through this program and quit last October.