Addiction Arrest: How Not to Crave a Smoke During a Crisis

I successfully arrested my "addiction connect" over 30 years ago re: booze and 15 years ago re: nicotine. What the hell is an "addiction connect" you might ask. The following account of recent real-life events and their powerful emotional impact on yours truly anecdotally illustrates this positive phenomenon and I promise to wrap this post with a specific definition and how to utilize the aforementioned potent empowering approach in order to stop smoking and/or boozing and/or drugging and to stay quit even in the face of horrific life experiences.

Here's a truncated version: In relatively recent posts I related my devastation concerning the loss of my beloved pooch companion, little Miles, the light of my life for over 11 years. Recently, while continuing to deal with my profound loss, I became directly involved in the plight of a feral calico mother cat who resided in the neighborhood of a very dear friend of mine who lives across town in San Pedro, a beach community. He had fed the cat in question since kittenhood behind his apartment building, as had other tenants; she was the one survivor of a litter and her mom accompanied her to dinner on numerous occasions for about 1 ½ years. The building didn't allow tenants to have pets in their apartments.

Mimi (he'd named her) became pregnant during this time and had her litter somewhere and her kittens apparently hadn't survived. Pregnant for a second time, she chose to climb the back entrance steps to have her litter in the wee hours on a summer morning right on the landing where folks who'd fed her resided. My friend initially aided by other tenants had to act quickly due to the visiting manager's threat to "take care of this matter myself tomorrow if you can't solve it today." A construction crew was scheduled to tear down the existing back stairway as part of a remodeling project. My friend approached a lady in the neighborhood who had cats and he told her of the urgent situation. She hurried over and coaxed Mimi into a cage, following her five babies. My friend thanked her profusely and stressed, "Please take them to a no-kill agency" and she agreed. Later my friend discovered that the cat lady had taken them to Harbor Animal Shelter, a city-run facility, instead, that very day.

That's where I and other concerned individuals came into the picture. After my friend relayed the particulars, I phoned the shelter and explained that a group of us would put up the funds ($60 per animal) and that we'd provide homes for Mimi and her five babies. The clerk said he'd entered my full name and phone number into the computer alongside Mimi's code listing. The clerk had referred to Mimi (unnamed to him) as "a fractious feral cat." Translation: frightened. We continued to check on mom and kittens occasionally until this Saturday, when I received a phone call from my stunned friend. He said the shelter vet tech had euthanized all of the cats on the previous Tuesday after my friend had visited the shelter on the previous Saturday and was told "mother and kittens were doing fine but you can't see them because they're feeding."