The Growing Worldwide Quit Smoking Team – Italy

We are very lucky to have a variety of hugely motivated, highly dedicated, and extremely capable people within Allen Carr’s Easyway organisation across the world. It can often be of interest to smokers who want to quit to hear how our team around the world has been gathered and this is the fifth in a series of features that look at the various journeys that members of Allen Carr’s Easyway To Quit Smoking Facilitator team have taken; from being some of the most accomplished and active smokers on the planet to becoming happy non-smokers and world-leaders in the field of stopping smoking.

Francesca Cesati, Allen Carr’s Easyway Italia writes:

Italy: I was born there. One puff at the age of fourteen, 40 cigarettes a day 21 years later.

I was convinced it was my friend, my support, my shield, my silent companion, the source of my security, the gratification I looked for after a school test or a difficult task. It was the bond with my friends, the still listener of our conversation well into the night, what allowed the concentration to keep up the good work.

The fact that it was a killer – it had killed my grandfather – my greatest friend when I was a child – a decade earlier and the fact that it was “strangling” my father with emphysema and chronic bronchitis was only “a small detail”.

London: I was living there in 1988. A woman, by chance gave me the business card of a gentleman by the name of Allen Carr: he helped people to quit smoking simply talking for one afternoon. Rubbish! Impossible! I had tried everything: hypnosis, nicotine chewing –gum, etc. No success. I even smoked during pregnancy. Not that it was something I was proud of but that was the obvious proof that I could not quit.

I decided to contact Allen. There was that interesting clause in the service that if one did not quit he would refund the fee.

15th August 1988. That was the date in which I came back to life. In one afternoon Allen took away the blinkers which had accompanied me through my smoking career, it showed me that all that I believed about smoking was not only false but the opposite was true: smoking was my worst enemy, was my straw support, did not shield me but made me tremendously vulnerable and insecure, was stealing from me my capacity to be proud of myself and substituted it with a continuous sense of loathing for myself, it was the chain that was suffocating me and my friends, it was the continuous obstacle to my concentration, it was the great screamer that pretended continuous attention up to the point that, if I could not smoke, even my best friends became unbearable.

Italy: The power of what happened that afternoon carried on increasing in time, transforming the fact that I had quitted smoking in a slow readjustment of my total perception of life. It made me see clearly all the tremendous fields of deception in which we continuously move convinced instead that we are free. The Wizard of Oz (the killer version of) had been unmasked by Allen and ten years later I decided to help Italian smokers to walk the same path which Allen had helped me to walk. After my training my first seminar/session was in 1998 and now there is a team of facilitators holding Allen Carr’s Easyway To Quit Smoking Seminars all over Italy.

I translated the Allen Carr’s book between 2001 and 2002. Published it end of 2003 and, up to now, it has sold more than a million copies in Italy- almost entirely by word of mouth. It entered in the best selling list in October 2006 and it is still there! The book is incredibly well known in Italy. People simply says: “I quitted with the book..”
More and more blinkers are slowly falling from people’s eyes and God only knows how much we need people who can SEE! Bravo Allen. You are living on in millions of people of all races: a kind of unified field theory!

Did you find it easy to quit smoking? Perhaps you could help to spread the word?