Hello Carolyn:
I think if you look at the responses that you are getting here, our members do not see their desire for Freedom as a game of semantics. In fact, being a member here is not a game at all. It is a commitment that hopefully each and every person who has applied for membership takes seriously.
I think you are missing what the title of this post means, that our members do not relapse anymore, only our ex-members do. It come down to defining what it means to be a member of Freedom? A member is a person who can post on our board. Thats it, the only perk or benefit that comes with membership is the ability to post on our board. Post a relapse and that benefit is gone.
We have plenty of non-posting readers at Freedom who are every bit as successful and every bit as welcome to access everything we have to offer information wise. Again, the only difference between a member and a non-member is the ability to post.
If a member posts that he or she has relapsed, he or she is no longer going to be a member. The post will be pulled, the membership of that person is going to be deleted, and this string is going to come up saying we have one less member that day because a person posted that he or she has relapsed. That person will no longer be a member of Freedom.
More important though is that person is no longer going to be free from nicotine. A person can lie to us and to the board but he or she can't lie to his or her own body. The person is now a relapsed smoker and had better be willing to accept the consequences that go with being a relapsed smoker. Because whether he or she wants to accept the consequences or not, he or she is going to have to live with the consequences, which means he or she is either going to some day have to go through withdrawal again in an attempt to break free or he or she is going to go through smoking again until it cripples or kills him or her. To avoid the consequences of relapse is still as simple as sticking to the commitment that you hopefully made to yourself the day you joined up at Freedom to never take another puff!
Joel