If You Started Smoking As A Teen.........
.......as I did, you'll probably find yourself wondering why staying quit is as hard as quitting. It's taken me a while to figure out, with the wisdom and help of jkay and GrizeldaJane, why this is so. It's such a big deal, I've been encouraged to share it with everyone. Hope it helps. From the ages of 11 throughout adolescence and young adulthood, we expend a lot of our maturing energy in learning how to act and react to situations and circumstances. If your best friend betrays you, you'll either get even or forgive. If someone cuts you off in traffic, you learn to blow it off (it's HIS problem, not mine) or whip around and cut him off. If your spouse or someone else who's important to you pushes your button once too often, you explode or maybe count to 10, calm yourself down and talk rationally about what's going on.

We learn how to handle good things, too. You've just finished a project under deadline and you sit and just bask in the knowledge of a job well done. Your spouse WAS paying attention to your hints and gave you that special present for your birthday, so you express your gratitude appropriately with a hug or kiss or dancing or whatever. (!)

And the mundane....finishing dinner, completing the painting of the dining room, putting in the last plant in the new flower bed. For all these things you can now sit and relax and enjoy them.

Good, bad, mundane.....it takes us YEARS to learn a wide variety of ways to respond and handle all these things.

Unless you are a smoker.

For when WE were adolescents and teens we learned to react to all the diverse situations in our lives BY LIGHTING UP! Instead of counting to 10 to calm down, we learned to smoke a cigarette to calm down. To express our satifaction at completing a project or task, we'd light up first, before any other reaction had a chance to manifest itself. If someone really pissed us off we'd light up even as we were yelling---sometimes INSTEAD of yelling. And many, many times when something or someone hurt us we learned to smoke and stuff down our feelings so that we often had no reaction at all.

Every action in our lives was started and ended with a smoke.

Is it any wonder, then, that we have so much trouble when we quit smoking? In the first couple of weeks I asked my family "How do you people know when you're finished with anything?" After eating, washing dishes or putting away laundry I'd light a cigarette and I'd be finished. Suddenly I had no way of knowing I was done with THIS and ready to go on with THAT. When my children would upset me, I'd light up and push down any negative reaction until I could respond calmly. Now I'm either lashing out with my tongue or crying, for goodness' sake! The list goes on and on and.....

So, here we are. After all these years, we are just now learning how to deal with stuff without a smoke. The skills that people who never smoked (or started smoking in their 20's) took 8 to 10 years to learn, we are pretty much expected to either already know or at least learn in a couple of weeks! No wonder so many people relapse! When you find yourself reacting with the emotions of a 14 year old, you just want to curl up and cry.

And talk about WORK! We're constantly on guard, being forced minute by minute to learn new, appropriate responses. It's no surprise, then that after the nicotene addiction is gone we still want "just one" to get us through....(fill in the blank). Nothing sounds more restful than going back to our old, familiar ways....sigh....

So, did I bring all this up so we'd have one more thing to get depressed over concerning this addiction foisted on us by the tobacco companies? (Remember, we chose to smoke at first, but we never CHOSE to become addicted). No! I bring it up so that if you are experiencing these very disconcerting reactions and feelings, maybe this will help you identify the causes faster than I did. (Course, I'm probably a lot slower than most). I'm also bringing this up as a tool for letting your loved ones know why you're so different and, perhaps, unpredictable.

Mostly, though, I'm pointing all this stuff out so that we will cut ourselves some slack in this area. We can't expect to learn new ways of handling everything in our emotional lives in just a few weeks. We need to allow ourselves ample time to work through things and learn new coping skills. We DON'T need to push ourselves into relearning too fast what non-smokers got to take YEARS to learn.

We need to be patient with ourselves and love ourselves enough to get through all this stuff in whatever way we need to. We need to explain to others what's going on so they can love us through it, too.

We quit, we really did! And we can be victorious in this, too, we really can!!!

Marleah