My Therapist Told Me Not To Quit Smoking
Before you judge either one of us too harshly, allow me to provide some context.
There is far too much backstory to cover at this point but allow me to sum it up by saying what everyone you’ve ever met and their grandma says about their own therapist: we have a different sort of relationship.
Now, I do not by any means refer to the partaking of each other’s goodies, it’s not that kind of special. The two of us, I think, simply seem to work on the same wavelength.
This particular episode dates back to the months leading up to 2017 and the start of the year. The world was in shambles as Trump edged his way into the polls and later the White House. Brexit was still fresh out of the oven, no one knew what was happening. I had just moved to England and asked myself why every day. Nowhere felt safe, nothing could comfort me.
My pockets have never been quite that empty since. Pack after pack, stolen lighter after lost lighter, I lived for my cigarettes. Got a fifteen-minute break at work? I can probably squeeze three smokes in that.
I make it a rule not to smoke when I’m sleeping. — Mark Twain
I slowly replaced food with cigarettes, rationalising it to myself as a smart way of saving money. Quickly after that, I started going back to therapy.
My therapist and I had known each other for a few years at that point. I’d first come in at the end of high school and, though the initial period was fairly intense, have been going casually ever since. She never seems to be lost for context to any of my stories, though. It’s particularly remarkable when taken into account that she has never taken a single note in front of me.
Let’s be realistic, I didn’t really want to quit, either.
One afternoon, as I spewed my worries onto her — not literally, I can still control myself — I spiralled my way into the conclusion that all that was wrong at the time was because I was smoking so much.
Look, fair enough, a lot of what was wrong at the time was because I was indeed smoking excessively: my health had never been worse, my bank account was on the brink of gaining sentience exclusively so it could part ways with me, and I had, in reality, never felt so down.
A cigarette is a pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool at the other. — George Bernard Shaw
However, my reasoning behind the quitting smoking was not quite right. I didn’t want to give up cigarettes because I wanted to be able to breathe after climbing three flights of stairs — I wanted to stop smoking because I wanted to be in control. I wanted to prove to myself that I could, that everything in reach was mine for the taking, subject only to me actually wanting to take it.
So, naturally, she laughed at me.
She asked, “So you quit smoking. What will your five minutes of peace be, instead?”
Cigarettes, the mere act of holding one and twirling it between my fingers, have been my sole coping mechanism for the past few years. Before that, I anxiously turned to food whenever I felt life slip ever so slightly out of my control.
My high school years had been tough and she knew it. When I hadn’t been able to sleep, Buzzfeed’s ‘Tasty’ was there to keep me company. When the few friends I’d made eventually let me down and made me question my character judgement, I baked coconut cookies for two weeks straight — a fresh batch every day. When I discovered weed, Dominos nearly blocked every single one of my heart’s arteries.
Food could not be the answer again and she knew it before I’d even thought to consider it.
Habits can make or break us
Patiently, she let me work out my own motivations behind this sudden burst of motivation. Cigarettes, and any tobacco product, really, become little more than a habit after a while. Sure, we romanticise them as our peace haven, those precious minutes in the day when you can enter the haze of the smoke and clear your mind for a moment or two.
In reality, however, as she explained to me, after a few years of smoking all I was really doing was using cigarettes as a framework around which I’d created a routine. I knew when my first of the day would be, how long after that one the second one would come and so on. I planned my day and my commitments around smoking opportunities, always careful to leave enough time to sneak one in.
Now, the obvious answer here would be something along the lines of, ‘Great, you’ve worked out the problem and not only how often it re-occurs but exactly when it does, too. Now just replace it with something healthy.’
Munching on an apple every time you crave a smoke is not going to fix anyone’s problems. Going for a jog between meetings has turned out not to be the most viable option. Painting the next 21st century masterpiece when all I wanted was to stuff my lugs with gunk never really seemed like something I could pull off, either, so, naturally, I figured I was out of options.
My therapist pointed out, then, that I had never taken the time to develop a coping mechanism. I’d swiftly gone from one addiction to the other and in the meantime had decided to pile a couple of new ones on top. Quitting cigarettes now would mean an automatic relapse into old patterns since I did not know any other way.
I know that choosing to keep smoking may sound like sacrilege but, the thing is, cigarettes never made me hate myself. Food did, and still does, mostly because the lack of self-control there is so much more evident. If I smoke half a pack in under an hour, no one will mention it. If anyone even notices it, they’ll simply put it down to me being ever so slightly more stressed out than usual. However, devour half your snack cupboard over an episode of University Challenge and there’ll be a lot of questions left to answer — most of them being yours.
Give yourself the gift of time
She never said I couldn’t. She strongly implied that my brain would be all the more scattered should I choose to quit smoking then but, the important thing is, she never said I couldn’t stop.
My main problem at the time was that I was having a lot of trouble coming to terms with the loss of control: my romantic prospects were just on the edge of non-existent at the time and I was still reeling from an unrequited predicament; the career choices I’d made up until then were not paying off and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d enjoyed a day’s work; and, cherry on top, I’d finally realised, after years of it, that I hadn’t been using therapy the way I’d initially intended.
“Don’t stop now. Not because you can’t, that’s not it. Now’s just not the time,” she said. I laughed back then, even told my friends over a drink about how my crazy therapist was advocating for tortoise-paced suicide. Now, though, I’ve realised that, even if I’m a lot better at it these days, I still haven’t built a strong enough support system of my own through which I can filter my anxieties.
My therapist didn’t want me to keep smoking — I can see that now, I know it for sure. All she wanted was for me not to do what I always do: make an impulsive, reckless decision that, regardless of its good-natured intention, will leave me in worse shape than I started with.
