The Courage to Quit

I spoke with my brother this morning who, after asking me how my no smoking was going, told me he had bought a £1000 bicycle in preparation for his own attempt to stop. In fairness to him he'd paid £300 for this lightweight (13lbs) wonder of cycling technology which he'd not used as yet due to the fact he hadn't got a helmet and feared the consequences of falling off.

Sounds like a fairly complicated web of procrastinatory co-dependencies to me.

I also received another extremely articulate and insightful email from my ex-smoker friend which I'd like to discuss with him, and with anyone else who may wish to enter the debate about the very important discourse he raises.

In response to my last post on Bachanalian remedies he says:-

'I was a bit concerned to read that your guru was advising the avoidance of stressful situations. This is the very behaviour which leads to anxiety related disorders such as agoraphobia etc, where avoidance of a given situation enhances and reinforces the belief that the situation presents some danger to one's self.

I suggest, in my reply, that there is a remarkable book I once read entitled The Courage to Be by the theologian Paul Tillich which deals with this subject in some depth. Although not a religious man myself I certainly found this remarkable work very helpful and sustaining in facing a number of existential difficulties. I don't propose to review it here - there are in fact a number of excellent reviews available at: http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0300084714/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 one of which states;

'Technically, this book is difficult to read and often hard to understand. The book feels like an awkward translation by Tillich of his own stream of conscienceness. But, that should not deter you in any way. Once you feel comfortable with the language the book really opens up as you get a feel for Tillich's rhetorical skill. The arguments are well made and are very fun to wrestle with. He speaks on Courage in it's different forms, their manifestations in history and politics, and it's place in our modern lives. I found this book to be a very interesting (and helpful) perspective on how we arrived at the point we are in live today, both individually and collectively. Far from being an anachronism Tillich's famous book is as enlightening now as it was in the 1950's.'

My erstwhile colleague however puts the argument, relative to quitting, or continuing smoking thus:

'... in a large percentage of those situations which the addict has deemed to be stressful, the stress has actually been created by the nicotine, or more accurately the fact that the situation will temporarily prevent one from indulging the monster.'

This presumably posits the notion that the cigarette is simply the 'comforter' the vestigial and usuallydenied nipple from which one's separation causes the individual existential angst. He continues ...

'If we are to be entirely honest with ourselves, we would admit that in the vast number of cases where our attempts to rid ourselves of the demon have been scuppered by the actions of our nearest and dearest, it is more likely the case that the nictotine raddled brain of the user has engineered the situation to provide a convenient excuse for relapse.'

Self-sabotage then is another of the properties of nicotine?

Life, post nicotine, is a series of first experiences, and the sooner all these are confronted and successfully negotiated without the crutch, the better, because each avoidance will make the attempt more difficult in the future. Some situations are genuinely stressful, but in actual fact you find that the nicotine has been kidding you all along, because no matter how many fags you consumed before facing the stress, the stress was still there to be faced.

Existential angst seems therefore to be unavoidable and inevitable. However, is it not our mind and how we, the individual employ these external shields, be they nicotine, alcohol, narcotics, gambling, eating, adrenaline, violence, sex or the many other manifestations of addiction with which we are confronted almost constantly in the form of neurosis, and not the substance or activity itself that performs the delusion and allows the behaviour to become our master?

This is the problem with many forms of counselling and advice on 'giving up' (which in itself sounds like a sacrifice ... of what ?) they attach a very false importance to the effects of nicotine, which merely serves to heigten the idea of deprivation in the reformer ...

These are all valid arguments which lead to an ineluctable truth. If we truly want to quit we have to avoid all substitutes which means I and every other member of my support group have quit smoking by replacing our dummies with a blanky! In my case I have actually replaced it with another dummy, the inhalator, but given that I am now managing my existential angst without the drug capsule which goes in the inhalator, presumably this could be considered a progressive regression? I think this is known in the trade as a 'transitional object' and can take many forms, medical, psychological and spiritual and all of which serve to support the addicts move from dependency to semi-dependency, co-dependency and ultimately, unlike religion for example, to arrive at complete independence from any form of 'crutch' whatsoever.

Reader's may recall that I began this writing by pointing to the popularity and dangers of the cold-turkey route to independence. Time will tell whether the transitional approach proves to be more successful in my individual case, although there must be some statistical data I can adduce to support my theory. I will go and look!