GUS (Gave Up Smoking) is a community support diary for Kossacks in the midst of quitting smoking. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are quitting or even just thinking of quitting, please join us! We kindly ask that politics be left outside. You can also click the GUS tag to view all diary posts, or access the GUS Library (the archived version for now).
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In my experience, people with compulsive or addictive personalities tend to be pretty familiar with denial. We're good at minimizing or rationalizing or excusing our behaviors and decisions; it's really the only way to get past the cognitive dissonance of knowing something to be bad (or unhealthy or unproductive) and feeling compelled to do it anyway. We don't want to do something...except we kind of do want to. Or feel we have to. Or don't know how to not feel that we have to.
Anyway, it's complicated, so it's just easier to find an excuse as to why that thing is still happening---or better, to pretend it's not happening at all.
We get really good at minimizing things. After all, if it's really not that bad, or it's just this little thing (or bunch of little things), or almost okay (except for this one thing...) then it's not so scary, right? We come up with a rationale that lets us keep doing the thing, telling ourselves if only this one thing were different (if X stopped happening, or if were a better time, or if we didn't have X to worry about), we'd totally stop doing it. It's really just this minor thing standing in our way, right? Minimizing the issue is one way to keep from feeling overwhelmed by the [actually not-so-little] thing we're facing. It's understandable, but it gets in the way, too.
So we pretend the big stuff is small stuff, or unimportant stuff, or stuff that's not actually happening. And the really big stuff? Well, we get very good at looking right past that. We're masters of denial. We learn to look directly through that honking big elephant in the room, no matter how huge it is and how hard it is to ignore. Elephant? What elephant?
We do this because to do otherwise means admitting to ourselves what is really going on, which can be pretty scary. We don't let ourselves think too hard about the formidable task ahead, the struggles on the horizon, the impending discomfort, because behavioral change on this scale can be really daunting, even overwhelming. Easier to downplay or ignore.
We pretend the elephant not there (or is no big deal; maybe just a cute little Dumbo-sized elephant) because facing that kind of change can force us to face things we've spent a lot of time minimizing or suppressing; for some of us---especially the self-medicators---that change process forces us to feel feelings that we'd rather not feel.
But facing up to the reality---acknowledging that elephant in the room---is a critical step in making a lasting behavioral change. Ignoring the bad parts doesn't help. Pretending that there are no bad parts (or that there's a perfectly good reason to react to the bad stuff the way you do) doesn't help. It just postpones the inevitable.
You can't really change something about yourself or your life until you name it, know it for what it is, recognize all the uncomfortable or scary details and potential pitfalls you're up against, and (fully aware of what you want to change and what might be getting in your way) decide to make the change anyway.
When you not only see the elephant in the room, but sit down with it and try to either make friends with it or to talk it into getting the hell out already, then you're getting somewhere.
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