I’m often asked a question like, “What do you do when you slip and smoke a couple of cigarettes?” The person who asks this question will usually go on to explain that it wasn’t their fault; they’d run out of meds, or they couldn’t get patches until the next day, and their husband or wife wasn’t being very supportive…
My answer is usually something like the following:
First of all, you stop trying to kid yourself by saying you "slipped": slipping is something that happens to you that you can’t control. If you’re walking on an icy sidewalk and you slip and fall, that’s an accident; you can’t control it, and you wouldn’t have chosen to do it.
But if you pick up a cigarette, apply flame to it, and suck poison into your lungs, that’s no accident: you made a deliberate, conscious choice to feed your addiction and you followed through on that choice by engaging in a series of actions that were in no way accidental.
Own Your Choices
Second of all, you stop trying to kid yourself by putting the blame for your own deliberate, consciously-chosen behaviors anywhere outside yourself: pills or no pills, patches or no patches, support from someone else or no support from anyone else; none of that matters.
What matters is the choices you make, and you have to take responsibility for those choices. The bottom line is that there are no "slips", and there’s noone and nothing outside of yourself that can make you smoke if you don’t want to or keep you from smoking if you choose to do so.
Good News, Bad News
The bad news is, you have to make those choices a lot in the beginning, and every time you’re presented with the choice, you have the opportunity to screw up and throw your quit away by choosing to feed your addiction. That’s the path of least resistance; it’s what you’ve trained yourself to do all these years.
The good news is, you have to make those choices a lot in the beginning, and every time you’re presented with the choice, you have the opportunity to do the right thing by choosing not to feed your addiction, and every time you make that choice it gets easier to make it again the next time.
The Best News
You can still do this. Every day’s a new day. Make the right choice every time you get a crave (see this post for more on this) from now on and you’ll do fine.