~~I've found that recovery means being honest. About what I want. What I need. What I feel. Who I am.~~ Unknown
You may feel you are being honest. You say you know you need to quit smoking. Your health depends on it. You say you need support. You can't quit successfully without it. You say you aren't strong enough to quit when you relapse.
Honesty is sometimes buried deeply beneath the layers of addiction. Remember all the years you could stuff your emotions under the nicotine? Remember all the times you had 'just one' to get you through the 'bad' times? Remember how you could better de-stress when you smoked?
Lies. All lies. The only reason we smoked was because we were addicted to nicotine. The 'feeling better', the 'relaxation', the 'just one' were all lies our addicted brain concocted because addiction scrambles our brain cells. That's all. And the first step in recovery is being honest about being an addict.
Now, honesty in recovery? Still a process for many of us. Because we aren't used to facing our demons. We haven't been able to think clearly. Our thoughts, in one way or another, have always been focused on keeping our addiction active.
Some of us are afraid of our emotions. Some of us know we need to make changes in our lives even though we don't want to. Some of us have been beaten down by life and don't know how to recover. We don't know who we are. We don't know what we need. Our life is a blank sheet in front of us and we don't know how to create a life...without smoking.
Life is waiting for us on the other side of addiction. We aren't working from scratch, we are simply adding to it. Life isn't as scary as we've led ourselves to believe. It isn't impossible and it hasn't forgotten us. In fact, when we step away from the nicotine induced haze, we find that life is much, much more than we ever saw before! We simply need to get off the sidelines and become active in it. Honesty is a good, good start to a good, good life 
Sheri
