Members,
Afraid to turn into a bear when quitting? Maybe you've quit and it's already happened? Explosive, quick to anger over little things? Unexpected outbursts? You are not alone, but rather one of many.
What happens?
People in recovery do have ups and downs, and sometimes more downs than ups unless they adopt new ways of coping, none of which happen overnight. We keep saying that quitting is a process. Anger may play an unexpected role for you in this process, and better coping skills need to be developed to deal with this also.
When many smokers quit, they go through changes that require some unmasking. Take anger, for instance: As nicotine addicts, we might have swallowed our anger, or lit up rather than make a scene when something really irked us. It might have been easier and less stressful than engaging in confrontation about some problem. I'm confident that most smokers who were "put in their place" can remember exhaling the smoke slowly at some time or other to decompress. They puffed away for dear life rather than say their piece and end up getting fired from a much-needed job, to offer one example, or be in an in-law�s bad books forever, to name another.
In such anger, a nicotine fix became the crutch, the comforter and the savior of sorts, and quite a coping mechanism! (Or so we thought anyway.)
With the giving up (and loss from our lives) of that lifelong 'all-round friend' the cigarette, we literally go through mourning with all its stages, including the stage of sadness and anger. Quitting is a major loss, both physically and psychologically, and in addiction, a quitter will naturally mourn that loss for a little while, until they freely accept the quit and adopt it, just letting go of smoking or chewing.
But besides that mourning, there are also things that can naturally trigger an angry response in a quitter: For instance, typical little things such as finding an empty roll on the toilet paper dispenser, discovering someone's dirty laundry on the floor, coming across dirty dishes in another part of the house, etc., all could NOW send a quitter into that angry zone. When you smoked you might have lit up and maybe said nothing in those situations, maybe even allowed yourself a sigh of exasperatio
