As long as he hides from the truth—from the real reasons why he smokes—he can conveniently shift responsibility from himself to a “force” that’s stronger than he is. When a smoker says, “I really want to quit, but I just can’t,” what he really means is that he doesn’t want to be held accountable for his bad choices.
For many people, there is a certain comfort in believing that they can’t avoid the destructive path they’re following, even though they know where it leads in the end. They are locked into a self-defeating mindset that says, “I know I’m doomed, but what can I do about it?” The answer is that they can do a great deal about it, but not until they are able to see through the mind games they play.
Why do we play these games, even when we know our habits are destroying us? I think the answer goes something like this: As soon as we break out of the cage we’ve been hiding in, we will have to admit that we had the power to do it all along.
That can be a scary thing. A person who frees himself from a habit that has dominated his life for years or decades can be terrified of the prospect of having to admit that he wasted a large part of his life by failing to take responsibility for his own behavior.
If you’re in a helping relationship with a person like that, or if you are courageous enough to admit that you are that person, take heart and remember this: Better to have wasted part of your life than to have wasted all of it. It’s never too late to turn your life around. As soon as you do, you’ll discover that none of it was wasted after all—it just took a little longer to reach your goal.
A woman you know may be drinking herself to death, but subconsciously she tells herself that it would be far worse to be free of her habit. If she were free, she would have to spend the rest of her life wondering what she might have made of her life if she had realized sooner that she was free to make better choices.
This is the danger of focusing on the past. When all you can see is what lies behind, you aren’t able to under stand that new oppor tuni ties present themselves as soon as you make the decision to walk in a different direction.
A person’s capacity to shift her thought s from the past to the present is the key to moving from stage 2 to stage 3. You can’t make the decision to change as long as you’re still focused on the past.
As soon as you decide to change, you’re at the end of stage 2. The next step in the cycle of freeing yourself from a bad habit is the preparation stage.
