Chapter Four: The Weight Below

Here the guide asks more of you. In this chapter and the next you will look at the feelings that have been living beneath the vape. Nobody is asking you to wallow in them. You are asked to see them and to let them go, so that they stop building the pressure that sends your hand out for the device.

A word before we start, because it matters. Not everyone who vapes is carrying a weight underneath. Many people picked the thing up because it was there and it tasted of something and it felt nice, and then it stuck. If that is you, read this chapter as a map of country you may never have to cross. The practice in it is still yours, because the same allowing that lets a heavy feeling through is what lets a craving through. But do not go looking for a hurt because a book told you there ought to be one. There may be nothing under yours at all. If there is something, you will know it, and you will know it in your own time.

For others the weight is real, and they have known it for years. They know it in the way they reach for the device on the walk back from a hard conversation, and on the sofa late at night when the house is asleep and something they cannot name is sitting on their chest. For those people the vape has been doing a job, and the job was keeping the lid on. Stopping takes the lid off. That is why so many attempts come apart later than people expect. For most people the body eases over two to four weeks, and it is then, with the roughest days behind them, that the feelings the vape was holding down come up for air. This chapter is for that moment, so that when it comes you know what it is and what to do.

The feelings are set out in a rough order, from the heaviest to the lightest, because that is often how they are layered inside a person. When a heavy one goes, a lighter one comes into view. As you rise through them the tone of your inner life changes, from something tight and held to something open and moving.

Read the chapter slowly, and read it more than once. You do not need to work through it like a list. Take the feeling that is nearest, and leave the others until they arrive. Each section describes one feeling from the inside, so that you can recognise it when it comes, and then turns the practice you learned in the last chapter towards that feeling. The practice does not change. Only the thing you are allowing changes.

And if at any point a feeling gets worse rather than moving, stop, lift your eyes, and look at the room. Name four things you can see. Nothing here asks you to go further than you can go today.

We begin at the bottom.

Shame

Shame is the heaviest feeling a person can carry. Guilt is about something you did. Shame is a conviction about what you are. Shame says: I am bad. I am weak. I am disgusting. I am a failure. If people saw the truth of me they would turn away.

Almost everyone who has struggled with an addiction carries shame, and the addiction and the shame feed each other. You vape, and you are ashamed of vaping. The shame is hard to bear, so you vape to get away from it. And round it goes. The hit wears off, the feeling is back, and now there is one more hit to be ashamed of.

Shame is also the feeling that most wants to hide, so you may not notice it at first. It shows up as a reluctance to look at yourself. It is in the joke you make about your habit before anyone else can make it, in the flinch when someone mentions it, in a sense of being somehow less than the people around you. It is in the way you slide the device into your pocket at the school gate when another parent looks over, and the way you turn towards the railings to use it. It is in the second device you keep in the car, so that the one in the house looks like less. It is in the doctor's waiting room, when the form asks whether you smoke and you write no, because vaping is not smoking, and you feel the small dishonesty of it settle in your stomach and stay there while you wait to be called.

From the inside, shame does not feel like a feeling. It feels like a fact. That is what makes it so heavy. Anger feels like something passing through, and even grief feels like something happening to you. Shame feels like a report on what you are, delivered by someone who knows. It is worth saying plainly that the report is false. A person can do a thing ten thousand times and still not be that thing. You are someone who vapes, and that is a habit with a chemistry behind it, and it says nothing about your worth. But you do not need to believe this yet. You only need to be willing to let the feeling be there without acting on it, and the truth of the matter comes clear on its own.

To let go of shame you first need to be willing to feel it, and that takes real courage, because shame feels as if it would wipe you out if it were let in. It does not. Find it in the body. It often sits in the chest or the face, a heat, a wish to shrink or disappear. Allow it. Let it be as big as it is. Do not argue with it, and do not reach for the device. Let the shame be there, and watch it.

Stay with it and you find that shame, allowed, rises and crests and passes like anything else. What is left when it has gone is a truer you than the one shame described.

It helps to know what shame is afraid of. Shame is afraid of being seen. Its whole plan is to keep you hidden, and hidden is where the addiction does best. So the deepest answer to shame is the opposite of hiding. It is being known by one person you trust and finding that they do not turn away. Chapter Six describes the telling, and Chapter Ten describes who is safe to tell. The recovery fellowships have understood this for a century. Nobody there is asked to be impressive. They are asked to be honest with one other person, and the shame that could not survive daylight begins to go.

Shame has a way of attaching itself to the very things that help, patches and gum among them, and there is no more shame in asking a pharmacist about those than there is in wearing glasses.

Shame also feeds on earlier attempts. You stopped once for three weeks and then you did not, and shame has filed that as evidence against you. Look again. Three weeks is three weeks of knowing you can go without. The attempt taught you what caught you, at what time of day, in whose company. That is knowledge nobody could have given you, and you paid for it.

The letter to a friend who slipped

Here is a practice for shame that you can do at a table with a pen, and it is best done before you need it.

Picture a friend. Choose a real one, someone you love. Imagine they told you a month ago that they were stopping, and imagine that this morning they vaped, and that they have come to tell you, and that they are braced. They expect the look. They expect the sigh. What they get from you is what you would really give a friend, and you know what that is. You would say that a morning is a morning. You would say that a person who tells you the truth about a slip is a person who is still stopping. You would ask what happened, without the tone in your voice, and you would ask what they wanted to do next. You would probably put a cup of tea in front of them.

Write those lines down. A few of them, in your own hand, as if to that friend. Then read them back as if they were written to you, because they were. Keep the page somewhere you can find it, in the drawer with the passports or folded into the back of this book, so that if a hard day comes there is something kind already waiting, written by someone who knows you well.

The reason it reaches shame is simple. You would never say to a friend what shame says to you. You would never tell a friend they were disgusting for wanting a thing their body had been trained to want. When you hear the two voices side by side, your own kind one and shame's, you can tell which of them is telling the truth. Shame is loud and shame is old, and it has never once been fair.

If writing the letter brings up more than you expected, put the pen down and look at the room. Leave it for another day. The letter will keep.

Read the letter beside one of shame's sentences, if you like. I always fail. What does always leave out? The afternoon you managed differently, the help you asked for, the time you came back after a slip. Do not collect these as evidence that you are impressive. They are ordinary facts the sentence left out. A fairer line might be: I have found this hard, and I have kept trying to understand it. Use words you can believe, once, and then put the letter away. You do not have to keep arguing until shame agrees.

Guilt

Guilt is lighter than shame, though it does not feel light. Guilt is about what you did rather than what you are. You feel guilty for the money, the promises broken, the times you vaped in front of children, the lies about how much, the health you have risked. Guilt says: I did wrong.

Guilt is often right about the facts. It was the holiday. It was the school shoes. But notice what it does next. It does not reach for a pen and a plan. It reaches for the device, because guilt is hard to sit with and the device is the fastest way out of anything hard. And so the very feeling that says you have spent too much sends you out to spend more. Chapter Seven asks you to look at the money plainly, when you are ready to.

Guilt is also the feeling of the promises. The one you made to your partner in the car, the one you made to yourself on the landing at midnight, the one you made to a child who asked you to stop. Broken promises are a real thing and guilt is a fair response to them. It becomes unfair only when it is used as a whip, because a person who is whipped learns to hide, and hiding is where the vaping lives.

Guilt has a use. It shows you where something needs to be set right. It becomes a trap when it turns into self-punishment, because punishing yourself feels like taking responsibility while being a way of avoiding it. A person can feel terrible about vaping for years and never stop. The feeling stands in for the change.

Let guilt go the same way. Find it in the body. Allow it. Let it burn as hot as it wants. And notice that beneath the guilt there is usually a plain, clean wish: to have done differently, and to do differently now. That wish is the beginning of amends, and you will come back to it later in this guide.

There is a test for whether guilt is doing its job or standing in for the job. Ask what it is asking you to do. Real guilt asks for something plain and possible. Tell them the truth about how much. Put the money where the money was going. Stop. Punishing guilt asks for nothing. It only wants you to feel bad for as long as possible, and it will let you vape while you do. When you find the plain wish under the guilt, the guilt has done what it came to do, and it can go.

Forgiveness for something small

The recovery traditions teach that a person cannot set down a debt they refuse to look at, and cannot set down a debt they refuse to forgive. Both are needed. This guide comes back to peace with other people later, where that is safe. Here the concern is peace with yourself, and it starts small.

Do not try to forgive yourself for the whole of it. That is too big to lift, and trying to lift it is one more way to fail and feel ashamed. Choose something small. The lie last week about how many pods were left. The hit in the car with the window cracked while the child sang in the back. The promise made on the sofa late at night that did not survive the morning. Pick one.

Then say, plainly, what happened, without the story around it. I said I had one left when I had four. Say who did it. A person who was tired and frightened and wanting. And then say the thing you would say to a friend. That was a small thing, and it was done by someone who was struggling, and it is over.

Let the guilt that comes with this be there. It may sting. Let it sting. It passes, often sooner than you expected, and what stays behind is a small clean place where the guilt was. Come back to it when you like, with one small thing each time, and the small clean places join up.

Forgiving yourself is saying that it happened, that it was you, and that you are not going to carry it in your pocket for the rest of your life alongside the device. It mattered, and you put it down anyway. If it needs to be set right with someone, you can do that in its time, and a later chapter will show you how. Paying for the same small thing for ever is a habit of its own, and it takes without giving, like the other one.

The person who picked it up

Take one person's beginning, which may be nothing like yours: imagine being fifteen, at the bus stop outside the school. Rain comes through the gap between the roof and the back of the shelter. The air smells of wet coats and diesel. Your bag is between your shoes, with one strap trailing in a puddle, and you are picking at the corner of the bus pass in its plastic sleeve. Two people from your year are beside you. They are talking about somebody you do not know. When one of them holds out a vape, you take your hand off the bus pass.

You have stood here with them all term. You know where they sit on the bus. Sometimes you sit two rows behind them and laugh when they laugh, though nobody turns round. Now there is something being passed along the bench and you are part of it. You take a pull and cough into your damp cuff. One of them asks whether you like it and you nod. You want to be included. For the rest of the wait you are.

Your own beginning may have a different age and place. Let it be there if it comes back as you read. If nothing comes, leave this section. You do not have to find a hurt or produce a happy memory, and nothing here asks you to forgive anyone else.

If what comes back is more than you can sit with, put the book down. Look up and name three things in the room: the chair, the light switch, the bag by the door. A memory you cannot sit with is information to take to someone trained to work with it. Make an appointment at your GP surgery. Sit in the consulting room and tell the doctor what comes back. Ask for a referral to a therapist. The book can stay shut on the desk.

When you call the person at the bus stop stupid, you give them the knowledge you have now and ask how they can possibly take the thing. But they are fifteen. They know what it is like to stand outside a conversation and wait for a gap that never comes. They want somebody to pass them something. There is nothing stupid or weak about wanting company.

The lie about the pods is still a lie. There are things to set right, one at a time. None of them requires you to go on prosecuting the person on the bench. You can forgive that person now, with the small things still waiting to be put right.

Blaming that person keeps your hand moving towards the vape because being blamed is a feeling and the vape has always been your answer to feelings.

Look at their face before you sit down. You know the mouth, but the cheeks are different, and the hair is cut in a way you have not thought about for years. Their hands are round the plastic sleeve of the bus pass. Sit near them. The metal seat is cold through your clothes. Put an arm round their shoulders if you can. Rest your hand on the far sleeve. It is damp. If your hands stay in your lap, sit with them there. You are both facing the road.

Let a feeling be there if it comes. You do not have to find something to say to them.

You can come back to this page. Reading it once does not settle how you speak to that person for the rest of your life. Come back when their face comes to mind. Sit down again. Lift the wet strap out of the puddle and put it on top of the bag.

Apathy

Under the surface of many people who vape there is a grey layer that does not look like a feeling at all. It looks like nothing. What is the point. Nothing changes. I have tried everything. I am too tired. This is who I am.

You know apathy from the sofa late at night. The programme has finished and you have not moved. The device is in your hand and you are not enjoying it, and you take another draw anyway, because there is nothing else to do and no reason to go to bed. There is nothing wrong that you could name. There is nothing at all, and that is the trouble.

Apathy is the feeling of having given up, and it is comfortable in its way, because once you have given up you no longer have to try. The vape fits into apathy like a hand into an old glove. It gives a small taste of something in a life that seems to have nothing in it, and it asks nothing back except that you keep reaching.

Apathy is the great counterfeit of peace. From the outside they can look alike, because both are still. But peace is full and apathy is empty. Peace has a smile in it. Apathy has the television on with the sound down. You can tell them apart from the inside by asking whether you could get up and walk to the door if a friend knocked. In peace you could, and gladly. In apathy you would wait to see whether they went away.

Apathy also lies about the future. It says nothing changes, and it says it in a tone of experience, as if it had seen everything. It has not seen this. It has not seen you a month after the heavy feelings started moving through, with a spare hour in the evening and nothing in your hand and no idea yet what to do with either. Apathy speaks from inside a closed room. It cannot know what is outside.

Apathy is hard to let go of because it does not feel like something you are doing. It feels like the truth about the world. But it is a feeling, and it can be allowed like any other. Find its texture in the body, the heaviness and the fog, the sense of not being able to move. Allow it. Do not try to talk yourself out of it or drag yourself up by the collar. Let it be there. Under apathy there is usually grief, and under grief there is usually a want that was never met. Let apathy pass and you will find them waiting.

Small things help apathy where no argument can. Stand up. Open a window. Walk to the end of the road and back. None of it fixes anything, and it does not need to. The body remembers that it moves, because apathy lives in the body as much as in the mind, and a body that has walked to the corner shop and back is already a little less sure that nothing is possible.

Grief

Grief is loss. It is the feeling of something being gone. You may be surprised to find grief connected to vaping, but look. There may be grief about the years spent in the cycle, grief about the person you were before, grief about what you did not do because you were always stepping outside for another hit. And there may be older grief that has nothing to do with vaping, which the vape has been muffling for years.

Grief can come in a doctor's waiting room, when the leaflet on the wall is about lungs and you think of the years, and of the mornings you could not walk up the hill without stopping, and something in you is sad for the person who did that to themselves. That sadness is grief, and it is allowed. It does not need to become shame. A person can be sorry for the harm without being the harm.

Grief comes and goes over days. It cannot be released in one sitting. But it can be allowed, and each time it is allowed it grows lighter. Do not be afraid of the tears if they come. Tears are grief moving. Let them.

Grief has its own timetable and it does not take instruction. It comes in the supermarket when a song is playing. It comes at the school gate when you see someone you used to stand and vape with, and you realise that the small society you had there is gone. You are not doing it wrong when it comes back. Grief goes round rather than straight, and each time round it is a little lighter than the last.

There is also a particular grief that arises when you stop vaping: the grief of losing a companion. However much harm the vape did, it was always there. It went with you to the car park and the back step, and it was there on the bad nights. Letting it go can feel like a bereavement. Allow that too. It is what leaving feels like.

It may be true for you and it may not. Some people put the device in the bin and feel nothing but relief, and if that is you there is nothing to mourn and no need to invent a mourning. But if you find yourself missing it the way you might miss a person, do not be ashamed of that. You spent more hours with it than with most of your friends. Of course there is a space where it was.

The older grief deserves a word of its own. It may be a parent, or a marriage, or a version of your life that did not happen. This guide does not go looking for these, and neither need you. But if one surfaces when the vape is gone, it has surfaced because there is room for it now, and room is a good sign. Allow it in pieces. Nobody has to grieve all at once. And if it is too much, or if it does not move over the weeks and the days go grey, that is a matter for a doctor, and going to the doctor is one of the braver things a person does.

Fear

Above grief sits fear, and fear is the great fuel of the addiction. You may be afraid of the craving, of not coping, of weight, of failing again. You may be afraid of being short with the children, of being dull at the party, of what your hands will do in the car. You may be afraid of the first bad news without it, and of the first good news too. Under those is the fear of a future without the one reliable thing, and beneath it, of feeling what you have not let yourself feel.

Read that as a list and nothing more. Some of the fears will be yours and some will not. Nobody knows which but you, and the vape does not have to be hiding anything for a person to be afraid of stopping it. Fear of change is enough on its own. Choose the loudest one, name it, and leave it unanswered for today. You are not required to argue with it. You are only going to look at it.

Fear is also what the story of the craving is built from. I cannot cope. This will get worse. I will not survive this feeling. All of it is fear talking.

You know fear from the night before a thing. Perhaps the night before the day you have chosen, whenever that is. You lie on your back and your mind runs the film of the next morning, and in the film you cannot do it. Notice that the film is always of the future. Fear cannot live in the present, because in the present there is only this breath and this ceiling, and you are managing both. Fear needs a next hour to be afraid of. Bring your attention back to the ceiling and the breath, and fear has nothing to stand on.

The practice with fear is the same, and it is a great freedom. Find the fear in the body. It is often in the stomach or the chest or the throat, a fluttering, a tightening, a bracing. Allow it. Let it be as big as it wants. Do not tell yourself there is nothing to be afraid of. That is arguing with the feeling, and arguing is resistance. Let the fear be there and watch it.

In one way fear is honest. It lives in the body, and the body does not lie. The tightening in the throat is real. What is not real is what the mind has built on top of it, the whole tower of what will happen next. So do the body's part and leave the tower alone. A fear that is allowed as a sensation, without its story, is a surprisingly small thing. It is a flutter and a bracing, and it passes.

Fear, fully allowed, turns into something else. Under fear there is nearly always desire, because what you fear is losing what you want. And under desire there is life itself, which is not afraid of anything. Let the fear pass and you begin to feel that life moving in you.

And there is this. You have already done a good many things you were afraid of. You got up this morning. You have sat in the waiting room. You have opened this chapter. Each time you do something small that frightened you and find yourself still standing, the fear loses a little of its say over you. Courage is the willingness to act while you are still afraid. You feel it before, as the willingness, and you confirm it after, when you find yourself still standing. The next chapters take you into it.

Fear sometimes asks for a practical answer. There is a bill to open, an appointment to arrange, a question about your quit plan. Give that part one small action and a time to do it. Other fears ask what if, and ask it again after every answer. Remember the paused film in Chapter One: you read another answer on the phone, and still the question comes back, what if every evening feels like this? You can care for what is happening without solving every possible tomorrow.

If the same worry takes the whole day, try giving it a smaller appointment. Note a few words and choose ten minutes later, at a time when you can look at it without rushing. When that time comes, ask whether there is anything useful to do. Make that plan, or let the question remain unanswered for now, and return to the day. You do not need to use all ten minutes, or bring back a worry that has gone. If this becomes another way of circling, leave it and ask for help with a different approach. The purpose is to give life some room, not to get better at worrying.

When the weight does not move

Most feelings, allowed, move. Some do not, and it matters to say so. If the grey has been there for weeks, and the mornings are hard to face, and the practice makes no difference to it, that is no longer a feeling waiting to be let through. It may be a low mood that needs care, and the care exists. Sit in the waiting room. Tell the doctor what the days are like. There is nothing in this guide that a doctor's help gets in the way of, and there is a great deal that goes better with it. The waiting room, with its old magazines and the child playing on the floor, is one of the places where people take their lives back, and nobody sitting in it is weak.

The same is true of grief that does not move, and of fear that has turned into something that wakes you at four and does not let you back to sleep. The practice in this guide is for the feelings that move. When one stays, ask for help with it, and ask early. Asking is the same movement as everything else in this chapter. It is a setting down of the wish to carry everything alone.

Rising

As you release these heavier feelings, one by one, over the days and weeks, you notice a change in the tone of your inner life. The weight lifts. The grey brightens. Cravings that used to feel like emergencies begin to feel like sensations passing through. You may find you have more in you than you expected, because so much of you was going into holding all this down.

You are rising. Nobody is hauling you up. You set down what was holding you under, and you come up on your own, the way a cork does.

A month on, and a year

Shame still comes, on the days when someone mentions it, and guilt still comes, and grief comes at the anniversaries, the way it does for everyone. The difference, a month on and more so a year on, is that you have started to notice the going. What that month and that year look like belongs to the last two chapters of this guide.