Smoking can meet incredibly deep psychological needs for us.

For Regina, smoking was a way for her to feel connected to her mother, and having that connection meant more to her than life itself. Ultimately, Regina followed the call for her to quit for the well-being of her own child and used a system that worked with both her logical and emotional side.

Enjoy Regina’s story here on the You Can Quit Smoking podcast.

Jessi:

Hey everyone, welcome back. I'm here today with Regina. I'm so excited to talk with her. She's such an inspiration and I'd love to learn more about her story with smoking.

So, Regina, thank you for being here. Can you introduce yourself to the audience?


Regina:

Hi, everyone. My name is Regina Louise.

Currently, I work as an emotional and spiritual intelligence coach and I work at the Hoffman process as well as I have my own boutique coaching.

And I am a poet. When I say that, I'm so excited.


Jessi:

Yes, I know it's a new journey for you. So, I think it's really exciting and I'm definitely interested in checking out your work. You got me with a mythopoetic. I was like, "Ooh..”


Regina:

Come on, building that tribe. Thank you, Jessi.


Jessi:

And so, talk to us about smoking. What's your story with smoking?


Regina:

Oh, wow. I grew up with a mother who at her best, she was an itinerant figure in my life. She came in, she came out. She was very non-committed.

And I loved to smell her breath when it was laden with her scotch, her perfume, and her smoke. It was what I could get from her. It's all she had to give. And she would have me go and light her cigarettes. And I would put my mouth where she put hers because I wanted to just get a bit of her.

Even when I would go and light the cigarette for her and bring it back to her, she would say, "You wet my cigarette." And that was my way of saying, "Yeah, now I get to give you the kiss that I would want you to give me." So it was a very deep psychological way of relating to a mother whose love was completely unavailable.

And then because of where that relationship landed me, which was in foster care. So for me, I picked up smoking when I was 14. It felt like the thing to do at that time because the way that I remembered her was, as I said, her smell with her filterless Paul Malls.

So when the opportunity came and my ingroup at that time began smoking, it was easy for me. And then that it was a way to own some of my rebellion and then it became a way to assuage the emptiness of having no one.

My smoking, which I later would recognize, became a way for me to connect to my mother. I would not understand until two decades past the time that I began smoking. So I began, as I said, at 14, I would be in my 30s before I would take action on my relationship with smoking one pack, which led to two packs of Marlboro lights.

I started with Marlboro Reds because I lived in Redding, California, so nobody smoked Kools or Kool longs. You know, it was uncool to do that. But everybody smoked Marlboro lights. So, I was in good company and they weren't as mentholated. They weren't as overwhelming to my system.

So, I smoked as I said for almost three decades and then I got pregnant. I am… am I ashamed? I'm not ashamed to say that I smoked the first trimester. I'm not ashamed to say that because I wasn't informed enough. My addiction, my relationship to smoking wasn't tied to the altruistic relationship of my child and the damage I could do. And I didn't see the connection.

And I quit at the end of my first trimester. I said, "This isn't okay." What led me to that? Maybe my doctor. And when I learned of the complications my child could have, that turned the table and I quit.

After breastfeeding, nursing, when he was maybe two, I began again. I was a single parent and I was bereft of family then, other than my baby. I couldn't hold him accountable for meeting my needs that I didn't even know I had at that time.

But the smoking was a crutch. It was something I had. It was something that again connected me to my mother, connected me to feeling useful, being seen, not so invisible and erased.

And then I went to look for a new apartment. And my son was maybe seven and he collapsed in the apartment. And I thought it must be the varnish in the apartment. It's too strong. But the reality is that my smoking contributed to his asthma. So, he had a life-threatening asthma attack.

And when I got him to the hospital, they accused me of intentional neglect. They said, "These things don't come on all of a sudden.” I didn't know what to say, but I didn't put the cigarette smoke, the secondhand smoke as a contributor or the fact that I had smoked the first trimester. So, I got that and I saw that. And to be accused of intentionally wanting to harm my child was a big wakeup call. But not the biggest.

The biggest would come a year later. So, I stopped smoking around him. And then I didn't know that, oh, maybe even the smell of my hands, my hair, and so forth could cause problems. My son was maybe eight or nine.

He came home and he said, "I want to say goodbye to you now." I'm like, "What? Where are you going?" He said, "Well, you're going to die and you're going to die sooner than all of my friends’ mothers." I'm like, "Well, why am I going to die?" He said, "Because of the smoking." And I said, "Oh, okay."

It was at that moment I took myself and him very seriously. I didn't know how before. I was so bereft as I said earlier of feeling as though I mattered and I could only meet him with what I had where I was. So I made a decision to quit.

At that time I was a hair stylist at Vidal Sassoon in San Francisco and I had a client who was a silver Olympian swimmer. I shared with him the story of what my son said and he said in so many words, "I got you. What I want you to do is go buy two cases of Calistoga Seltzer water."

I'm like, "I don't know if I like that." And he said, "Just do it. Trust me. And then drink it every single time you get that impulse." He said the fizz when it's going down your throat will mimic the sensation of the nicotine. It's about the feeling. And I did that and that helped me in the moment that I said, “No more.”

I would awaken in the morning because I smoked. I followed my pattern. I smoked upon waking. I smoked if I had a drink. So everything that aided and abetted smoking had to go. So in the mornings I replaced drinking coffee, anything that partnered with the smoking had to go. So just a process of elimination.

And then I went to my acupuncturist and she put seeds in my ears that every time I wanted to smoke beyond the seltzer water. I'd press the seed and the seed would numb or sublimate the impulse.

And then I purchased at Pier 39 one of those glass tubes that had in case of emergency break for the cigarette. And I thought I would have to be so desperate to do that. And then I had this gum, nicotine gum, but I knew I would never do that.

So I sort of set up this chain of events. If I couldn't get through to the other side of the impulse of the habit, then I would prove that to myself by breaking the glass of that solitary cigarette that was probably hundred years old and smoke that. And that would be the epitome of, “You've got to be kidding.” Like that would define my desperation.

So I set up this system. It would start with water and I just be with that, be with the feelings. If I needed to escalate it, then I would escalate it with the seeds in my ear. And then if I needed to escalate that, I would go to nicotine. But instead of nicotine, I just began chewing regular gum. Nicotine would be that next stage.

I never got to the nicotine Jessi because every morning when I awakened, I thought about my sweet baby. I thought about his lungs. I thought about what it might feel like for him to become motherless because my addiction, my habit was more important than me, which would affect him. And that's not the legacy I wanted to build for him.

And then to know he would have no one. His father would obviously step in. But from his the maternal line, there'd be no one. And I could not in good conscious due to him what I was barely surviving. I wanted my mother more than I wanted life. And smoking at that point in my understanding and my innocently untutored mind was the best substitution.

And giving it up, I quit around the 1984 Olympics, something around that time. I never looked back. And you can say I quit cold turkey because I never hemmed in hard. I just made a decision.

And I sat with, “What does it mean to believe in God even? What does it mean to believe in something greater and stronger? What does it mean to have dominion over one's actions and oneself?” And so along with the guard rails I'd set up and along with the curiosity of, “What would it look like, feel like, be in relationship with power. with true power? To face the habit and the addiction?”

You know, I study in the work I do. I read Gabor Mate, In the Realm of the Hungry Ghost, and different authors and Buddhist perceptions and precepts. And addiction is a way to have connection. It's seeking connection. And that's what I was seeking.

I was a little girl who grew up into a young woman who had a child who I knew enough to know it wasn't his job to complete me or to fill me up. So I never used him for that. So the smoking was my crutch and then all that comes up with becoming a new mother. So that's my story.


Jessi:

Well, that's incredible. And I love how there's a mix there in your tactic. You're dealing with some of the practical aspects of it, like, “Hey, we got to change habits. I need a replacement.” Just kind of with the nitty-gritty of it.

But also you're working with something deeper there, the emotional drive to smoke. And allowing yourself to have feelings, sitting with those feelings, sitting with the pain, honestly. And so, I just have a real respect for that because I feel like it can be hard if we just rely on the practical aspects without going to the deeper needs.

And so I'm wondering, I know with your work now, you're doing these emotional coaching. You've done a lot of healing from the traumas you've been through. You know, it sounds like you're still on that road. It's never over.

But I'm wondering at that time, how did you start dealing with all those feelings? Because a lot of times when we quit smoking, we've suppressed a lot of anger. We've suppressed a lot of sadness. And that comes boiling up to the surface. It looks like grief. So, how did you care for yourself in that way with your emotions?


Regina:

What a beautiful multi-textured question. I didn't know that I was going through disenfranchised grief, right? No one to sanction what I'd lost because it was so invisible. Or ambiguous loss, right? Sure, I came from people, but where were these people to even validate that I was their kin?

So, in the absence of all of that and letting go of the smoking, I began to feel a lot like way more than I thought I would ever be capable of holding. And I learned and taught myself I need to increase my window of tolerance here.

I employed a therapist so that I could come back into my body. Because of course all of these behaviors, they rendered me disembodied. I have to learn how to make my body, the soma, a safe place to be.So part of that breaking up with my smoking habit was learning how to inhabit my body.

If I unpack this mythopoetically, this was less about a young girl smoking and more about a young girl hungrily, desperately trying to find something symbolically to keep her connected, to keep her on the planet, to keep me her connected to something that matter, some reason why my existence at that time warranted an existence. And learning to love what was so ruthlessly and unconsciously rejected. Learning to work with the rejection.


Jessi at midroll:

Before we get back to the rest of the story, I want to speak to the pregnant moms listening. If you are navigating the stress of pregnancy while trying to stay smoke-free, please know you don’t have to do it alone.

I created The Heart Within Sponsorship as a completely free, safe space for you to find emotional resources and community support. You can join us today by visiting honoryourheart.net.

Now, let's get back to today's show.


Regina:

And ultimately, I began to write. I began to write the feelings. And I then, you know, there's a film about my life.


Jessi:

It's great.


Regina:

Yeah. And I have four books and now this upcoming poetry collection.


Jessi:

Yeah. I was really inspired by the film. Just having that little window... I'm sure it's not to a tee, but just that little window into the power that you came into is so inspiring and against all odds.

And I think that just goes to show like with the quitting smoking. Because you were talking about your relationship with power then getting past that habit. Like you've gone through hard things and you went through this hard thing and it keeps preparing you. Did you…


Regina:

I have to interrupt you. I'm sorry Jessi. Did you have an emotion like two sentences ago? Did you run into an emotion by any chance? I just want to ask.


Jessi:

Excitement.


Regina:

Yeah, I felt it and I thought, “Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. I’ve got to see that and acknowledge what just came into the room.” So, thank you.


Jessi:

Yeah. I just I get really excited by what you've been through. And because I think a lot of us, we want to avoid struggle and it really can help us come back into who we really are underneath all the conditioning, all the things we've been through. But like that true essence of who we are and what we came to bring into the world.

And I just wanted to know if you wanted to speak more on resilience. You kind of touched on it with quitting smoking. Do you think that quitting smoking gave you more resilience? Did it give you more compassion? Like what kind of gifts came out of that that experience for you?


Regina:

Well, the way that I define resilience is recognizing that although one can be stretched, pulled, pummeled, there is always the capacity of the human spirit to return to baseline seemingly unscathed. Resilience offers us the opportunity to come back home to the self, and that's important.

What I've had to learn in my journey is I've had to become my own safe harbor. And it's taken me 60 plus years to figure that out. What is a safe harbor? What is that? And for me, it is to know that I no longer have to outsource home. I no longer outsource belonging.

I have tapped into, emboldened and curated a refuge, if you will, of resilience within me. And so that's where I go when things become challenging as they do. I mean, this is life, right? And things don't always go as planned. To have the temerity and the desire and the relationship with consciousness whereas I know that this or something better is always possible. I think that's the power of resilience.

The elasticity of resilience in and of itself is applicable in every faction of life. We can use that idea that what comes up must go down. Some people who think about karma which I don't spend a lot of energy in, there's that return no matter. So I think what's most important to me and where I put my energy and what has currency for me is the willingness to begin again. I think that too is resilience.

I respect Buddhism and mindfulness, vipassana, mindfulness, meditation. And so I tend to trend towards that type of thinking. And with that, I know that resilience is everywhere pretty much all the time as long as the opportunity to begin again is there.


Jessi:

Speaking on that aspect of renewal, was there a change in your relationship with your son? I know it's kind of personal, but did you feel like something shifted between you when you quit smoking?


Regina:

I think it's all personal, right? Sure. He thought it was cool and from there everything became competitive around that because I grew up in foster care. There was no way I could finish college. And so he found a way to even fold school into the mix. “Okay, so you quit smoking. What's the next thing you can complete? What's the next thing you can do?”

And so in this journey I ended up returning to school to college in my 50s and I graduated before him summa cum laude. So that's the nature of the relationship. And then of course I went on to get my masters as did he. And again I completed before him because you know traditionally that's what parents are to do.

So it's been just respect. It's really emblematic of the respect I had to learn to have for myself and in return I could extend that to him. And that just creates safety in the relationship. It creates stability. It creates a sense of agency.

I want my son to know what I think are the tenants of resilience: I can, I have, I am. So what I exhibited is that I can face a habit. I have the internal strength to confront it, to make it non-negotiable. And I am able enough, empowered enough to have my “No” land with dignity.


Jessi:

I'm curious, was that the first time you had attempted to quit?


Regina:

No. When I was pregnant with him, the end of the first trimester, I quit.


Jessi:

Okay right. So, just those two times. Wow.


Regina:

Mhm. And then the last time was, “I'm done.” Think about Glen Close and The Devil Wears Prada when she looks over her glasses and says, “That's all.” That was my relationship with the smoking. That's all.


Jessi:

That's amazing. And yeah,I love that kind of power.

So, I'm wondering for someone that's in the struggle right now. Maybe they've been wanting to quit, but they've been hesitant to make that change. They know it's going to be difficult. They don't know what they're going to do to regulate themselves, to keep themselves calm, to keep themselves focused, to have that time for themselves away from whatever stresses they have going on in life. So, what kind of words of advice would you have for somebody that feels like they really rely on smoking to get by in the world?


Regina:

I think you said something quite salient when I heard you say they know it's going to be difficult. They know that it'll be a challenge. So all of that I never thought of it that way.

I thought of it more of the inverse. How every day I am going to move towards releasing this. I never split my attention to be this is going to be hard but. There were no caveats.

This was about empowerment for me. And so there's no negotiating with the lowhanging fruit for me. So the lowhanging fruit for me would be to bump up against my perceived limitation. So for me smoking was less about negotiating with the smoking act itself as a particular kind of perpetrator or something that had power over me. It was more about how do I step into my power to make my word have power.

So for me it was less about arm wrestling with a habit and it was about having dominion over my right to have a choice and to exercise power. So it was about blowing life and energy and value into a decision I'd made.


Jessi:

Those reframes are so powerful. That's all it takes is looking a little differently and suddenly that seems insurmountable can be simple and clear.

Regina:

Even the shifting of the perception has a weightiness to it, Jessi. But there's this incredible podcast that I had to honor being interviewed and his name is Eric Zimmer and that podcast is The One You Feed. So do we feed the one that renders us a helpless victim or do we feed the one that holds, offers, feeds our liberation?


Jessi:

Beautiful. And we've kind of mentioned it but can you talk more about your book, your upcoming poetry book and how people can get in touch with you? Anything you want to say about your work and share with us?


Regina:

Yeah right. As I said, I work with executives in my private boutique coaching and I work with them around, I'm going to say radical emotional and spiritual intelligence. And you can find me on my website at www.therealreginalouise.com.

On Instagram I am @therealreginalouise and Facebook. I use Instagram mostly Facebook. I’m starting to build Tik Tok with my poetry.

So my poetry wow… in the same way that I've learned to cultivate a theory of mind, if you will, around agency, authorship, sovereignty, I took my background, some of the experiences I had a three-year old ago relationship, and I synthesized it through what I'm calling a mythopoetic framework.

Through that mythopoetic framework, I took all the things that people projected on me. Whether that is, “I am not a valuable human because of the color of my skin. I am insignificant because of my social status. Because I was born to teenagers, my human tenure is illegitimate.” I could go on and on and on about the ways in which socially, culturally, implicitly, other people's opinions of me have caught my spirit up, have caught my sense of myself up, have moved the line, if you will, of my own decency and humanity out of reach of myself. Oh, I'm done with that.

So the mythopoetic allows me to turn and go, "Oh my gosh, I was but a child. I was innocent. No one wanted me or claimed me." And I had to figure out how to be both a child and an adult simultaneously. And how that informed my friend choices. It informed my so-called love language. So if I had to turn and look at it, “Oh, my love language is toxic. Yay! Okay. So no, that's no longer going to work for me.”

So this has offered me an opportunity to be the mother, the aunt, the sister, the cousin, the father, the brother, the uncle, the grandmother, the aunt that I never had. This particular collection, a mythopoetic reclamation of love. It's had to be earned by denouncing the ladylike postures that say, "Turn the other cheek." Oh my god, I've turned my cheeks so much. I feel like a living disco ball, right? [laughter]


Jessi:
[laughter]


Regina:

You know, I'm about supporting people to identify ways of behaving that no longer serve.Turning the other cheek no longer serves. So, it's taking some of the admonitions that I learned as a child and recognizing where do these no longer serve me? Where does this render me helpless, a victim, a martyr, a people pleaser, toxically codependent?

Some of these admonitions lead to that type of ladylike posturing. So, I had to let go because had I not, I would have never been able to leave a toxic relationship because it requires me to be a victim. It required me to be half of a woman and to forget my power and to make it all about that other person. cooing them, holding them, loving them, sewing them back together.

So, let me just say about my book of poems. They will go on pre-sale July 14th and people can go to bookshop.org as well as Amazon. And then the book actually launches September 1st. I'm so excited, Jessi.


Jessi:

Yeah, that's a huge deal. And I love how you speak on the healing nature of writing and that's such a way to connect to ourselves and to face some of those parts that we don't necessarily like, we don't want to see what’s been in the shadows for so long.

And I think all of us can relate to that, to patterns we took on for survival and are trying to overcome to live fully and to reach our highest potential.


Regina:

There it is. That's the work I do with people: help them uncover those patterns so that they can rediscover who they really are beneath all of that which is humans worthy of dignity.


Jessi:

Yes. Well, I appreciate your work so much and I really value coming on here and sharing vulnerably. You put a lot out there, things that people are afraid to say and I think that it's gonna be the perfect medicine for somebody. And it resonates with me as well.

So, thank you so much for coming on and speaking your truth with us.


Regina:

You are awesome.


Jessi:

[laughter] All right. Well, thank you again and take care everyone. We'll see you next week.



End of Interview

Breaking the generational cycle of smoking can be tough, but our children can be our greatest motivation.

Becky grew up in a household of smokers and always saw it as a completely normal part of life. But as she built a family of her own, she realized smoking was getting in the way, and she decided to make a change. She never could have guessed the importance of that choice in her life unexpectedly unfolded, or just how significantly it would impact her relationships.

Hear Becky’s story on episode 10 of You Can Quit Smoking.