Dealing with upsupportive friends

Dealing with Unsupportive Friends

It's best not to expect or ask for much help from the unsupportive people on your list. They may include unsympathetic nonsmokers or ex-smokers who try too much to impose their own views on ways to quit.

Dealing with smokers may take extra effort. You may want to point out that just because you're quittting doesn't mean they have to. The decision to quit is a personal one. Let them know that they can help in other ways, by:

never offering you a cigarette, even in a kidding way,
not smoking around you, especially when you are trapped (like in the car, or at the dinner table), and
understanding if you need to stay away from smoking events you used to share with them for a while after you quit (lunch in smoking sections, your weekly card game).

Maybe spouses who smoke agree to change their smoking habits in small ways. They don't mind limiting their smoking to a certain room of the house and keeping their cigarettes and matches with them rather than lying around. Most smokers find it easy to make some rooms smoke free. It's helpful if others can avoid smoking in your bathroom or bedroom. Don't be surprised, if six months after you quit, your smoking friends may confess their envy and admiration and ask you how you did it!

There are two elements of friendship. One is truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere... The other is tenderness."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Back One Page

Forward One Page

© 1989, 1995, 1997 Fox Chase Cancer Center
© 2001The Smoking Research Program, James P. WIlmot Cancer Center and Department of Community and Preventive Medicine, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry