I smoked daily for ten years until recently (I quit on Halloween). I definitely used weed to escape/ dissociate from all the emotional pain I felt from my childhood. But when I first started I was just a teenager trying to connect with "friends" and be cool. I started smoking with this girl who was in several of my classes, and then started skipping to school to smoke with her and going to school high all the time. Probably not the best influence for me, but I was being abused and it was nice to do something to distract myself from the abusive situation I was in at home. But my response to weed changed over the years once I left home and started gaining self-awareness and learning to accept that my childhood was traumatic. It went from silly hang out time to stress reducer to dissociation and avoidance tool.
For the past couple of years as a daily smoker, when I woke up in the morning I would smoke a bowl on my patio pretty much first thing. The weed would trigger a sort of primal fear in me and send me into an emotional flashback within the first few minutes of smoking it. I would have a good cry and let my mind wander to the most fucked up aspects of my childhood to ruminate and I would grieve for my inner child and all the bullshit I put up with from having such a cold and terrifying environment to grow up in. Other times, I would let my inner critic run wild instead and tell myself how guilty I should feel for working on myself and that my abusers were right about me all along. I shouldn't be trying to re-write my own story and own the truth about my traumatic past. "It wasn't as bad as I think it was. Or, my parents were abused too and didn't know how to treat me. Or maybe [insert shitty excuse for abuse here]."
I tried for a long time to quit, but it was really hard. This had been my life for a decade. I kept wanting to smoke every time I attempted to quit, and would inevitably give in every time I tried. My therapist finally brought it up with me, and honestly them bringing it up and asking about my weed habit all the time irritated me and I finally decided I would give it a more honest try. Maybe if I quit they'd shut up about it. Plus I had a feeling that it was going to be a good thing to quit, and I was pretty curious to compare how I would feel without weed in my system.
So on Halloween I hid all my weed stuff out of sight and gave it my best shot and it stuck. I told my spouse to help me this time, which was important I think. Having support helps. Whenever I felt the strong pull to smoke weed, I tried meditation instead. I sat down and closed my eyes and just started counting my breath to 10 over and over again. I reminded myself that I can do this, that it's going to be okay, and that the feeling of helplessness and the need to be smoking weed in that moment would pass. And it did. I am not a daily smoker anymore. I have smoked I think 4 times since Halloween and it's always ended up being terrifying and really unhelpful.
The biggest difference I noticed after a couple of weeks sober is the amount of clarity I feel while not smoking weed all day every day. Weed really does put you into a fog. Being out of the fog is really exciting at first once you realize the huge contrast between weed fog and clarity. But after awhile that excitement fades. I'd report that these days I don't have as many emotional flashbacks and as much rumination, but I feel numbness instead. I dissociate in other ways and try not think about the pain and sadness. I am still pretty helpless. I still have trouble with anger. I feel like I've become slightly more passive aggressive and apathetic since quitting weed. But these are things I am working on in therapy and it's going well. I think feeling these things is better than what I felt while smoking weed all day. I feel the clarity still, and I hope my life can be a little more active in 2019. I am like the definition of "freeze response" and daily weed was keeping me glued to that constant state of freeze, and I finally feel like there is a way out, even if it's still a long difficult road.
TLDR: quitting weed has been an overall positive thing for my recovery, but it's hard finding new ways to cope with pain after a decade of being a heavy pot head.