Gamblers questions: Why am I too stingy to treat myself nicely yet I keep ‘splashing’ on gambling & how does this hold me back in my recovery?

I will be doing a mini-series of addicted gamblers’ commonly asked question. A lot of the behaviours that are observable in recovering gamblers may seem strange and conflicted.

I therefore wanted to comment on some of the confusing behaviours that problem gamblers tend to take part in and how and why they may interfere with recovery. 

This can be helpful both for yourself who gamble but also for those who live with you. 

This week’s question:

 Why am I too stingy to treat myself nicely yet I keep ‘splashing’ on gambling & how does this hold me back in my recovery?

A paradoxical behaviour that is commonly observed and queried amongst treatment seeking gamblers, is the more general relationship to money, that often appears to differ drastically to how the gambler relates to money during spells of gambling. 

Being a recovering gambling addict does for most people imply a level of financial restrictions, for example someone monitoring finances, repayments of debts and considerably less money available overall. For this reason it is perfectly understandable that the average problem gambler might act with caution when it comes to spending money. This is appropriate and important, both as a show of respect to those around you and as a way of re-learning the value of money.  

But what’s going on with those (and this is many!) who are outright being stingy towards themselves and sometimes also towards others around them, while still ending up gambling hard when an opportunity arises.  For example; turning down ideas of a lunch out, an evening at the cinema, a membership at the gym- all for the reason of ‘needing to save money’. I am fully aware that at the time that the excuses are being issued-these same guys do believe that they will save the money. What they don’t foresee is the longer term consequence of all of this holding back..

Some guys I’ve met with have been so ‘tight’ that they cannot imagine themselves renewing an item of clothing in their wardrobes let alone dream of a weekend away somewhere.  This in itself is perhaps not problematic but by the time this same guy is found shoving pounds down a slot machine as though money was growing in his pockets – it sure begins to raise some eyebrows!  

If you are one of these people who habitually hold back on spending on the good stuff in life; only to later lose it all to gambling, then this post is for you. Just to clarify though, it is also not a post about becoming a frivolous and careless spender. It is a post about understanding why finding a balanced relationship with spending is important. After all, what is the point in working really hard to make money. Try desperately to ‘save’ by not treating yourself to good stuff, yet month after month ending up with zero pounds to show for it. It becomes both foolish and painful.

Let’s take a look at some of the excuses that people use that maintains this negative spiral

‘I don’t deserve good stuff after the bad I’ve done’

‘I can’t afford it’

‘at this point I have to use the money to repay things instead of spending on new stuff’

‘how is it going to look if I treat myself after what I’ve done to the finances…’

It is understandable that spending, in any form at all, has become associated with pain and shame.  This is however not an entirely useful piece of programming, as it will prevent you from spending on things that actually make you and others feel good (and feeling good will protect you from gambling). 

Other people around you might further reinforce the notion of you being undeserving of rewards due to the damage you inflicted. Although they may be quite justified in feeling this way, you have to consider what implications your self-deprivation will ultimately have on them too.  It is tough to communicate this to clients as well as to their loved ones; but the recovery has to come first!          All other parts of the relationship and financial wellbeing will still be hinging on your abstinence from gambling, hence a failure to prioritise it may act like the first brick falling in domino…

Why is this paradoxical behaviour problematic in my recovery?

Suppose you continue to be in recovery but continuously do not agree to treat yourself to anything enjoyable or rewarding- what do you think will happen then?  

We have talked in the past about the role of rewards for a recovering addict of any kind and how the brain in the early days after you start your recovery will be particularly ‘hungry’ for something that satisfies the urge that still remains from having so suddenly stopped engaging in the addiction.  Whilst you are long term looking to wean yourself off of this constant dependency on rewards, it is still important to recognise that we all need to feel excited, have fun, feel cared for and enjoy a sense of reward when we do well. This is also a completely normal part of life. It’s just that life does not come with ‘hits’ of the kind you may have got from the gambling on any regular level. This is also not necessary to feel good in life. Most gamblers will resonate strongly with a feeling of having ‘free money’; a concept that relates to the money accrued from a win which doesn’t actually feel like real spending, because you won it.   Let’s not even begin to do the maths on this topic, since I believe you all know that the free money was never free in the first place. By the time your net is a loss- let us recognise that this was more about how it felt in the fraction of time that you thought you had that money. It was only ever about chasing a feeling. 

A large part of gambling addiction is based on the addictiveness of the intermittent reward schedule delivered by the gambling itself – hence to think that this same psychological underpinning does not play a role in recovery would be very strange. We need to continue to operate with your self-delivered rewards when you go into recovery.

In summary: We need to feel rewarded now and then – but we need to look for healthy and harmless ways of fulfilling this need!!

First let’s look at it from the other angle; if we fail to treat ourselves as a person deserving of good things, what is then likely to happen?

You can try to look over your own history and see if you can answer this question from a personal experience perspective.  If you can’t connect with it; I can tell you what happens from the experiences I have witnessed in therapy with recovering gamblers who refuse or do not see the importance of stepping it up for themselves. People return to the gambling again.  Living a life that is entirely lacking in ‘pick-me-ups’ and nice treatment of yourself (particularly when such is a direct illustration of lacking self-love and self-respect) is just not a life that makes sense for people. It only takes a few weeks of that type of lifestyle for the recovering person to start having thoughts like ‘actually…..I felt better when I still gambled’. Although this way of romanticizing the days of gambling is clearly biased and inaccurate, you can kind of understand how it, on some level, may feel like this.

So how do we go about gradually changing this relationship with money and feel safe in using it as a way of rewarding oneself?

Training your brain to do good for you

Try for a second to imagine that your brain was not attached to your body and it was this separate little entity – almost like a pet- that you needed to train. It lives in a little cage in your house.  As you can imagine – you would need to SHOW that little creature that when it does well and succeed, you need to give him/her a display that the behaviour was a desired one that we would like to see repeated.   If you don’t do that, there is a heightened risk that the little creature will break out of the cage and go after whatever goodies they can get its little paws on. These goodies might not belong to him/her and will most certainly not be good for it, but it is a direct result of you not having fed it to start with. You are now dealing with a desperate, hungry and dissatisfied little creature and this one is not going to be settling for a little snack. It’s going to want to feast hard, since it may not be every day that it is taking a walk outside of the cage. 

Do you see the parallel?  This is very much an illustration of how our minds may turn against ourselves when we try to deprive it of it’s natural needs.  Your job as the owner of this pet is to teach it a good and natural relationship with money related goods again. The relationship that perhaps was never there, or perhaps was once in place but got totally destroyed by too many years of gambling.

During your years of gambling history, you would have been overfeeding your little brain-pet all the wrong foods at all the wrong times. You might have had him starving for long periods of time, only to then allow him to feast on empty calories through the gambling once ‘it’ broke out of the cage. It won’t know the worth of what it is getting, neither will it know what brings the right kind of nourishment vs what constitutes as poison. You have to teach it!  When you are now dedicating yourself to train it correctly – you cannot just leave it sit in the cage and give it nothing. Particularly not when it is trying so hard to show up on best behaviour. You have to reward it to make it understand that it is indeed more of this that we want!!

 A lot of people with gambling addiction are struggling with low or non-existent self-worth. Remember that gambling is rarely going to be an activity that makes you feel good in the longer term and hence the more you keep returning against your own will and better judgment; the worse you are likely to feel about yourself.  Asking a person who feels like crap about themselves to go out and treat themselves nicely is like asking people to hand over all their gold to a person they hate and distrust. It will be difficult. Remember that in this case though, you are trying to re-establish and more trusting, loving and kind relationship with yourself. In doing so, you don’t hand over all the gold right at the same time. You need to get yourself used to both giving and receiving. Small acts of kindness, small gifts and rewards, little treats here and there etc.  It might be helpful to plan them out in advance in order to strengthen the connection with the ‘good behaviour’ itself.  You can make an entire reward chart – much like the golden star ones you might have used with your children- but here featuring your desired behaviours and the rewards that you will give yourself. 

 Good luck and do send me your questions if you want them answered in the blog!