Why do I keep returning to gambling when it hurts me? Uncovering and resolving your deep-seated motivations to gamble

Try to stop gambling before you soul search

Treatment of gambling addiction is a process that covers a lot of different areas. In the early days, the aim is to put a stop to gambling. Even at this point many clients object and feel that it would be less abrupt to start doing ‘everything else right’ and then save the quitting for last. I can understand that reasoning. Sometimes I even collaborate with this approach in cases where the client’s attempt to quit just don’t seem to be successful for one reason or another. It also happens that those gamblers who are a little less compulsive in their engagement can be successful at quitting as a by-product of starting to engage more healthily in other areas of life.  Having witnessed both approaches, on balance I still advocate the ‘quitting first’ approach.

Just stopping gambling does not automatically result in recovery

The main reason it works better to quit first is that continued gambling will likely interfere with any steps of progress you make in other areas of life. On the reverse, stopping can often act as a catalyst for growth and change. However, you will need to prompt that process along yourself. The mere fact of stopping does not equate to recovery. Many of you would be able to testify that the ‘quitting only’ approach to gambling does not lead to a joyful life. This is because life is more than just ‘not gambling’. It is however a really great start on the basis of which you can begin to build a much healthier foundation and continue to enrich your life in other ways.

Taking a look at the ‘function’ gambling has once filled - with a disclaimer

Something that I have witnessed many times is gamblers entering treatment and being more invested in finding out ‘why’ they gamble than they are in taking actual steps to quit.  Wanting to understand why one continues to engage in self-harm on the wallet, psyche and general wellbeing is very understandable.

Understanding the deeper reasons why you gamble holds some of the keys to living a life free of gambling and compulsion in the long term.

It also equips you with a crucial understanding of what your unmet needs are so that you can begin to heal properly. That said, it does not make any sense to start embarking on a past-time or in-depth exploration of those motivations before the gambling itself has come to a full stop.

 I would instead recommend that you stop first (or at least do as much as you can to reduce it even if you are finding yourself drawn back like a magnet). Once this step has been achieved, it makes plenty of sense to start understanding the WHYs...

Although there are good reasons not to talk too much about any possible ‘upsides’ that gambling once had, it would be naive to think that the addiction would give way without attempting to understand some of the reasons it got such a foothold in the first place. Do mind that powerful memories of wins paired with other positive functions it might have appeared to have at some stage, can make for triggering material. As I am sure you know, triggers can act like a minefield during the recovery process. If you are still feeling vulnerable and have all routes to gambling still open- please stop reading now and make sure you take steps to safeguard yourself first. 

 Why do I gamble? A deep dive into the psyche

You will probably agree that many triggers are better off avoided. Gambling venues, money, stags to Las Vegas, trips to Cheltenham or sporadic pop-ins to the bookies are all ones that you should avoid like the plague.   On the other hand, attempts to avoid every single part of the gambling, including thoughts, feelings, memories, and the functions it once filled – will lead you down the route of white-knuckle abstinence -or towards your next auto-piloted relapse.

This may feel as though you quit gambling, but the feeling is still one of ‘surviving the day’ as opposed to living a proper life. Additionally, you will live with the niggling feelings that underneath the relatively calm surface where you are scraping by not gambling, there is an earthquake brewing.

Unresolved matters will eventually surface unless dealt with- and without awareness they will continue to run the show

Actually Living life requires presence and a feeling of being able to choose our actions. When living as though gambling is only a difficult moment away, you will most definitely not feel like you are enjoying yourself.  In order for us to dare to be present and work actively to increase self-awareness– we need to be willing to discover not just the good, but also the bad. It requires a very honest look at our lives, traumas, the pitfalls and to be prepared to be accountable emotionally all the way.

People with active addictions tend to think that this is a step that can be conquered via some handy short-cuts.  Without sounding terribly depressing- there is no shortcut to getting to know yourself and understanding why you are who you are. There is also nobody else that can deal with your situation at this point other than yourself. Regardless of whom or what might have been implicated in the reasons that lead you here. It is going to take a little time but, trust me, it will all be worth it. 

It is uncomfortable to look inside ourselves

Some of the reasons why people with addiction tend to have a reluctance to ‘attend’ internally are

A) they never slowed down enough to check what is happening. Addiction to whatever it may be is based on the concept of instant gratification and acts as a quick fix.

B) because early trauma and emotional damage have resulted in a fear of the inner world. Just choosing to look the other way, unfortunately, does not equate to deactivating our inner wounds and the power they hold over our behaviours and feelings.

Ignoring the parts of the gambling that were an attempt to remedy something difficult, is going to take you further from a resolution and reinforce a feeling of discomfort with yourself.

Gambling as emotional avoidance

Even if you don’t quite identify with the idea of deliberately avoiding your inner world, you might recognise that it feels instinctual for you to put your attention elsewhere whenever discomfort arises. Particularly to things that are highly pre-occupying.  Here is where gambling may have acted as a powerful distraction and in many cases a way to dissociate from emotional pain.

Dopamine and the drive to repeat behaviours

Emotional avoidance is facilitated by the dopamine release that gambling provides. Something that in turn increases your focus on the activity at hand and ‘makes’ you want to continue to seek out the behaviour that is able to produce this feeling of ‘pleasure’. This causes a little behaviour loop where you continue to seek out gambling because it feels good (or at least it feels less painful) and the very fact that you are engaging with it creates an even stronger urge to do more of it.  Little does your reward-centre in the brain care about the ramification or aftermaths. It cares about prolonging the feeling only- at the expense of you getting stuck in a gambling trance!

Humans are programmed to seek out activities that produce dopamine since the beginning of time and hence, in this respect, you are doing something that ‘makes sense’ biologically. The problem is that the context makes no sense at all and the behaviour is causing you damage!!  

The trance you find yourself in when gambling does not have anything to do with healing, understanding yourself or learning alternative behaviours that could act to replace the gambling long term. It is simply keeping you stuck on repeat. To keep avoiding, distracting and seeking out more ‘pleasure’ (or excitement) so that you can feel good temporarily or at least less bad.    

 

It is ok if you once loved gambling… but don’t forget to be honest with yourself about the damage it has caused too

Gambling often acts as a surrogate for a whole host of functions.

Common ones are:

• -          A way to numb emotions or avoid problems in life

• -          A way to emotionally escape from painful memories, traumatic experiences or negative feelings

• -          A way to lift mood (short-term)

• -          Something to do-

• -          a challenge that stimulates the competitive side and

• -          something that provides powerful feelings of euphoria and excitement

• -          ‘a friend in need’ and a filler of loneliness

• -          A community

• -          A way to procrastinate when other things feel too strenuous

• -          HOPE for a better future

*this list only covers a small number of all the different functions it tends to fill.

Although tempting, please accept that you will waste your time in contemplating ‘whether or not gambling again would ever be worthwhile..’. 

It won’t. Once the control has been lost, it will not be coming back.

Once the gambling has taken on the properties of an addiction (which likely it has since you are reading this text) the shift is for life. It is like bereaving a relationship that felt great but then turned bad. Regardless of how good it once was, you can not choose to disregard the fact that it turned bad- you still need to let it go and move on. If the final results were bad, you need to trust that this matters too. A repeat of the damage should not be required to remind you. Theoretically, you probably know this already. Emotionally- this knowledge will typically lag until you get some real-life experience of being free from gambling. Another reason why you must quit now!

Learning more about yourself is not a negative thing. The obsession with gambling has likely shielded you from many of the factors that make for a genuinely happy existence.  Now it is time to learn more about those!

Not taking any steps towards understanding your personal motivations to gamble means that you will risk facing plenty of situations where you are suddenly ‘overcome’ with feelings of intense longing, urges and complete disbelief as to how your recent hatred and disappointment for the gambling could suddenly turn you into a nostalgia tripping dreamer that finds every excuse to make gambling seem like harmless fun.

 The brain & the deluding feelings involved with gambling

Our emotional brain works in interesting ways.  Without attempting a lecture on neuroscience, it is worth remembering that it is the emotional part of the brain that drives your addiction and generates impulses to return – even at times when your logical self knows full well that it could be the end of the road for you.  Your brain was not born with an addiction to gambling. The very fact that you are human means that you can learn about your own feelings and understand how to unhook yourself from them- as opposed to letting them enslave you to do more damage to yourself.

There is no doubt that there are some genetic components as well as temperaments, levels of impulsivity and a range of other underlying vulnerabilities that make some people more susceptible to developing gambling problems. Despite all that, you also would have liked and enjoyed gambling in the very early days and although you may not feel it now- it is still highly relevant. It means that your particular brain ‘warms’ to the feeling of gambling which therefore makes it a very poor choice of activity for you given its highly addictive properties.

At this point, the features of gambling that you might have liked are now outweighed by negatives.  The control has been lost and you are not able to enjoy it – that is the bottom line and all actions that follow must be taken with this in mind.

However, letting go of something that we have liked a lot- even when it is currently showing up as harmful- is easier said than done.  In the short-term, the ‘letting go’ (which in gambling addiction equates to cutting losses and quitting gambling) is often facilitated by reminding ourselves of how hurtful and difficult activity has been. 

The damage that gambling has given rise to is literally in your face- which can act as a culprit to stop. During this time, you have a strong emotional connection to the negative memories of gambling. You don’t even have to think too hard to remember the pain that it caused, the faces of your loved ones that found out or to notice the catastrophic financial situation that it has paved the way for.

The bias of your emotional connection to gambling

You wonder whether you can just ‘bottle the feeling up’ and open it for a little sniff whenever you have a craving in the future. In the clinics I have worked, anything from flashcards, to shopping lists of consequences have been used to help deter an urge. Even ‘memorabilia’ of the tragedy caused by gambling, such as collections of withdrawal receipts or bank statements or a journal entry from that time when you couldn’t buy food for your kids because you had blown your funds in the betting shop.  to If it only was so easy. I like these ideas and completely support the idea that these strategies are helpful to a certain extent.  When an urge emerges, it can force you to ‘see the story out’ and be reminded of the damage. If you are lucky, it actually changes the feelings too and you might notice that a feeling of desire suddenly changes to one of being put off.  This is ideal.

Overtime – the connection to the negative feelings associated with gambling starts to fade.  Not only does the negative feelings get more difficult to access, but the entire narrative of the gambling-past is frequently reconstructed. Now with a serious touch of glamour-filter and deletion of the inconvenient truths that often was the gambling disorder.  The thoughts have changed. The feelings have changed.  Even the memory is selective. This makes for a very dangerous situation, and many gamblers simply do not have enough going in their lives at this point to resist the compulsion to return for another roll of the dice.  Literally.

It is at this point that I would suggest that letting go fully may require slightly different skills and often a deeper act of surrender.    

Unconscious repetition compulsion

‘The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, he acts it out, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it .... Sigmund Freud

How can we then stop ‘badly programmed’ memories from giving us a disproportionately good feeling that triggers us to want to return to the scene of the crime? How can you override a compulsion that is so strong that gambling in the moment appears like a sensible thing to do?

Without having any other similarity to a gambler, think about how serial killers return to the crime scene to relive the sensations experienced during the horrors of what they have done. This behaviour is sometimes described in psychoanalytic (Freudian) terms as a way of ‘acting out’ an unconscious repetition compulsion- frequently a re-enactment of early trauma etc.

it is important to recall that that gambling represents so much more than just what you can ‘see’ on the surface. Underneath the behaviour, there may be (and will be for those of you who identify as deeply addicted to gambling) a strong, psychologically driven compulsion.

Trauma and the trapped Vampires

Your clever brain is manifesting an external scenario (that runs on repeat) in order to help guide you towards a solution for inner healing. The minute that you can grasp this fully- the compulsion will start to lose its power over you.

Rather than following through and compounding the pain, you can begin to see what you need to give yourself to start your healing. You will otherwise be continuing to ‘act out’ while your little brain is hoping that something will click into place as it reexperiences the trauma in an attempt to process it ‘properly’. If your psyche keeps drawing you back to something that results in more pain- simply trust that you have some trapped feelings that need to be taken care of.

You are your own best healer and by operating from a place of self-compassion you can allow yourself to stay present with these feelings and disallow them from dictating your behaviours. The first step towards processing is a simple acknowledgement of the feelings. By choosing to stay with the feelings and taking steps towards validating your experience of them, the processing and healing can begin.

Think about them like little trapped vampires that are energised by the hollow darkness that you provide inside of you when you never visit them. Bring them out in the light and try to caress them then watch them run for cover - leaving you in peace with yourself and with an inner cage that can now be fit for more positive creatures.

Trauma and repressed feelings that keep luring you back in

Like an infection that will arise if something is left inside of the wound, traumas can leave unprocessed, repressed and trapped emotions behind. You will feel compelled to return to the scene of the crime until you decide to properly allow these feelings to dissolve.

You do not necessarily need to uncover the precise event that caused you to re-enact a situation that results in shame, emotional pain and disgust in yourself. Awareness is the key to change. By becoming aware of these patterns, you can start making a CHOICE of how you behave. Remember without awareness we operate on auto-pilot. This is a dangerous position to be in when you are addicted.

Try and drop the story about gambling for a minute when you do this, and just tune in to what it is that your body and soul need from you. This kind of healing is not about the context of gambling- but about your emotions. The feelings themselves do not know why they are disturbing you like this, they are just part of a program that your brain will run to alert you to your need for healing.

Methods you can use to heighten your self-awareness and start becoming more conscious about the deep-rooted reasons why you keep returning to gambling:

# Journaling

# Therapy

#Meditation and mindfulness practice

#Labelling emotions and connecting the dots with past emotional experiences; while reminding yourself that you are now an adult who can choose a more constructive response than you might have been able to do at the point in time when the emotional damage occurred

Well done if you kept your attention going through this blog post. It is long and intense and might be one that you wish to return to or read in portions in order to help digest it well.

I wish you the best in your recovery X