Gambling addiction recovery: Let the emotional fire burn and rise like a phoenix from the ashes
The attraction of avoiding our inner experience
In 2014 an interesting psychology experiment took place. The idea was to investigate how far people will go to avoid just sitting with their thoughts. During the experiment, the participants were encouraged to sit in an empty room for 15 minutes and entertain themselves with their thoughts. They were also told that they would have the option of self-administrating a painful electric shock should they want to.
Here is what happened….
67% of men decided to administer at least one shock to themselves. One outlier even decided to give himself 190 shocks!
25% of women delivered at least one shock to themselves.
Note that all participants had previously reported they would be willing to pay to avoid having an electric shock.
Why would I be sharing this with you and what does it have to do with gambling? Well, if that many people are prepared to electrocute themselves, albeit quite mildly, rather than just sitting with their thoughts (and this was not even done in a clinical sample so no reason to believe their thoughts were even particularly challenging!) – then you can rest assured there is motivation around for something like gambling to prevent people from engaging with their minds. Gambling, in comparison to mini electrocution, at least delivers some potential of a positive! In the short-term, the anticipation of an outcome also feels like a buzz irrespective of how tragic the long-term circumstances become. Interestingly, even if electric shocks may appear to deliver nothing at all but pain, they would assist with distracting from having to be present with thoughts. Something that illustrates well the massive appeal of escapism for human beings. Even when the nature of such escapism is seemingly negative (i.e., an electric shock). This is how any behaviour, even those that would fall into the category of self-harm, may end up feeling addictive.
Here is the link to the original experiment article by Wilson et al. The challenges of the disengaged mind which I very much recommend taking a look at.
Gambling as experiential avoidance
For the vast majority of addicted gamblers, gambling has come to represent some form of avoidance strategy. Avoidance of thoughts, painful feelings, memories, moods, and/or life itself are all examples of this. I recently wrote an entire article on the topic so if you would like to flesh out your knowledge on the topic – please read that here.
This blog post is instead going to talk about how NOT to avoid your thoughts and feelings, how to cope with the early days of pain, difficulties, heartbreaks, and the fact that ending your relationship with gambling is not that different from ending other experiences in life that have at some point helped us with something. Meaning; Even if you may have come to resent the gambling, you are still very much going to bereave what it may have represented. Sometimes at the level of severe nostalgia. Perhaps not in a pure way, and possibly not because you intellectually believe it has helped your life one bit- but nevertheless… if it was a way to avoid an experience that feels ‘threatening’ to go through, you may still miss it.
Gambling gives you short-term emotional relief or possibly even a buzz – but long term it has caused problems and pain. When you instead aim for long-term gains- get prepared to feel worse short-term
When you turn the behaviour loop around and start doing something other than gambling with your time, get prepared for feeling worse before you later start to feel better. This is usually the case when we make big changes to our life and not at all a sign that a return to gambling is the answer. Despite the thoughts often telling you that this is the case. As humans, we are quite keen to remain in the comfort zone and oddly, despite it not being comfortable at all, changing often gets met with reluctance from within. Even when such change is for the better. Unfamiliarity is never easy for the emotional brain that loves nothing more than easy peasy processing- which usually equates to ingrained behaviours and habits.
Dealing with difficult feelings, painful thoughts, memories
To operate under the illusion that we can be in control of the pain that we experience ends up adding another layer of tension to what already feels bad enough. The reality is that you will still feel all the pressure of trying NOT to feel your feelings. Put simply, when we try not to do something we are still exerting a certain amount of effort! A difficult obstacle to letting go of that effort tends to be the fear that your new ‘loose and relaxed’ towards your feelings is going to invite the gambling back in.
We let go of trying to control our feelings – we do not let go of our attempts to put gambling under tight control!!
I think it is important to clarify the different processes that are relevant in this instance, as I often witness the two getting confused and treated as one. This is something that leads to great pain and a higher risk of relapsing. I hear people say things like:
‘balance is important to me, so I’d better not allow myself to feel too many of those bad feelings. If I do I might relapse’ or the reverse.. ‘ I feel like I should not try too hard to restrict myself from money. I should not need that. Surely that motivation must be an organic one so I will leave all possibilities and access open and wait until I really feel like quitting’
What people are referring to is not so much ‘imbalance’. Rather; it is a state of having confused two separate processes. There is no need at all to let go of control regarding the strictness of blocking strategies for gambling, i.e., access to money, venues, etc.
Be as strict as you need to be and operate with the assumption that the beast that is your addiction will sooner or later try to be opportunistic. This is not because you are a catastrophiser, but because you are dealing with addiction and the loss of control is what defines it!
I have probably said this 20 times in blogs, so sorry for regurgitating the message again: If your gambling was happening as a result of conscious control, you would not be having this issue. Never forget that. The hallmark of an addiction is the loss of control over the activity (in this case gambling) despite the very negative consequences that it is bringing to your life. Failure to recognise this when trying to move beyond gambling can (and probably will) result in more lapses and grief than necessary. Money, gambling establishments (whether online or in real life), and other opportunities should be avoided, and control strategies should be put in place. They should also stay in place for a long time to come- to some degree forever. Your emotions and inner experiences cannot be avoided and should instead be processed and dealt with. Something we will now go on to explore.
Processing emotions cannot happen when we refuse to have THEM
Your emotions need another type of handling which will discuss below. The barriers that keep gambling away from you, need another. I see gamblers constantly trying to avoid everything from thoughts to memories and feelings. Avoiding feelings, thoughts, memories, and life itself is not good at all and will always circle you back to gambling since you cannot live a good, worthy life without processing those and learning a degree of staying present with yourself at all times. The process of embracing feelings will require you to take a huge leap of faith. From my clinical experience, those who often start moving forward the fastest are those who decide to take a Nike-approach to removing that proverbial band-aid of holding back pain. Basically…’Just do it’.
Why should you rip the band-aid off?
We can talk about this for a long time, but really, there is only one question you need to ask yourself to generate the data required.
Has avoiding your feelings/thoughts/memories/experiences worked well so far and has it enabled you to lead a gambling-free life or a life that is pain-free and fulfilling?
Some of you might put up arguments about this since gambling indeed can and will block out even intensely negative feelings for the duration of the gambling episode. Sometimes also in the lead-up and during the aftermaths where chasing is still happening. But we are now only going to concern ourselves with the long term. The long term is what matters in your life. You can fool yourself for moments, but ultimately you will not be successful in running from your mind, heart and soul. It all catches up with you. And if that was not bad enough, I find that many people who are busy ‘running’ from themselves emotionally, are quite stressed even during the run itself. Who enjoys being on the run from something knowing that at some point in the near or distant future, it will get you? Like a monster that feeds off the nasties you are trying to dodge, the monster will one day be strong and overpowering. You will not be able to relax at all as it feels like it is imminently going to ‘get you’.
With all of that being said, you would think that approaching feelings should be a given. You might even feel a bit stupid for not having done it sooner. Please don’t! Remember that your avoidance has served a purpose for you and that at some point in your life those feelings would have felt too powerful and difficult to deal with. At that point, the mind discovered a denial mechanism in the form of gambling. Perhaps you weren’t ready to deal with something. Even if you were and you still opted for a cop-out method, things are what they are. We don’t need to dig up the past and ask why. But you do need to get clear on one thing: the HERE and NOW need to be dealt with. By all means, take stock of past mistakes and identify all the times when you did wrong but let us bring it into the present where there can be use for those lessons.
What makes avoidance so attractive even if we know it is not working?
Whatever reasons for emotional avoidance you may have had – or still have, just know that they would have made a lot of sense to your emotional brain. This part of your mind is programmed to avoid things that do not feel good short term, so do not expect that this part of your brain will break out in applause when you decide down the road to do ‘the right thing’. Nope. It will feel quite the opposite sadly. It is that same part of the mind that has come to believe that gambling is a ‘helpful strategy’ because of the short-term high and/or the emotional avoidance that it provides. It does not care about your long-term happiness! Rather than berating yourself about why this is the case, just accept that your brain is not operating in accordance with the lives we live nowadays. It is still in hunter-gatherer mode and thinks that it is doing you great favours by luring you towards things that feel nice. You see, the part of your brain that has been suggesting to you that gambling is a great solution for life’s many difficulties- is now programmed to believe that this is the truth. It is not until you start EXPERIENCING the opposite that it will rethink this encoding. And the only person who can re-program this learning now is you.
Action speaks louder……you will never successfully think your way out of an addiction
The part above about having a new experience is so much more important than many people in recovery realise. Clients often express reluctance (and at times even refusal) to ACT on the changes they want to see happening. Understanding why it is so critical can often sway even the most reluctant recoverees to at least attempt a behaviour that has previously been met with reluctance. Thinking about doing something is not enough to create change… Pretending, even just within yourself, that you are doing something is also not going to cut it. It is only through real-life doing that you form new experiences from which new pathways in the brain can get created.
So what should you do with all that pain that comes up when you stop gambling?
All the suddenly powerful realisations that you messed up so much? The full-on emotional experience can overtake not just the mind but also the entire body at times. The realisation that you do not have much skill or experience at all when it comes to coaching yourself through the experience of difficult feelings?
Stop trying to control your pain- Let your emotional bonfire burn
I am not going to sugar-coat this for you at all. Letting go of trying to control your emotional experience will result in difficult feelings too. It will burn and you need to let it happen. Let the fire of those difficult painful emotions burn like a bonfire. Let them push you around, eat you from the inside and allow yourself to FEEL how bad that feels. It is horrible. Nobody likes it. But it is part of our human experience, and we must learn to accept that we cannot run away from our own construction. Whatever it feels like let it just be what it is for a little while. Just like you would with a real-life fire, allow it to burn until all the fuel has run out. Meanwhile, you sit tight around it watching. Keep chucking things on the fire while it is burning through. Put in the shame, the blame and all the feelings of loneliness, anxiety, depression and guilt. Throw all of it in and let it burn hard for a little bit. How bad can it get? Pretty painful and bad of course, and definitely not the greatest times you would have had but think about it like this... You will be feeling awful for a limited period. There may be a few repeats that typically get shorter and a little less painful as you learn that you bounce back and that the pain is not permanent. No fire will burn forever!! Not even your emotional one. The fuel gets consumed, and it will come to an end. I appreciate this does not sound like a tempting proposition but guess what? It feels even worse when you walk around in tense avoidance knowing that at some point your limits will be reached and that the worst is yet to come.
The anticipation of having horrible feelings is still far more complicated than just making a controlled choice to go ahead and experience them. It puts YOU in control over your feelings ultimately and not the other way around.
When the burning finally stops, you will see that there is clarity. You might realise that there are solutions to some of the problems you blocked yourself from thinking above. You might remember that although you have had pain, there will be the potential for joy. You will also feel proud and pleased about yourself for doing something different and for embracing yourself and your feelings. You will feel raw and vulnerable but also cleaned out and ready for the new - all at the same time.
Feelings - the good the bad and the ugly - don’t last forever. Feelings are temporary events – and this is not my invention. It is a fact of life. Moods, on the other hand, can sometimes feel like enduring events that last far longer. It is not this simple, but in many ways, it is when we are unwilling to experience our raw emotions that the moods get created. Through the many layers, we add by judging, questioning and going against our original feeling, we end up experiencing far more pain than necessary.
In the Buddhist tradition, they were saying this from the beginning of time:
‘Pain is inevitable - suffering is optional’ It refers to the process by which we create our own suffering by resisting the inevitable pain of life. In western psychology teachings, the practice of acceptance is only getting a proper foothold in the last 20-30 years or so. Acceptance brings internal peace and nobody who tried it comes back to say ‘actually- let me return to a state where I deny myself emotions and separate myself from existence from my inner experience’
The practice of acceptance…
Acceptance is bittersweet. When we accept something, we don’t necessarily like it. But we choose to end the inner struggle. It is the equivalent of not trying to stop a wound in its healing process as we would recognise that the wound-healing is a natural process that the body knows how to handle. So we allow it to do its job. Perhaps we clean the wound now and then, but fundamentally we allow it to heal. We do not sit around picking at it constantly and wondering why on earth it is not feeling better. We leave the body to do what it already knows. Why should emotional pain be so different? Well, because we are conditioned to avoid anything that feels painful. So we think that we will help ourselves if we apply an emotional fire blanket that stops the fire before it naturally gets to burn to a halt.
The inner struggle is the greatest form of pain for gamblers…
At some point in your journey with addiction, the pain of holding on is going to feel more difficult to bear than that of losing control and just allowing yourself to try a new method. Even when that method equates to having an emotional bonfire. Frequently, the phase when you are anticipating the anxiety and pain and intuitively know what’s coming- that’s when the pain feels the hardest. Yet, you have not quite made the choice of letting it all go yet. So, it feels impossible. You know you will not be able to hold back, yet you are so vulnerable in the face of your feelings. Gamblers are often just as guilty of chasing after good feelings as they are in attempting to run from bad ones. All along the only long-lasting solution to the problem is to learn acceptance of what is. Learning how to move with the feelings is to feel free and lighter with them. Yes, there is no denying this is a tough experience in the beginning and one that requires faith that things will get better later. I know there is nothing that I can say to instil that trust in you. Try and trust in the many people who have done this journey before you; The many wise men and women who have chosen to document their life experiences, findings and great outcomes. Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is the connection between our ability to experience pain and our ability to feel joy, satisfaction, gratitude and happiness. What feels bad now gives way to a capacity to feel good -if not amazing- in the future. To motivate yourself to do this, you need to keep your eyes on the prize, and not on how awful it will feel when you go through the motions. Think about yourself rising like a phoenix from the ashes after you took the brave step and decided that your previous attempts of disallowing your negative feelings and their existence have backfired terribly. When something does not work, and you have more data points than an entire research unit to see the evidence for yourself – it is high time to change strategy. In some ways, on the bright side, it is then risk-free too.
The only way you can travel from the bottom of the pit is up!
I hope you have enjoyed this blog post and please keep reading
Annika X
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you
sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for
that which has been your delight.
Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese writer 1883-1931
image credit: Andrey_Kuzmin at Shutterstock