How to reduce your emotional reactivity during your gambling addiction recovery
Not trusting yourself and your behavioural responses means you will feel at the mercy of external triggers!
One of the many aspects that make addictions so stressful is the inability to rely on oneself and one’s responses to external and internal stimuli. You might draw up great plans for how you are going to be abstinent, for how you are going to treat your family members and for what new habits you are going to put in place - only to proceed to let yourself down on all accounts. Being able to remain familiar enough with our inner world yet without getting caught up in constant emotional reactions is job that requires dedicated training.
Giving up gambling is one thing, but to address some of the unhelpful wiring that gambling has aggrevated is a job that takes a bit of time. Until you start feeling at ease with your triggers (external and internal) life can feel a bit like a trail of dangerous events all just waiting to ‘get you’. Additionally, being in a triggered state is an emotionally taxing experience and takes a huge toll on your bandwidth that you need to deal with other life issues; be they emotional or practical.
You will feel as though your primary focus is to ‘FEEL better’ rather than DO better when, in reality, it often takes sustained actions over long periods of time to start feeling better from an addiction. This means you have to temporarily suspend your needs to feel instantly great. Ask any gambler if their strength in life is to operate with great patience and diligence and you will hear a resounding NO. Most gamblers are in the habit of approaching life in fits and spurts with little balance. What you will attempt to accomplish during recovery is therefore going to be quite a new experience.
The desperation to feel lighter and more in control can very easily guide you towards all the wrong behaviours.
Without wanting to make recovery sound like a slog- there will be no way of getting forward if you are unwilling to face some hard emotional work along the way. Overcoming your cravings, reactions and impulses will be part of this job as will having to persevere in your recovery efforts even on days when nobody will pat you on the back for doing so.
image by author (adaptation of CBT ‘hot cross bun’
Breaking down the concept of emotional reactivity
Emotional reactivity (in this context) refers to how quickly and intensely we respond to emotional stimuli. A reactive mind reacts impulsively to thoughts and emotions without much control or awareness.
For those of you who have done some Cognitive Behaviour Therapy treatment in the past, you might be familiar with this picture. Whilst basic, it helps us understand the vicious spirals that people get into about any problem they may present with in therapy. By increasing the time and ‘space’ between the different boxes we have a greater opportunity to make informed choices as to how we behave.
If you use the format to put your recent gambling lapses into the model you will quite likely recognise that thoughts, feelings and physiological responses are often missed out from your awareness whilst instead, your behaviour follows the arrow straight from trigger to behaviour. This is what we call auto-pilot. Auto-pilot has a hugely important function in our lives and enables us to learn things quickly. It prevents us from having to learn anew when we encounter familiar situations and circumstances. Sadly, the auto-pilot ‘function’ does not discriminate between helpful and unhelpful habit-loops, or whether a habit has crossed the barrier and is now a true addiction. Habits are formed to help you out by simplifying the steps between a trigger to behavioural output.
Naturally, addictions is not one of the times when auto-pilot serves you well. Indeed, the faster you move from a trigger to a behaviour, the less likely you are that your behaviours are well considered. Acting on auto-pilot is essentially ‘easy’ and will happen more when you are influenced by strong feelings. In the context of addiction and other mental health problems, this fact tends to bring bad news. Just like a little child who has not yet trained in the skills of effective self-awareness and self-control; you will find that your ability to make adult decisions during a thrilling gambling chase is brought down to toddler-level! Afterwards, you might also experience guilt, shame and pain which in turn often give rise to more unpleasant behaviours and ‘lashing out’. This vicious spiral between negative interactions, gambling and more negative interactions can be truly challenging to break away from.
Laura’s story
Laura had finally quit gambling. She had been addicted for over a decade and had previously made several attempts to stop but had never been successful.
During her last gambling cycle, she ended up in severe debt to the tax office. The letters and calls issued by the tax authority were becoming more frequent and they threatened with increasingly serious consequences. Laura felt like she had no choice but to come clean to her husband. Her initial plan had been to win some of the losses back before telling him the truth about her addiction, but with the mounting pressures and the fear of continuing to return to gamble, she finally decided to be honest.
Since she co-owned the family house, the pair of them had suddenly been put in a position where they could lose their home. Needless to say, stress was running high in the household and Laura found herself staying away from gambling only thanks so the fact that she had no access to funds at all. Whilst it was of course good that she was now abstinent, she was not enjoying her life and she was constantly wondering if this was all that life would have on offer.
Her only means of escapism was gone and the reality of her life felt like it was punching her in the face on a daily basis… As a result, her mood was extremely volatile and she felt triggered almost constantly. At any given time she would ‘blow up’ at someone else (or quietly break down on her own). If it wasn’t her children or husband in the firing line, it was someone at work that she ended up falling out with. She would also snap at random people she would encounter when out and about. To sum it up, she felt like she was walking on a trip wire and could no longer trust herself to lead a normal life. Not only did her emotional turmoil create constant stress and friction, it also brought her needs for escapism and soothing to the forefront. It felt as though she was only one bad interaction away from placing bets again..
Setting yourself up for success: Use long-term goals and aim for an internal locus of control
A lot of clients (gambling and non-gambling) enter therapy with goals such as ‘I just want to feel happy again’, and ‘I want to stop feeling anxious/stressed’. It is natural to want to feel better of course. The desire to arrive at a particular feeling is not wrong, but when these expectations are underpinned by beliefs about needing the environment to change so that we can feel better things get more problematic. Particularly for people with addictions who tend to want the feelings to change immediately. Just like with most things in life, things often get a little bit worse before they then start getting better. This can be a bitter pill to swallow at times when you might already feel like the bottom has been reached.
To add further to the complexity, people with an external locus of control are likely to attribute their feelings and outcomes of situations to factors that lie outside of their control. Whilst doing so can bring moments of relief (as one thinks of who/what else is to blame for our misfortunes), it will mainly create more pain and suffering in the long term. Since addictions feature a good dose of denial, you will usually encounter a strong desire to point figers, as well as rationalisation based on what the external world ‘should’ have delivered on to make the addiction recovery smoother.
If you can be honest enough to spot this in yourself- congratulations. This means that you are ready and willing to start taking full ownership of your journey!
In the harshest and truest sense, we will only feel properly great when we feel in control of our responses to the environment that we are finding ourselves in. This does not mean that we will not have reactions to negative events in our external environment - but it means that we can trust ourselves to manage whatever those reactions may be. Having an internal locus of control enables us to be accountable and take responsibility for our behaviour- even when the going gets tough.
Having internal locus of control means that we stop waiting for someone or something to come and rescue us from suffering - and instead power up and take charge of ourselves and our responses! This approach is tougher, requires more work and will not make you jump for joy immediately. It will however put you back in a position of control over your life and give you a sense of agency about where your life is headed.
****** Disclaimer: Since there is a lot of discussion in the world of gambling addiction about who is to blame for the addiction, I thought it would be worth mentioning that taking responsibility for yourself and your actions does not automatically mean that say the industry does not play a part and that advertisements have not triggered you to want to gamble. Sadly, the fact that they could have a part in the development of your addiction will not necessarily impact your ability to now get better from it. It may well be that you want to speak up or try to make a difference for yourself and those who could get affected in the future- but make sure these actions don’t happen at the expense of taking responsibility for yourself. As a general rule, I often recommend getting your own house in order before you embark on those ventures as they can be triggering and stressful even if they could also be vindicating
How being overly reactive holds you back in recovery
We need emotion regulation skills for almost all kinds of situations in life hence if they are non-existent or ‘rusty’ from not having trained them (which would be the case if you have been gambling in response to most feelings) you will be living the results every single day. Here are some of the statements I have heard gamblers say over the years that indicate that they are feeling reactive, in the grips of emotions and frightened of their own emotional ‘explosions’ and as a result are being held back.
‘no I can’t take on a job- what if I argue with someone and end up gambling ‘
‘Not sure I will be able to attend this treatment program, people just keep pissing me off in there when they don’t seem to get me…. I worry that it will do more harm than good..
‘ I don’t think I can go out to that restaurant. Last time I went someone gave me a funny look and I felt paranoid and suspicious that they knew what I was going through.. I’d rather eat at home going forward’
You might find yourself ending up flying off the handle for the smallest stuff – even when you know logically that you ‘should’ not react as intensely. You might also find yourself getting very hurt, upset, anxious or rejected in situations that do not necessarily call for such a personalised emotional response. There are many presentations of this problem but what they all have in common is that they leave you feeling out of control and as though your emotions are running the show. I see many gamblers – particularly male ones- saying things like ‘but I am not an emotional person’ to which I often have to point out that the kind of emotionality we need to address when treating addictions is not isolated to deep prolonged episodes of any particular mood or feeling.
Being a person who cannot control one’s responses to triggers, be they internal or external, still means that you are in the grips of reactivity. It means that you are not able to maintain good awareness when emotions rise up – and hence will find it considerably harder to make an active choice of how to respond to such feelings. So forget about which label you use to describe yourself and try to put any type of pride down for now. Instead, do acknowledge that you can still have issues with emotion regulation despite not being a person who cries in sad movies or engages well in emotional discussions.
Why am I so reactive?
Walking around on eggshells exacerbates feelings of being out of control and can easily end up feeling like life is difficult and potentially also lacking in meaning. This is not because your life IS meaningless but because you may not have enough emotional bandwidth to consider what else is in your life except the stress you are feeling! Gambling addicted or not, we all have ranging levels of reactivity. Some people are naturally more reactive than others of course, but even within each individual, the ability to regulate emotions can vary a lot from day to day depending on factors such as stress levels, general well-being, how much one has slept, rested and the level of external pressure. The good news is that even those who present with poor emotional regulation or have a baseline of elevated impulsivity (which is common amongst addicted gamblers), everyone can be helped by learning techniques to help themselves become more aware and therefore implement more choice and control over their behaviours. In situations where the control is completely lacking- you will need to be honest about that as well and resort to external protective barriers to ensure you stay safe at all times.
In the context of mental health, most treatment seekers are struggling to control their response to feelings in one way or another. The origin of such difficulties may be anything from childhood trauma that has affected the person’s emotional regulation skills, emotional neglect, attachment disorders and/or difficult life situations such as divorce, breakups and losses that have created an emotional ‘buildup’ and of course not least – Addictions and its many negative consequences. Irrespective of the source of the issue, the solution is going to be the same: To learn how to increase one’s sense of control so that we can act in ways that benefit our lives longer term and align well with our true values.
Addictions are going to increase your reactivity with many orders of magnitude irrespective of how you felt before you became addicted. One of the reasons for this is that being addicted to gambling will continue to ensure that your stress levels are kept at a maximum! You are also rehearsing the neural pathway of ‘giving in’ to your impulses and cravings in a way that erodes any bits of self-control you otherwise would have been able to rely upon. Last but not least, you are also going to find yourself engaging in behaviours that go completely against your personal value system.
How can I start addressing my reactivity?
Expanding your emotional awareness and learning to be more accepting of your internal world
We don’t reduce our reactivity by telling ourselves that certain feelings are not ‘allowed’. This increases reactivity and charge. To feel calmer you will need to work on your ability to accept a wider range of different feelings. To practice awareness, it can be helpful to start labelling what you are feeling. Use the wheel on the picture to help yourself identify the different feelings. This exercise is an ongoing one and will require dedication and a bit of openness. Some of the feelings might be quite painful to discover. That is ok.
Get prepared to do a lot of breathing exercises and grounding techniques (you can find many such techniques by typing in ‘emotional grounding’ to youtube) .
Make a habit of being accountable
Becoming more accountable is one of the hardest, most adult emotional skills - but also one of the most satisfying, empowering and progressive skills you will learn during your recovery. It requires you to be fully honest with yourself and to choose to view your reactions as your own. It means moving away from ‘he/she made me feel x,y,z’ to ‘when he/she said x I felt y’ . A seemingly subtle difference but one that creates a huge shift in terms of the degree of control you will feel you have over your mind. I often suggest to clients to be radical and assume that they are accountable at least in part for any situation and then work backwards from there. Quite likely will you find that it is true that we have something to do with most of our reactions- and at the very least I can promise you that you will encounter less and less friction with others. Yes, this approach requires you to let go of any ego and allow others to be right even at times when they may not be- but the joy of it is that you get to practice tolerance, patience and emotional control.
Develop a human ‘echolocation’
I have always been fascinated by bats and their echolocation which is what they use to be able to navigate and hunt in the dark. As a metaphor for thinking of how we guide ourselves through life, think about the process that the bat goes through…. They emit a high-frequency sound that then bounces off objects and returns as echoes. This is called echo reception. Finally, the bat uses their highly sensitive ears to detect the echoes and go on to form an interpretation of the echo. The interpretation is based on the time delay, and change in frequency of the echos and thanks to this process can then determine the size, shape, distance and even texture of objects around them. Pretty cool! And even more amazing is that this all happens in a fraction of a second. By recognising these signals the bat is able to not only feel more in control of itself but also be more aware of its surroundings and detect dangers. For those of you who have been reading my blog, you know I love an out there metaphor from time to time. This one definitely fits the bill of one - but I also think it is a great one. If we think about our perception and response style through the lens of a personal echolocation - we can recognize that we can train our mind to slow things down enough for us to better interpret our environment in ways that can assist to keep us safe. It means using and trusting our senses, yet being able to decipher between helpful vs unhelpful impulses and feelings and trusting our true intuitions and values (as opposed to our reactive feelings). This is a big job that can take years to perfect (and tends to never get perfect!) but one that will bring rewards along the way.
Mindfulness/meditation practices:
This area is huge and will deserve a blog post of its own in the future, but for now let me just mention that mindfulness and meditation practices no matter how small will be a very important part of your recovery. Whilst most gamblers find it extremely stressful to face their inner world at the level of ‘meditating’ on it, why not start with small attempts to pay attention to a particular response urge and try to refrain from responding in your habitual way? You can for instance try to resist scratching an itch or deliberately endure a few minutes of a craving without allowing yourself to go into habit-mode. Anything that you do that helps you broaden the distance between a stimulus and a behavioural response is going to help you greatly. If on top of that you feel like you wish to have a more formal meditation/mindfulness practice then you can go ahead and add one. If you find that moving meditations are easier (most gamblers I meet with do) - then consider mind/body practices such as yoga, tai-chi or other martial arts that particularly targets your mental focus and patience.
Do an emotional ‘detox’ and release some of the internal pressure
Most people who are operating in the ‘reactivity zone’ are no longer reacting exclusively to things happening in the here and now. Indeed, there tend to be layers upon layers of pent-up unprocessed emotions. Not only does this create a feeling of heightened pressure, but it also means you spend more energy suppressing feelings in the fear that they will otherwise open up the stored-up dam that could burst and become unmanageable. This creates a challenging cath22 where you are highly likely to continue to compound your emotional burden instead of doing the one thing that needs to happen- opening the release valves. Our emotional channels need to be cleared out a bit so that the ‘flush function’ can work again and you can start letting go of the stuff you don’t need to hang on to. Failing this, the sensation can often be one of tension and unease. You kind of know that any little thing that happens is going to set off a domino effect of feelings- and in the worst case also culminating in a fallback on gambling as a way to escape from it all.
The fear of having such reactions can keep people stuck in a setting where they start to believe that they’d better keep their environment 100% risk-free. Much as I would advise you to keep certain types of risks to a minimum, the aim is to one day be able to go through life without constant hypervigilance for triggering material. You will however need to accept that you have no business in the casinos, bookmakers, vegas, Cheltenham or any other place that is excessively associated with gambling. You should also take self-exlcusion and barring from gambling sites very seriously and the barriers that have been put in place to protect your money are there for the long haul.
Summary points:
In this blog post, I have made some bold suggestions about becoming more emotionally aware and less reactive. Whilst I believe everything I write about I am also a realist. You will be highly unlikely to change from being someone whose mind operates a bit like a pile of dry woods drenched in lightning liquid and awaiting a spark- to becoming a zen master overnight. Training your time takes time and you will need to be patient. Patience is not a quality ascribed to addicted gamblers in general. Having had your mind programmed for instant outcomes and gratification often leaves a legacy of heightened reactive patterns and a low tolerance for boredom and, frankly, for introspection! Adding to this fact, a large proportion of gamblers are also more impulsive by nature. None of this means you cannot learn but it does mean you will learn better while having your avenues to gambling shut to help yourself practice in peace.
We don’t learn to swim by throwing ourselves in the deep end we start where we can safely manage and gradually you will be more confident to go into the places where your feet can’t even reach. Keep up the good work, keep reading and practising and all the best on your recovery journey.
Love Annika X
