Euphoric recall - how to conquer the most devious trap on your recovery journey
Image credits: Shutterstock (with own edits)
Many gamblers I’ve met with over the years have experienced the following scenario which might resonate with you. Gambling recovery is going pretty well. It has been some time since their last bet. In fact, there haven’t even been any thoughts about gambling for a while.
Things are falling into place again and there are plenty of life improvements happening as a result. This all feels good and satisfying. The whole idea of returning to such a miserable activity feels off-putting and there is a sense of security developing. In summary, life as a recoveree is becoming easier.
Then…
As lightning that strikes from a clear blue sky, you suddenly find yourself completely overwhelmed by urges, romanticized memories of gambling and to put it in the most honest way possible; The idea of another bet feels completely natural. If not like a must.
The part of you that knows better is temporarily hi-jacked and tossed into a corner of your brain where it can neither speak nor guide you. Every cell in your body is aching for gambling and there is no resistance left in you. You are re-living the excitement, the anticipation and the enormous head-rush involved with the gambling episode.
What you are not re-experiencing, is the pain of the aftermath. The feelings of loss and anger with yourself or any of the extremely painful consequences that your gambling inevitably gave way to. The pain and sorrow of addiction and what it did to you or your loved ones or the look on peoples’ faces as you re-emerged from yet another lapse. You cannot connect with any of it. Least of all the feelings. You are basically re-experiencing a beauty-filtered version of events that have little or no reality basis!
Euphoric recall; a major threat during the gambling recovery process
If the above sounded familiar, You might be experiencing a phenomenon that is part and parcel of any addiction. You might also have experienced it in other circumstances such as post-break-up. ( It seems to be particularly prevalent in cases where there is a lack of closure and/or where the relationship featured particularly intense ups and downs. ) Euphoric recalls are pretty commonplace actually, but there is a significant difference between going off on nostalgia about cream cakes in the amusement park and as a result, ending up having a few too many (unless you are food addicted of course) and allowing the re-living of a gambling-high to lead you down the path to utter hell through a re-start of yet another cycle of bets. This is why it will pay off to learn how to handle these episodes while remaining safe.
What happens during a euphoric recall?
I will leave the neuro-psych explanation to those who specialise in that area but from an experience point-of-view - here is roughly what happens:
During a euphoric recall, your mind is quite literally flooded with only one category of memories from a situation. To be exact; just the good ones. You will FEEL every feeling you felt when things were at their peak, and your thoughts will be distorted beyond belief. Although one could argue that everyone should know better than to fall for this trick of the mind, it is important to recognise that the feelings are very real, in fact quite visceral, and as a result, the mind puts on an ‘argument’ that makes gambling sound like a compellingly good solution. It goes beyond having a memory of something pleasant. This is more akin to re-living something- only you do so with all the negative bits carved out 100%.
In the case of gambling, this means you are in for some serious cherry-picking of memories. The fresh and juicy ‘cherries’ that you visualise is basically all that you remember. The ones with mould and rot are buried far down the basket and your brain tells you that you may as well just go back for more. The thought of abstaining seems more absurd at this point than that of recovery. You might also convince yourself that even if you tried, there is no point since you clearly will fall prey sooner or later anyway. So why not just ‘get it done with’?
Next thing you know, your distorted mind has taken you down the wrong course of action and you are scheming on how to place your next bets. At this stage, things are truly risky. Your defences are so low that you might feel willing to override practically any hurdles that you’ve previously put in place between you and your gambling. This is why we need to intervene much earlier. Keep reading for some ideas on how.
How to avoid falling prey during euphoric recalls?
Many gamblers tend to blame themselves for how they feel and, as a result, end up spending extortionate amounts of time trying to eradicate feelings that they find have previously provoked a lapse back to gambling. This becomes about as possible as not salivating upon seeing your favourite dish of food coming out juicy and hot from the oven. Classical conditioning ( i.e., the process of learnt associations that enables us to have quick emotional/physical reactions to previously neutral stimuli) is an extremely well-established psychological phenomenon and one that I encourage you all to understand and read up about if you want to understand fully how triggers act on your mind.
Instead of spending any amount of time trying not to have euphoric recalls- let’s take a good look at how you can learn to manage yourself if one indeed occurs since they do for most people in recovery from addiction:
# Keep your barriers high- always.
During a euphoric recall, your brain reconstructs a dopamine-fuelled, inaccurate and massively romanticized experience of a previous ‘high’ of life. It does so with absolutely NO regard to the consequences that this might have (or have had) to you or your life. This does not mean that your brain is screwed up or devious. In fact, it means that it is working well. What it does mean, however, is that you need to build up enough awareness about what happens to enable you to take appropriate and early action when this state comes about. If you await the moment when you are encapsulated in your ‘bubble of distortion’, you will be at extremely high risk of setting the scene for further gambling. Things happen very fast at that point hence why ADVANCE PREPARATION, as I have mentioned in numerous of my blog posts, is paramount. The first steps of this translate to blocking access to money and venues. Primarily money in my opinion as this is a much safer strategy, but ideally go after both by also taking active steps to self-exclude yourself from gambling sites, bookmakers and casinos.
Act as if you mean it. Even the act of doing this teaches your brain something about how determined you actually are to call it quits. The minute you start entertaining thoughts like ‘aaahh well, I don’t have to cause I can always go back when I want to anyway…’ you are already starting to hand over your power a bit. Act now and be happy you did later.
A euphoric recall can be a very serious catalyst for cravings and since they cannot always be anticipated it is important to not let these barriers go just because in general, you feel better and more detached from gambling.
# Develop your insight: try to understand what is happening and talk yourself through the sequence of events
This gives you more time to process what is happening. Something that in turn can help you understand the concept of detachment and conscious choice better. Talk aloud to yourself as though you are doing a narration of your own inner movie recording, for example: ‘My thoughts are telling me I should have a bet ‘ ‘my heart is palpitating’ ‘I am feeling overwhelmed by a longing for a bet’ you are actively reminding yourself that these are processes of the mind that can remain separate from the higher self even during a state of high emotionality. This is absolute key to recovery! Any time that you become too wrapped up in your feelings, the objectivity to the situation gets lost. This is not dissimilar to any other situation in our lives when emotions run high. We seize to think straight and become overreactive – but it is a state that passes relatively quickly. The more you activate this state of detachment, the better at it you are likely to become.
Practice daily and you will definitely find that the trust in yourself and your ability to remain stable through difficult urges will improve just like muscle power. If you don’t use this ‘muscle’ at all, it will sadly get very sloppy, and your motivation to even try will shrink in line with the reducing muscle mass.
# Understand the exact nature of this experience & know that the feeling does not accurately represent the real experience as it was or how it will be if you try to repeat it
Understand one thing about our brain; It has a remarkable memory for feelings. What do you remember about situations? That’s right- how it made you feel. Have you ever noticed for example a song that you hear on the radio suddenly triggering a certain mood state? Or a smell that suddenly brings back a particular feeling? Our limbic system stores these feelings a bit like memorabilia. They become encoded in our long-term memory. The cues that trigger it will often go unnoticed for us, but if we later stumble upon them they hold the power to unlock those memories during a process that happens fast and furiously.
Some triggers poke holes in the type of memories that pose a threat of relapse. Not only do they cause intense nostalgia of the kind that warps the mind and encourages you to take foolish action. These memories are by their very nature fragmented and more like snap-shots of a real situation. They do not even include the before- and after. This is something you have to be aware of before you get whisked off to a fantasy-planet where gambling is an experience of great buzz and wins and only that. You are tripping on nostalgia to the point of feeling bereaved by the fact that gambling is no longer in your life. Sit yourself down for a solid reality check. Recite to yourself all the evidence you hold of gambling as an activity that brought you to a point of utter self-destruction. Do not let any feeling tell you otherwise!
YOU know better and if you struggle mentally to access such memories, try to actually dig out a few reminders such as account statements, angry texts or emails from loved ones and/or a list of people that you have hurt in the process. Be aware that if you are triggered enough, none of these cues will act as immediate emotional deterrents so remember to give yourself time and remain in safety from another bet until you feel like a sense of logic has returned.
It is hard to understand how one’s own brain can be so deceptive. To normalise this a bit, try and recall that this is pretty much what our brain gets up to during any intense mood state. It tries to get more of the same feeling. Be it good or bad. Think about what happens during for example a state of anger. What do our minds get flooded with? That’s right; further thoughts that spur us on. ‘How could they’ ‘I will never forgive this…’ etc . That side of your brain does not understand logical reasoning or consequence. It is too primitive for that. And as a way of finding equilibrium and for your mind to ‘make sense’ of this conflict- it compensates with creative rationalisations. All of which we must learn to take more lightly since as little as 20min on you might already be wondering what all the fuzz was about.
In the case of gambling, you will remember the wins and often the excitement prior to starting your gambling episode. This is the job of dopamine in the brain. It is there to save our lives and make us humans quickly figure out what we should seek out in order to encourage us to repeat behaviours that are useful and stop engaging in those that do us harm or could be dangerous. It minimizes our emotional ‘vision field’ down to a narrow little slimmer of the entire situation. You end up seeing the wins but not the losses. The joy of a good moment, without the pain of the repercussions. Just like a pig in a sty who will greedily reach for a pile of dirt to munge on without recognizing that it could be poisonous, you will not in the moment of a euphoric recall necessarily reflect a whole lot of what the consequences of your behaviours will be.
As you know already, it creates a very dangerous situation that has the power to derail even the strongest of contestants in their recovery.
‘But when I want to gamble, I will make it happen regardless of barriers so why bother trying…’
These words were uttered by pretty much every gambler I have ever treated in therapy. I do of course understand that this is how it feels. I would even be willing to admit that there is a tiny grain of truth to it, in the sense that many gamblers would jump through some serious hoops to achieve more gambling if the desire is there.
Still, I would argue that your efforts are well worth it.
You are dealing with compulsions that momentarily are so powerful that you FEEL as though you could never resist them. Nor may you have proven to yourself that you can. Does that mean that this level of compulsion cannot ever be conquered though?
Not in my opinion.
There are many conditions that involve severe compulsions to do things that the sufferer knows is not actually in their best interest (and in many cases even lead to immediate feelings of great shame and regret). Tourettes, OCD and hair-pulling disorder (trichotillomania) are examples of disorders where the severity of urges and level of difficulty in refraining from the associated action are pretty similar to those of severely addicted gamblers. Yet, you will be pleased to hear that the urges are not impossible to withstand. But one thing I can tell you is that you need to be very well prepared and act at all times as if you really mean business in your recovery. This means efficiently risk-assessing and problem-solving your environmental triggers. If you can see some loopholes that need tightening, you don’t wait to see if you fall into the trap first. Instead, you take no risks at all on yourself. You make sure you tighten up ANY route to gambling as much as humanly possible.
Think as though you are safeguarding the environment for a loved one with a severe peanut allergy that upon exposure would result in anaphylaxis. Leaving your accounts open access, money in the wallet and credit-lines ready to go is the equivalent of drizzling satay over your allergic loved one’s chicken and then ask them to avoid getting unwell. You have to act far sooner than that and make concerted efforts to avoid the exposure to these very notorious triggers.
So the bottom line; feelings can be very powerful and will often mislead us. In order to take control over our emotional world and our behaviours- we have to develop better awareness of what triggers us, how we end up thinking, feeling and behaving. These are the principles that CBT are based upon, as are most spiritual practices.
Awareness is the name of the game and the only person that can work on it is you!
With love Annika X