Avoidance: When gambling represents the path of least resistance
‘Life-Avoidance’
I used a mole in the picture for this post as it symbolizes the way many addicted gamblers go into their little metaphorical ‘hole’ where they hide from life and its many difficulties. Money troubles, relationship crises or other emotional burdens get left unaddressed and the molehill keeps growing as you dig yourself deeper underground. When one day you come back out from under your little ‘hill’ of troubles, the feeling of overwhelm can be pretty brutal!
Struggling to see clearly in the light but everywhere you go there are disappointed people, tasks left undone, debt and, for some people even impending criminal charges… Even for the highly skilled emotional ‘coper’ these challenges are enough to make a person want to dive headfirst into a hole and never come above ground ever again.
It is difficult but necessary to start taking a different approach. You can no longer be the mole. It is time to take on an alter ego of someone who is keen on confronting problems, solving and fixing and being prepared to suffer the pain involved with taking ownership. Think….Barbapapa or McGyver! Someone who is always ready for what is ahead. I know it may sound silly to picture yourself as a pink blob or a dated 80s hero but you will be surprised what it can do for you to pretend you are someone who already has the skills you are seeking at a time when your confidence in yourself is non-existent. By choosing to do so you also recognize that the way out of your troubles cannot be found in the underground channels you dug for yourself when you were in ‘mole-mode’. You will need to switch your attitude towards life’s many problems. The difficulty is that this change has to take place way before you emotionally will feel ready to do so.
Recovery will only happen when you are prepared to tackle the difficulties on the journey. Yes, there will be many tricky times but on the bright side, you will equip yourself with the tools necessary to live life in the process.
THE TABOO OF Avoidance
The idea of being someone who ‘avoids’ things that matter in life can feel a little touchy. Therefore, this topic tends to be a little taboo. Confronting it can be hard even in the therapy room. At the end of the day, the job of a psychologist is not to criticize and/or make people feel bad. That being said, our job- (in my opinion anyway) is to go where nobody else goes if deemed helpful and necessary for the client’s wellbeing. Where your friends and family might shy away from pointing out a blind spot, we must be truthful and open up new insights. Failing to do so would be failing at our jobs by sitting by and watching someone engage in self-destruction that they themselves appear to be unaware of.
But even if speaking the truth is something I pride myself in doing, there are those truths that hurt quite badly. One of the many things I love about working with addiction is that people know- even when they resist it at times- that unless they start taking an honest look at themselves- nothing will ever change. This brings about a sense of honesty and authentic connection in the therapy room, one that I find to be unparalleled when working with other conditions. All masks need to be dropped and that brings with it a beautiful sense of growth.
So here we go. Let the truth set you free 😊
Some truths about avoidance & how it links with gambling addiction
Avoidance feeds your addiction through the creation of more pain and anxiety
Although it may feel like avoiding the hard stuff (feelings or situations) works short-term, soon enough the reminders of the areas you are trying to avoid will show up and you will yet again realise that nothing is changing. At this point, it might even feel more painful to confront your issues.
Gambling IS a form of avoidance in its own right
When you gamble, you create a sense of dissociation from your mind. This enables you to feel ‘free’ for the duration of the gambling episode. Bear in mind that the pre-planning stage where you are seeking out the money, planning and scheming etc often represents the most thrilling part of the experience. It is at this time that the dopamine peaks and the sensations feel pretty positive. The trouble with using gambling to avoid feeling and thinking is that you are kicking the can further down the road. As soon as the losses come in (which they will sooner or later)- you will have yet another bad experience queued up to be suppressed. This in turn tends to lead to even greater compulsions to gamble.
Avoidance becomes habitual and results in genuine coping skills getting rusty from underuse
I have many times met with gamblers who are in their 60s but present like adolescents emotionally. There is frequently a sense of ‘arrested development’ on the emotional plane dating back to the time when gambling took over as a coping mechanism.
The many faces of avoidance:
‘Busyness: ‘How Can i be avoiding stuff when i’m always so busy…?’
It’s very possible. In fact, it is sometimes in the ‘doing’ that the more internal, often referred to as ‘experiential avoidance’ can be concealed. If you bring it down to basics, the real skill that most gamblers need to learn is that of managing difficult feelings and inner experiences. Aside from the gambling itself, there are hundreds of other behaviours (good and bad ones) that can also assist in the ‘running’ from one’s own feelings, thoughts and memories. Working too much is a common example. Other examples are:frantically engaging in social activities, online games and overdoing it in some other area of life.
It is not that those activities are bad for you by default- but when things come from a motivation of wanting to avoid being with yourself, all behaviours can become somewhat complicated over time.
The idea of constant doing is highly reinforced in our society – often to the point where it is seen as lazy to not ‘do’ stuff all the time. This gets very confusing during the recovery process where it can end up becoming tempting to keep overly busy in an attempt to ‘avoid’ any risk of feeling a craving, having a thought, or feeling uncomfortable.
Living on the run from oneself is a very stressful venture and one that does not gel with recovery at all! ‘If I feel better when I keep myself fully booked, then surely that is the way to live for me’ tends to be the attitude; but as you might be starting to realise, this is one grand illusion. Not least is it tricky and exhausting to always be on the run, but you will also live with a constant feeling of the nastiness, that is your gambling disorder, breathing down your neck.
The path of least resistance (laziness)
Like an electrical current that will always choose to run through the path of least resistance, the lazy brain will try to promote the least painful and fastest way to achieve something, regardless of the cost of doing so. ‘Can I just be hypnotized to get rid of my addiction?’ ‘What do you think is the fastest way to get all of that money back without having to work? These are the kinds of questions I frequently hear in the early days of recovery.
I am not mocking or belittling this way of thinking, but I do need to highlight that the beast you are feeding when thinking this way is the same one that brought you the gambling addiction.
The more fuel it gets, the bigger and more powerful it becomes.
Doing difficult things may not feel great when you do them- but the sense of accomplishment is usually on a whole other level. Additionally, you are training your brain to resort to new neural pathways and over time the resistance will decrease - even with the more difficult tasks that you need to do to keep your recovery going.
Experiential avoidance
This concept refers to the unwillingness to face emotional challenges, discomfort, and a tendency to run and hide from them through some form of avoidance.
This usually also incorporates the avoidance of any situation during which you might run the risk of having to ‘be’ with yourself rather than do something.
An important point to remember is that practically any behaviour can end up being used as avoidance. Even good ones. As long as an act is done with the motivation of avoiding an inner state, it tends to reinforce the difficult feelings further as opposed to helping relieve them.
This might come as a great big surprise if you’ve been used to cluttering your diary with ‘positive’ activities but realise that all along you did so because you could not bear to face yourself even for a moment.
Denial & unwillingness to accept the difficult parts of life
An emotional ‘muscle’ that is weak and cannot cope with much strain leads to a reluctance to use it in the first place, particularly if you know that the work will be emotional ‘heavy lifting’.
If something starts to feel difficult the urge for some sort of escape often becomes overwhelming. Having the urge is OK but the trouble is that many people end up acting on it almost immediately since they don’t recognise it for what it is.
The unwillingness to face and solve problems
How can anyone not want to avoid a line-up of ‘crap’ that lies ahead following the discontinuation of gambling? Sadly, it is the felt need to avoid the hard stuff (and feelings associated with such) that often generate a highway right back to the gambling.
If you are facing a mountain of undealt-with matters at this point, please do not beat yourself up. Try to find acceptance for the fact that you are where you are. Instead of spending even another minute trying to figure out how to get around the problem, spend a little while breaking things down and start to create an action plan. Begin with the very small steps and build up from there.
Seeking instant gratification and quick fixes
Having to work on oneself requires dedication, commitment and patience. None of these tends to come easy for the typical gambling-addicted client. ‘Mental laziness’ will often present itself as a need to arrive at a quick outcome and to get rewards for labour instantly. Realistically, most good things in life are not achieved in this way and, truthfully, recovery is no exception to this rule.
Wanting for highly stimulating activities rather than those that require ‘work’
Ask a gambler if they prefer to be micro-chipped with the knowledge of how to recover, or if they would consider reading a book. You probably know what the answer would be. Yet, every gambler that comes to therapy to address their addiction tends to want to rid themselves of their addiction. So, for those of you still reading this verbose blog post, I give you credits! You are already making an effort and applying yourself to something that is slow and a bit painful.
Avoidance IS ADDICTIVE IN ITS OWN RIGHT
Even during the times when there is a willingness to encounter a situation head-on, there may be a feeling of agony or a sense of ‘I can’t’. The brain creates multiple excuses and rationalisations on a daily basis, and when we experience an urge to avoid something, it literally goes wild. This is when you will often find that the brain displays its highest levels of creativity. It is not unusual for gamblers that I see in therapy to present with the most award-winning lies that they have manufactured to themselves or others in order to avoid having to face something hard.
So, in summary, the habit of avoidance that we are talking about here has nothing to do with how BUSY you are in your daily life, but everything to do with your willingness to look inward and face the difficult stuff.
Your willingness to do the work that recovery requires rests on your ability to overcome your own tendency towards avoidance.
RUNNING FROM INNER PAIN WILL NEVER WORK – IT IS LIKE TRYING TO RUN FROM YOUR OWN SHADOW
The idea of tackling the hard stuff fills you with dread and an inclination to run. The problem is that the more you run, the worse the pain that you are running from becomes. If we yet again think of this part of your brain as a weak and out-of-practice muscle, it is hardly going to get stronger in the absence of using it. Instead, it will become sloppy and cause even less willingness to face other difficult feelings. In this way, laziness gets self-reinforced.
If inactivity is paired with an inability to help yourself through the tough times in life, the overwhelming emotions that arise often pave the way for problematic behaviours - gambling being one of them. These are then expressed with the intent of a ‘quick fix’ that temporarily makes you feel that you are taking action to solve a problem. Needless to say, gambling takes you backwards from your starting point and will never actually assist in any type of problem-solving let alone overcoming an emotional bump in the road.
Some words on instant gratification
If there was one thing that every single addicted gambler has in common, it would be their preference for instant gratification.
Impatience, the need for instant outcomes, and the inability to delay rewards are both feeding the addiction and getting reinforced by it.
In other words; the more you gamble- the more impatient you will feel. The more you get your brain used to having to wait no more than a few minutes for an outcome, be it good or bad, the more your brain thinks this is how life works. The part of the brain that drives your gambling is not the smartest in a logical sense. It is however a part that operates with quick reactions and emotion. Therefore, it cannot really imagine the future, let alone connect with a future feeling. Its main concern is pretty much to rid itself of the unpleasant feeling through whatever means possible. It likes a quick outcome that can help shift the feeling.
This process happens irrespective of how loud your logical structures are trying to convince you that you should abstain from doing more harm to yourself.
***** Our modern ultra-high-tech society does not help us at all when it comes to learning patience. Instant gratification can nowadays be achieved constantly through a phone, the internet or some other clever device. If we want some food, we can press a few buttons on an app and someone will deliver it. If we want to know how to do something, we can check YouTube videos and find out within minutes. Reducing our instant gratification on one type of outcome (for example gambling outcomes), may require you to become more aware of how we engage with other processes in our lives. I am not trying to set you back to the ‘good ole days’ where we used cabled telephones and 2kg dictionary books to look stuff up, but understanding our constant reliance on instant gratification and rewards will be an important part of your overall sense of recovery.
When Avoidance & Laziness attach themselves to the recovery process
I have mentioned in a previous blog post how the beginning of recovery often is met with great enthusiasm and a gung-ho attitude towards the new life as a reformed human being.
THESE ELATED FEELINGS UNFORTUNATELY TEND TO BE SHORT-LIVED. SOON ENOUGH, THE DRAGGED-OUT WHOLESOMENESS OF RECOVERY DOES NOT APPEAR QUITE SO APPEALING. FOR SOMEONE WHO HAS GOTTEN THEMSELVES USED TO QUICK AND CONSTANT OUTCOMES (BE THEM GOOD OR BAD) IN THE PROCESS OF GAMBLING, IT IS VERY UNDERSTANDABLE THAT THE MUCH SLOWER PACE OF RECOVERY DOES NOT FEEL TANTALISING!
It is critically important not to chase the ‘highs’ in recovery as this is a big part of the skewed emotional experience that gambling has helped reinforce for you. Normal life simply does not feature a daily high at the level of dopamine that gambling used to provide. This is an uncomfortable truth for some, but for others, it can also be relieving. Life is actually easier when you are not ‘chasing’ feelings all the time. The only problem is that it will take some time to discover this.
WAYS OF OVERCOMING LAZINESS and avoidance AND STARTING TO BUILD EMOTIONAL ‘MUSCLE’:
Commit to tiny goals in daily life and practice sticking with them. This creates a small boost every time and will over time build a sense of self-control and trust in yourself. When you feel that you can trust yourself to carry out an action, your overall feeling about yourself will start to change. This is rewarding. You might notice that when you try to commit to stop gambling or to anything else big and important in life, it gives rise to some anxiety. Following through on a commitment requires you to address any resistance and your urge to procrastinate. You will also need to detach yourself from the many excuses that will surely come. That’s why you want to start with small things and gradually build up. Most addicted gamblers are prone to ‘all-or-nothing’ thinking and behaviours and are therefore resistant to acknowledge that their prior efforts have usually failed. Not because they were not worthy or able- but because they decided to bite more than they could chew. Slow and steady is the pace to aim for!
Push through your pain and practice learning new things: Learning requires you to break through your laziness and desire to duck and dive. The unwillingness to strain is often evident in treatment-seeking addicted gamblers who may ‘accidentally forget’ their homework in the therapy room or shrug when they see any big blocks of writing. But most of them still would like to see results. You might recognise that your brain craves a quick fix that will just produce results without having to do any hard work. That in itself is a sign that you should try and learn more. Push through the pain with compassion for yourself. Your physical muscles will not grow overnight and the same applies to our ‘mental’ ones. We have to assign small steps that we keep talking about until we are ready for the next ones. Even if you notice that you still yearn for making it easy, try to increase exposure to the more difficult things bit by bit.
Practice being patient: Patience WILL be required during the recovery journey. You can practice your patience in ANY kind of situation in life by simply trying to refrain from acting on your auto-pilot (when doing so would not be of service to you).
You can try one of the following behaviours to practise patience:
Listen attentively to a loved one talking without interrupting
Allow something that you would normally rush to take its time
Practice not rising to anger in a moment when you feel irritation bubbling inside of you
When you find yourself rushing, try to intentionally slow down and try to remain in the present moment
Practice acceptance of how things are currently without trying to overthink and/or avoid them
Practice living in the present moment instead of mentally rushing ahead
Annika X
WHETHER WE FLOP OR RUSH, AND WHEREVER ON THE GLOBE WE HAPPEN TO BE, THE COMFORT-ORIENTATION BRAND OF LAZINESS IS CHARACTERIZED BY A PROFOUND IGNORING. WE LOOK FOR OBLIVION: A LIFE THAT DOESN’T HURT, A REFUGE FROM DIFFICULTY OR SELF-DOUBT OR EDGINESS. WE WANT A BREAK FROM BEING OURSELVES, A BREAK FROM THE LIFE THAT HAPPENS TO BE OURS. SO THROUGH LAZINESS, WE LOOK FOR SPACIOUSNESS AND RELIEF; BUT FINDING WHAT WE SEEK IS LIKE DRINKING SALT WATER, BECAUSE OUR THIRST FOR COMFORT AND EASE IS NEVER SATISFIED.
Pema Chodron, Buddhist / Lionsroar.com