Gambling addiction: no more escape-changing your relationship with emotional pain is a key part of recovery
Recovery from any addiction can be a very painful journey during which you will, unfortunately, get to experience pretty much the full range of uncomfortable feelings. Anger, depression, sadness, guilt, shame, anxiety, impatience, boredom and frustration - to name a few. Sorry to be so upfront about that, but in my opinion- it is better the devil you know. You will of course gradually also experience many positive emotions such as happiness, gratitude, excitement and fulfilment. Being in recovery can generate a sense of joy that is deeper than you have ever imagined. So there is that to look forward to as well.
emotional pain- a common stumbling block in recovery
In this article, I will however put the focus on one of the most difficult emotional hurdles of recovery namely ‘emotional pain’. Emotional pain is referring to any emotions that feel painful to you. This can be shame, disappointment, fear, depression, guilt, hopelessness, anguish, helplessness and many more. Some of them will have strong physiological manifestations in addition to the more mental discomfort they give rise to.
Your relationship with emotional pain will have a major impact on your progress in recovery
The type of relationship (with pain) commonly observed in individuals with gambling addiction is one of intolerance. This intolerance is often based on very real, sad and traumatic experiences during which the gambler might have learnt that something hurts so much, that the only way to survive it is to attempt to escape from it. This can happen via the routes of compartmentalisation, dissociation, denial, addiction or all of the above. Often, this learning has happened outside of the person’s conscious awareness. The pain usually occurs because something is wrong or warrants our attention. Therefore, the act of dismissing these feelings or gambling to push them aside will result in an increasing buildup of difficult feelings. At some point, it will feel as though the bottle is about to burst. With gambling has often acted as the ‘one and only’ coping mechanism for difficult feelings, the increasing buildup of difficult unprocessed feelings will make you even more likely to want to resort to gambling. Quitting gambling will inevitably allow some of these pent-up feelings to surface again. Unless your relationship with this challenging emotional experience is addressed, you might find yourself spiralling back to gambling as soon as discomfort starts escalating. In order to break this vicious cycle we need to learn new more adaptive ways of managing the painful experiences that emerge along the way.
In a moment where you are choosing between facing up to the pain or continue to stick your head in the sand and hope it disappears- it can appear to make perfect sense to return to more gambling!
Don’t confuse the narrative – your continued chase for a win is not about the money. gambling provides an escape from your current emotional state. Gambling is an emotional & mental health problem- not primarily a problem of financial deficit!
Physical pain is often easily traceable – emotional pain often isn’t. Not with the same degree of preciseness anyway. Even so, emotional pain can feel excruciating. Whilst physical pain is extremely unpleasant people can sometimes find it a little easier to accept it- particularly when pain is traceable and understandable.
Example: You bang your knee- it hurts. You trust the process of healing, you accept that it hurts because you banged it. This is fairly straightforward to understand. The understanding enables a quicker pathway to acceptance, which in turn makes it easier to embrace the experience and make the best of it.
In the process of healing your knee, you might for instance make a conscious decision to focus on other aspects of life. Activities that you can take part in without your knee getting overly triggered and so on.
Now let’s take a look at gambling addiction or any other mental health condition. Gambling can take the role of an emotional anaesthetic short-term. This makes people who have experienced trauma and have accumulated a lot of painful experiences far more likely to find gambling a powerful emotional experience that offers temporary soothing and relief. Continued gambling losses and all other negative impacts of gambling addiction will have contributed further to the mountain of painful experiences. Finally, it will all be further inflated by your avoidance of it. The pressure adds another dimension to the unpleasant experience. You are effectively trying to run from your shadow and you will never be successful at getting away. This realisation will feel scary and create a sense of pending doom. It is at this point most gamblers hear a little voice in their head (and this is normal – not suggesting you are ‘hearing voices’ ) that says something along the lines of:
‘things are terrible. I have to find a way out of this situation. What if I just get some of that money back that I gambled for? At least the amounts I lost and ideally a small surplus too…. I can at least get a clean slate on all the hurt I caused. Get some of that money back to the people I owe…that would make them happy and would ease my pain too….’
Although this constitutes typical in-the-moment reasoning for a person hooked on gambling, you might now realise just how defunct this kind of reasoning is.
Even if you took this thought at face value, the reasoning is flawed for one simple reason: Your loss of control means that whether you win or lose, you will feel compelled to keep going.
In the interest of detaching further from thoughts, you need to focus on the fact that your issues are not about the money. Regardless of what your thoughts tell you. If they were, the very activity that lost you all that money would not be used to get it in return. Gambling addiction is not a case of failing logic- it is a hardcore chase for a shift in emotional state and one that will backfire terribly!
It is vitally important that you start viewing your addiction in terms of an emotional and mental ‘illness’ (although I don’t particularly like that word) rather than through a false storyline that your thoughts are trying to serve up. Your addiction is not about getting money and would not end because you got ‘even’ irrespective of whether you started gambling because you were financially broke, or already well off but wanted more of what you already had. While there is a certain amount of greed kicking in with the condition of gambling addiction itself, you are not addicted because you are in need of more money. You are addicted because you are unwilling – at least subconsciously- to accept your life as it is ‘warts and all’ (as we say in the UK).
What if the painful feelings are trying to tell you something?
Life for many gamblers has been tough. The pain you are feeling is likely there for all the right reasons. Therefore, we need to tune in better with it. Listen to it, feel it out and try to diagnose it more wisely. As long as you continue to paper over your feelings you will continue to feel reliant on your addiction to survive your everyday life.
Let’s instead take proactive steps to stop this spiral!
# Stop believing every word that comes through the mind
The mind might say: ‘if only you had enough/more/broke even..etc’ you would be able to feel better. The emotional mind will use any language that it can resort to that will get you to fulfil its short-term aim of not having to experience the pain. It knows that something is threatening ‘the organism’ (i.e., you) and is trying to find solutions. It gets creative and latches on to well-trodden pathways in an attempt to get an end to the suffering. If gambling is one such pathway- it will suggest that. It thinks about pain, it fears it and it is trying to convince you that you can get away from it. In reality, the pain might have important messages for you relating to how to protect yourself from further pain. It could also be telling you that something has hurt you and you need to process the feeling properly and learn from it. Even if you are incapable of figuring out what the feelings are telling you, rest assured the ultimate relief from your pain will not be found via continued gambling. Ever.
Turn towards your pain and commit to feeling it fully - look inside the body instead of in your mind where the thoughts will try to fool you
The physics of pain
Our emotional pain works in reverse logic. While we might successfully be able to avoid something external to us that causes pain, we will always find ourselves in an uphill battle when we try to resist our own inner experience. Heartbreak, bereavement, boredom, and loneliness, to name a few, are all experiences that feel difficult to stay present with. Any attempts of masking these experiences via ‘the route’ of addiction, procrastination, busyness or other will typically result in a harder wakeup call further down the line. Just like in physics, what goes up must come down. Emotional pain is an undesirable guarantee in life, hence we’d better gear up and learn how to manage it safely. Coping with emotional pain has nothing to do with removing the feeling. Rather, by ‘embracing’ the pain, we no longer get stuck in the resistance zone where we fear the awful experience while engaging in futile attempts to hold back the dam of emotions.
When we embrace pain- weirdly it feels more tolerable. We tell ourselves to just breathe through it, feel it and allow it to be what it is. The body also holds a lot of wisdom. If you tune into your pain you will start to understand your physical and emotional needs better. Many of my gamblers describe significant physiological sensations when talking about their negative emotional experiences of gambling. Some say that it feels like their head is buzzing and feels pressurised, other people feel dizzy, and some people feel chest pressure and pains. I have also encountered those who vomit before or after gambling. The body is telling you that something is wrong with this activity. It is a sign to stop. Not a sign to gamble harder to get away from the feeling. You are not weak or weird for having these feelings. They are part of your human experience and have to be dealt with one way or another.
Pain can lead to progress: start seeing pain as a catalyst for something useful
# make your pain more tolerable by reminding yourself of the fact that it is a necessary ingredient in any form of progress - you have to decide that you want to encounter it
Take a look at accomplishments you’ve made in any area of life be it at the gym, as a parent, as a partner or in a job and you will soon start noticing that none of that progress was possible without the experience of pain. One does not come without the other. This is the duality of life- the Ying and the yang. This understanding lies at the heart of healing from any condition we suffer as humans. This is not a way to dismiss the power of any painful traumatic events you might have lived through. But if something has already taken place- the only control we have is to either do the best we can with a bad situation or continue to layer on the pain through a negative attitude towards our circumstances. Recognizing that each negative event brings with it some form of meaning, learning or growth can help reduce resistance to letting go of the past. You probably could have done without your trauma, but again…accepting reality how it is, is the key to moving forward.
Call this wu-wu, but no matter what technical or scientific terms we choose to apply, many things can be simplified by just understanding some basic principles of our existence. Addiction, unfortunately, pushes you out of your natural balance and homeostasis. So rather than overcomplicating matters, try to recognise that we are only trying to achieve a greater state of balance yet again. More importantly – don’t forget that this is ALWAYS possible as homeostasis is what the body is always striving for.
I am not saying this to make your journey sound more pompous or mystical than it right now feels – but to give you hope and motivation that you can get back to what is already within you. It makes your recovery feel achievable.
# start taking gradual steps towards tolerating your painful emotions
I recently went for a pedicure. Having barely ever been to one I was not sure what to expect. I saw another lady getting a ‘cheese-slicer-treatment’ on the rough skin underneath the heel. I said to the beautician that I wanted one of those too. Walking out of there all chipper with my smooth feet, I soon realised that the heels were hurting just from walking in shoes. I had never appreciated how important that rough skin under the feet is to help us tolerate the ground on which we walk- despite wearing shoes. That skin takes a while to build up but was sliced away in about 60 seconds. Since avoiding walking did not feel like an option, I instead would walk barefoot intermittently just to allow the surface of the skin to build up gradually again. It did not take too long for my skin to have a comfortable degree of resilience yet again.
Perhaps a silly analogy but can make for a reasonable illustration of how we build up our tolerance to any sort of painful experience. We do so automatically, gradually and by repeated exposure to it. Had I decided to put on heal-bondage and/or never walk ever again due to the pain I first experienced I would probably be sitting stuck to this day. That is too high a price to pay for resisting any experience.
# remember that as we deal with pain; we learn our greatest lessons – and our biggest leaps of growth
When we turn towards something painful we are basically telling our mind that it is safe to do so and reprogramming our inbuilt compulsion to run away from it. Try and use an analogy (or better make it a real-life parallel by actioning it) of going for exercise. The minute you remember ‘no pain no gain’ you will feel more inclined to push through the pain. If you go one step further and embrace the pain BECAUSE you wish to see growth and result – you will be starting to experience a sense of power coming from within. You will start feeling like you are taking back control and moving towards your goals- not in spite of pain, but because of pain.
It stops being a hindrance and instead becomes your catalyst!
# Be gentle and curious towards your pain as you would if it was your baby’s pain
A baby will express all sorts of needs and painful conditions without filters, hesitation or shame. They will poo in public and scream blue murder in a shop without wondering what people will think. More importantly, they will not interrogate the appropriateness or whether their feelings are good or bad before expressing them and trying to do something about them. While I don’t suggest a ‘baby-fied’ approach to your expression of feelings, it is important to realise that we all do have an infantilised version of ourselves within and it is the adult self (the person with a bit more restraint and maturity) that has as a job to tame, guide and have a little awareness alongside those more primitive needs and feelings. That being said, it does not change the fact that when pain shows up– there is usually a reason for it. Without any kind of expression, validation or attention being paid to such feelings, trouble will gradually start to build up. If you listen to your pain you might understand its messages. In the case of gambling, the pain that accumulates while you are gambling is real. It is that same pain that you will stand face to face with when you finally quit gambling. It needs to be processed, expressed, and dealt with and the challenge is that often those coping mechanisms are yet not in place. So have patience with your inner baby – it is trying to grow up. As the adult carer, you do your best to teach yourself new skills, and new patterns of relating and as you progress you deserve your own validation and encouragement.
# If you feel like it is risky to encounter your pain, remember that The risk of feeling your feelings is considerably less than the risks you take while trying to avoid them by gambling with your future
Being in control is not about having power over others or having plenty of money in the bank. True power and control come from having a comfortable relationship with our inner world where we feel that we master our emotions – and are not dictated by any particular feeling. When we are in a state of acceptance and flow with our external as well as our internal world. By changing your relationship with emotional pain, you will disable some of the fear about ‘what’s to come’ since you have already chosen to deal with it- as and when it comes up.
Wishing you all the best in your recovery
Annika X