Sense of hopelessness

To everyone who is feeling an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and at a particularly low ebb right now, please read the below...

I started gambling in my early teens. Then on and off for the next 30+ years. I wouldn’t like to imagine how much money I lost but it was a lot.

Nearly 3 years ago, I’d reached the point when I had simply accepted that this was how life was going to be for me until I die. I remember that feeling of hopelessness. I’d tried everything, including seeing a therapist for a couple of years. Nothing worked. I would stop then relapse and stop then relapse and on it went... I started to earn very good money but the more I earned the more I gambled. You could’ve stuck a zero on the end and it would’ve made no difference. Money had no meaning. Then something clicked. I’d like to pinpoint what that was but I don’t know. But I do know that it felt different than those hundreds of times before when I’d tried to give up.

Here’s what I learnt...

ACCEPTANCE: To give up for real, you have to truly, honestly and genuinely WANT to. Be brutally open with yourself. Are you deadly serious or not? And here’s the crux- you have to fully accept that you will never gamble again in your life. Acceptance is absolutely key here. It may take a while to reconcile with the fact that you are never going to gamble again, but take the time to do so. It’s worth it. If you can get to that stage, it’s the start of the re-wiring of your brain.

BARRIERS: Put up the barriers. This is crucial. I can categorically promise that, ultimately, willpower alone will never be enough. For me, I signed up to the relatively new Gamstop. I vividly remember pausing when I got asked for how long do I want to be banned. I then realised if I put anything less than the maximum 5 years, by definition, I was not serious about giving up. So 5 years it was! I had been seeing a private counsellor for the past couple of years, I decided to keep this going and am still going to this day, it’s another additional barrier. The more barriers you have to break through to gamble when those inevitable urges appear, the less likely you are to fall back off the wagon.

AWARENESS: The more you have, the better. I had been fully aware of my problem for decades and taken in more recent times to almost micro analyse my behaviour, why/when/where do I gamble? I had got to the point whereby I was simultaneously gambling thousands whilst at the same time being lucidly aware of the damage it was causing (as opposed to only feeling bad afterwards) I believe this helped immensely in the long run. To the point that, eventually, a tipping point was reached when this total awareness combined with a desire to stop became greater than the urge itself.

WINNING IS BAD: Yep, in fact it’s just about the worst thing that can happen. A crazy paradox to the non compulsive gambler or a CG in the making. That money, even if it makes it back into your bank account, will just weigh on your mind until eventually you succumb and not only is it gone in a flash, but so is a load more, after you inevitably feel terrible and then chase your losses.

THE NEW HABIT: In the same way as gambling was a habit, NOT gambling has now become a habit in itself. I don’t want to break the streak. The longer the streak goes on the less likely I am to break it.

re-WIRING YOUR BRAIN: So this is just a footnote to say, that despite how you might be feeling right now, it is absolutely possible to rewire your brain. Once you realise that you can, that you CAN be in total control, everything becomes that little bit easier.

So very soon I hopefully will be 3 years GF. I am constantly reminding myself never to take my eye off the ball, never to be complacent. Those urges linger beneath the surface, and in all likelihood will never go away, but I am confident I am on the right road to hopefully remaining gamble-free for life. What I can say is that life without gambling is it thousands of times better than a life spent gambling. It hasn’t been easy at all but has been totally worth all the effort, more than words can say.