Triggers

Interesting. If you discount relapses that happen so close to one another, so I'm hoping to give up gambling and then a week later you're doing it again and just count a relapse as going back to gambling after a decent period if abstinence, my experience of GA is that the relapse starts some time before the actual bet.

From my experience of having decent time away from a bet, like 3 years and 2 years and relapsing, but not just having a bet but really losing myself again, it all starts with how I feel or I'm made to feel by others and rather than share it with the room I keep it in and it festers until I have to act on it. Either I've felt sad and sorry for myself about my children or I've felt unappreciated in work or what could have been with my wife or my life.

But, and it's a big but, it's only since I've worked a twelve steps program that I've recognised this and been able to deal with it.

I don't count an advert on tv as a trigger but if I started watching horse racing a lot on tv or slots on YouTube, I'm taken back in my mind to my life before and then all my regrets and self pity come to the fore and I'm lost in my own head. That's when I'm in danger. Because I work parts of the steps daily I don't allow myself to wallow.

I'm 2 1/2 years clean now and faced some real adversity during that time yet stayed away. I know for a fact that in the past I would have been triggered but the steps help me to identify these triggers before I act.

I hope that makes sense.

Chris.

Hi.

Ty. It does make sense and I do think the twelve-step program has been great in handling things we can not manage on our own. I won't write more now because I would like to give your words some thought but thanks again for sharing your ideas with me.

Regs

C

Hi c43h,

My honest opinion based on my recovery and the integrative therapy i teach has lead me to believe that triggers come in many forms. I believe there are several areas that contribute to continued struggling addiction. I'll use myself as an example to explain further. 

When I started my recovery after 23yrs of gambling I believed that anyone who lived my life and felt the way I did would need to gamble, drink or engage in some other mind altering vice. This wasn't because life was tough but rather that I was emotionally bankrupt with very poor coping skills. My parents were very reactive and I was never allowed/encouraged to express my feelings and emotions. We all have an emotional cup which has a capacity and due to my cup being near to full most of the time it never took alot to put me in to overwhelm (gambling). 

Emotional literacy was the first part of my recovery (recognising feelings/emotions and being able to express them in a healthy manor).

My sense of self was extremely damaged due to not being given all the things I needed to become a fully functioning adult. I suffered too much criticism and not enough approval. When I got approval it was only when I had done something outstanding. This meant that I only felt worth and value when I over achieved and not for just being a human being. My parents were always busy which left me feeling unwanted, rejected and abandoned. This led me to me being a people pleaser and would be whoever people wanted me to be as long as I was accepted. The danger with this is that it left me boundaryless and vulnerable. I was also treated harshly (without going in to details), this left me seeing life through the lens of fear/anxiety and having internalized anger that I wasn't able to express.

The second part of my therapy when I felt a trusting bond had formed with my therapist was to look at my past and process it. This included releasing the anger and sadness attached to my development years. Form a loving bond with my inner child, develop boundaries and continue to extend my emotional literacy vocabulary.

When I used to gamble I would more often than not say that I was bored. It took me a long time to realise that this word was the only one I could use because I was so detached from any understanding of what I was really feeling.

As I said above this is a little of my journey and we are all very unique with out past experiences that have shaped us along the way. The truth is that we are not who we are by coincidence but have been moulded. This doesn't mean that we have to stay feeling, thinking and behaving the same as we've always done. Change is absolutely possible with the right guidance in a safe trusting therapeutic relationship along with some vulnerability on the clients part and hard work.

Kind regards

Thank you for sharing your story. You have had a long journey of discovery and healing. I will reflect on what you have shared today and get back to you.

Regs

C

Interesting because I feel the triggers start with the depths of who I am and rely on all sorts of multi layered or sub triggers. Maybe triggers are just a word we use trying to make sense of a drug craving

I have searched for my earliest feelings and memories. My personality is on the depressive or pessimistic side of things. I had been highly self conscious about the way I looked and couldnt really make sense of what the world wanted from me and where I fitted in to the world.

I was happy in my own bubble playing with my matchbox cars  until school was forced upon me.  I felt the starting gun had fired on the rat race when I didnt really want to enter.

School depressed me. I was bullied because I was skinny and didnt excel in macho sports. The curriculum was a nonsense and I realise that now You cant articulate these things as a kid. I was more  depressed than I realised but there was no help. I did my work well like a shy kid and nobody really noticed me.

I have always been a worrier and anxious person away from my comfort zone. Society took me away from any comfort zone very early in life. My parents were loving in a distant way and I never felt any real connection to them

I was bored depressed and felt aimless. I was bored and lonely on holiday...going for chips was actually a highlight of my day. I then saw a fruit machine in that chip shop in a sleepy Scottish village. It made me feel totally alive in a way that suddenly gave me a purpose. It was an excitement rush I had never felt before and it just felt amazing doing it and preparing to do it again. Coins came out and I had a pocket stuffed full of them. That just felt good...Well I felt on top of the world  and it was top priority for the rest of my holiday. That was dopamine doing its work in the bloodstream

I now know I was hooked fast and for the next forty years I associated those machines with a feeling I wanted....I craved it like a drug. In the local travelling fairs it wasnt the big wheel or wurlitzers I wanted. My desire was for the seedy arcade section with the old clapped out machines

The addiction gets into our bones and my triggers were all over the place

Anxiety stress and bad news were major ones. I remember feeling totally overwhelmed with anxiety in a strange city...I had to get to an arcade to recover and take a breather if you like...in the arcade I felt safe....like it was surroundings I knew and i sighed with relief. It cost me  £500 that day and I was on a very low income.

The addiction progresses until any fears or complacency with money act as reasons we give ourselves As Chris says the feeling starts earlier so maybe the brain is looking for anything that day to hurry the inevitable along or make an excuse for the inevitable. I remember thinking I cant afford that games console and then ended up putting two or three times that value into a gaming machine. So miserly behaviour, a fear of money or a brief feeling of being careful with money would also trigger me off

I also think I gambled to punish myself for feeling a failure, to punish myself for childhood memories and opportunities passed over...for not asking that girl out for feeling shy and inadequate...for the crappy job I was doing making be feel impotent like a slave.

It was a form of self harm because I was on some level playing to lose. The feeling of the machine "cheating me" was also a feeling I learned to crave...any emotion above numb would draw me back to gambling.

Its difficult to talk about triggers because essentially I was addicted. maybe I was just using trigger excuse to explain justify why I did it again.

Maybe gamblers talk about triggers where other drug addicts just know they have to have their next ciggy, drink or fix. we were hooked to chemicals in a similar way. Its about escape just like those other drugs

Are those the reasons I more vunerable than others to crave dopamine and adrenaline that gambling induces? I don't know. I'm still working on it

Best wishes to everyone on the forum

Thanks for sharing. I must say you have way better insight into your own behaviour than I have of mine. Very interesting to get this information. 

For me, it's emotions that trigger gambling. I have always processed the world differently to others. For reasons unknown, I am always trying to unsettle myself, find ways to defeat myself. I have been at war with my own self for decades. It too, started with bullying at school. I tried telling people about this, but it just made it worse. I used to skip school and hide out in the parks, eat my packed lunch on the swings, then head home at the end of the school day. I had some other painful issues growing up, and used all of it to hate on myself. I didn't fit in the world, I still don't. I have always felt like I was on the outside looking in and it always felt like just going through the motions, pretending to like the same things as others, and getting drunk to feel part of the gang.....It just wasn't me. I grew tired of faking my way through life and decided instead to go it alone. No friends was better than fake friends who used and abused you.

I got myself a good education in the end, stayed on at school after the dead heads had left and went on to study at university. I found gambling in my early twenties and it was like a light had switched on in my brain. That light has been on for 23 years now. Yesterday was an important day for me, but I didn't feel like celebrating it or even mentioning it on here. It was 2 years since my last bet, but part of me still craves gambling and I have been plagued with triggers and urges these last few weeks, so I didn't want to mention it.

For me, I know that my gambling comes from the person I am. It is my nature to be self destructive. It always has been. I also know that part of me played to lose. Part of me wanted to lose. I would gamble to self loathe, to justify the way I already felt about myself. I have always struggled with emotions and deep feelings and negativity has always gripped me since I was a child. My head is always full and gambling was the only thing that ever let me switch off. I wasn't myself when I was gambling, I was just an empty, non thinking vessel and that was just fine by me. Gambling would ease my mind and remove all my thoughts. Nothing else existed except the screen, not even the numbers on the screen were real, it didn't even register as money. The numbers only really meant time to me. 

I don't know why these last few weeks have been so rough, except that I have been feeling low with all the negativity out there. The virus does not trouble me half as much as the way people behave. I have seen a lot of nastiness in the world and see people turning on each other. I have struggled very much to get out of the house and don't want to leave for fear of judgement and criticism because I know that I will also use that against me.

I like being invisible and going out right now gets you noticed. The thing is, for me, gambling is triggered by feelings. It's not triggered by debt, or anything really tangible. I always blamed my debt for my triggers before, but that's not really true. It's not the debt that kept me gambling, it was me and the way I see things.

It's always me looking to either justify an emotion or create one. I look to overwrite feelings,, rather than accept them. I feel sad right now, really low and I don't want to gamble, what I actually want is to unsettle myself, to self destruct. I don't like the way that I feel and I want to justify that because if I gamble, I know that I will feel like c**P and that beats feeling like c**P in general.

I have all these feelings and I don't know where to put them. I can't put them down. I carry them with me. I can't process them, despite having them constantly in my head, and so gambling worked for me, by making me not only detach myself from those thoughts while I was in the moment, but it also helped justify the reasons why I felt bad. In other words, I can blame the gambling for the way I feel. I put gambling in the way of my life and left it there because it was easier to hide behind it.

I did not even mention my 2 years GF on here yesterday simply because I don't feel that it is worth mentioning because I am plagued with thoughts to gamble so I don't feel that I am doing well at all. The more I have thoughts to gamble, the more I want to gamble to punish myself for wanting to do it! 

I don't seek it out to have fun, I seek it out like a pill I need to swallow. It's like when I am hurting, I need it and in the past, when I gambled, I would get a break from my own head and if I lost, I would get to justify my self loathing. Losing money would sometimes bring me a sense of calm. It was like I got what I wanted or expected in some way. It's exactly the same with self harm, it's the body and the brain overlapping. Pain and emotion criss cross in the brain so using gambling to self harm actually would make me sometimes feel better because I sought punishment for the way that I felt, so by losing, in a way, I actually got what I wanted and could resume life quite normal after an episode. Focusing on the pain of gambling would tune out pain from everywhere else, just like self harm. It also gave me a reason to feel bad about myself which was better than just hating on myself every day. In a way, gambling defined me. I surrendered all my emotions to the machine and let it take everything from me. Now, even 2 years on, without a bet, I am still struggling with triggers and emotions because I still carry all the same problems that led me to gamble in the first place and I can't process them because thinking about problems triggers urges to gamble or self destruct. 

The thing is, pain is pain, and your brain processes it as such whether you've been hurt physically or emotionally. But the difference is there's no real fix for emotional pain and the more it occurs, the more the person seeks to bury it. I struggled with emotional pain for so long that I began physically harming myself. It was not to feel pain but to punish myself for feeling pain, and to give me a better reason to hurt, something I could understand. I have a long way to go yet and am not fixed, not by a long shot. I have not gambled for 2 years and 1 day and I pledge to keep going but I feel like I am at war with myself as well as gambling and the foundations I am standing on are shaky at best. It doesn't matter how far you are away from your last bet, only how close you are to your next bet and that worries me. I feel threatened, by MYSELF!

I am my own trigger for gambling. I realise that. I don't need excuses or anything external to go wrong. I can create a storm myself and then use it to justify my actions. My view of the world around me is skewed because of my thinking. Gambling for me is nothing more than a big red button that I try not to press every single day. Sometimes, that button is distant and other days, it's right by my side.

How can you avoid your triggers when the trigger is yourself?

By knowing yourself as you do. That is what is keeping you on the side looking in. My therapist said that almost everyone he had treated with gambling addiction had experienced trauma at some stage in their life and I feel he was right about that. For me, I started looking at my thinking process differently after getting my NLP certificate. I adopted the way they look at thoughts. If I can give any advice it would be that you look it up and see if it makes any sense to you. Most things we do we first interperate in our brains are from experiences we have already stored and we make sense and decisions of the present from that prior knowledge we have accumulated earlier. That is why a lot of things we do are on repeat all the time. We are habitual and we do the same things again and again. All three replies have gone deep in how you are as human beings and it tells me how you are coping with those triggers that may show up on your journeys.  You life experiences have given you the tools to endure and or deal with them. That only comes from a lot of experiences sometimes not so pleasant ones.

What was I looking for? What if one could make that moment before the mood changes stress or angst that creates the trigger to gamble a smaller type or a different type of impulse. Something that does not sit in your subconscious but something that instead is pushed to your prefrontal cortex so that you actually get a chance of making a decision on the action of gambling instead of just doing it and thinking about the aftermath afterwards.

Thanks for sharing your story.

Thanks for your insight. I will take a look at it. I do judge things on past events. I am always ahead of myself and my thoughts race. They don't give me chance to stay in the moment, to rationalise or to be objective....that's where I always used to fail in respect to gambling. The main reason I am 'succeeding' now is because I have prevented gambling with every possible block, NOT because I have really succeeded in changing my mindset.

Believe me, I am working on it, but as others have said, we are very much a product of environment and this shapes our attitude to things that haven't even happened yet. We can use past events to justify future decisions and it is this sense of 'I'm right to feel this way' that gets in the way of everything good. Letting go of past pain and moving forward is key to being objective and being rational in the present. Otherwise, we can feel 'entitled' to continue feeling like the world is against us and use this to steer our thoughts and actions in a way that is destructive. I know this well.  It's like I expect things to turn out bad, I am negative, so all I do is ensure that they do just that, like some self fulfilled prophecy. We can become masters of our own destruction, and still insist it is because of someone or something else, but really, we are only making sure that the traumas and problems of the past stay right there in our present. How many times I have declared that I feel punished......when it is myself that is striking the blows. It is not the world that is at fault for my addiction but my interpretation of it, based on my 'training'. Training being all my past negative experiences.

I don't know if we can actually stop the mood from happening. Mine can happen so quickly and seemingly out of the blue sometimes and it feels like a journey I am on, not one that I have control of. My head takes me to places I don't want to go and then I can literally start plucking out horrible thoughts, one after the other, making myself absolutely and thoroughly miserable that I can often forget what it was that actually set me off this time.

It's like my 'trigger' for gambling is more like a 'trigger' for bad memories, negative thoughts etc...like opening up a box of stuff you don't really want to trawl through and your brain makes you do it and then you seek escape from it. I can start to feel down and my brain says, 'oh you think what's just happened to you is bad?, what about when A happened, or B happened? Remember that? Then each memory that comes to mind is worst than the last, I end up making myself completely miserable and in the end, completely forget what upset me. I think they call it the Negative Network, or something like that....each negative thought fires off another negative thought because bad memories are more powerful than positive ones and your whole head lights up with a load of c**P you don't want to think about. 

It's my brain trying to distract me from what's upset me, by getting me to think about stuff that was far more upsetting....I start ruminating, going over the past events and end up in a hole that I can't get out of for hours. I actually think that this is what puts me off dealing with my past issues. I don't want all the memories firing, I know how horrible it makes me feel, so when I do think about them to try to process them, it hurts and I push them back down for fear of starting off the chain reaction.....I dig them up and use them when I feel destructive, but I won't dig them up and use them to actually do something about it. I even used to create problems gambling so I could focus on them instead of other problems that I found too difficult to deal with. I would be stressed and worried about stuff, gamble and lose money and then all I could focus on was how I was going to make rent, buy food, pay bills etc...

This is what I have been working on lately. It might not fully prevent the mood that triggers the impulse to gamble, but it is supposed to help cool off the triggers when they strike.

1) Understand that often the things that trigger us are those that strike against our values, what we deem as right or wrong, our self respect and our integrity and it creates the compulsion to respond in a negative way. Because our response is an emotional one, the response tends to be far bigger and more inflammatory than necessary. In other words, we blow things out of proportion. Emotions do not trigger rational or thoughtful responses, they trigger hotheadedness, an impulse to immediately defend or change the way we feel.

2) We can change the way we perceive the trigger by becoming aware of what irritates us, what aggravates us and what really sets us off. Take time out to think and allow the brain to process the situation without reacting and this lessens the impulse to react negatively. This allows the response to come from a place of thought and mindfulness.

3) Things that trigger us create the need to respond immediately because the emotions are fuelled by adrenaline. It happens in the moment and creates a fight or flight response. We need to put time between what happened and our impulse to react. Just like not responding to that email or tweet that upset us until we have had time to cool off....

4) The reason being....emotions prevent hearing. They trigger a one sided course of action, one that comes only from our own perspective. They are one sided and one dimensional. When things trigger us, we don't listen, we don't process things properly, we just form defensive arguments in our head that distort the reality. We come up with 'facts' that justify our behaviour and defend out right to gamble because we are upset. We don't take the time to think that maybe we have perceived things wrong, jumped to conclusions....etc.. Our triggers are often the way we interpret a drug craving just like the previous poster said....something that will take away the pain we feel in that moment. Our moods justify our behaviour in these instances and it is only afterwards that we have deep regret. We need to breathe properly, slow everything down and give the brain time to interpret the situation with clarity.

5) We need to see that our impulses not only make us lose respect for those around us and act without thought or consideration for others, but also we surrender self respect when we react negatively. Despite addiction, we have a choice on how to respond in any given situation, so long as we learn to give ourselves time to process our emotions. 

6) As I mentioned earlier, when we are triggered it can become all about us and the arguments we form in our heads when we are upset will all be one sided. We need to take time to think about our actions and how others feel about them, to acknowledge that others have a right to be upset and to their own feelings as well and to acknowledge that the way you feel about something may be based on the past, on misconceptions, misinterpretations and not on the facts. We need to take things less personally and allow other people to think and feel differently to us and not interpret everything as a personal attack on our values. Seek understanding and clarity about a situation so that you can see it for what it really was. 

6) Learn to see other people's perspectives and be open minded. If we are always right, then we cannot really grow. Accept that it is okay to be wrong sometimes or to have difference. It's not always about who is right or who is wrong and gamblers often have a need to be right or to be proved right which can be volatile because it means our minds are rigid and closed off to anything else.

7) Know when you have been triggered. This is easy for me as I get upset about something and no one else even knows what has upset me. It is 0 to 60 in 6 seconds and I can feel my mind racing and looking for something to make it all stop. Triggers can often seem to come out of nowhere and this can make them hard to identify but often, they are things that to others, seem unimportant, but they will have rattled us on a deep level. Other people's inability to see why we are upset makes matters worse because we then seek justification for being upset and they won't validate our feelings because they have no idea why we should be upset. It is then a classic one of mine to self destruct and gamble because not only am I upset, but thoughts of 'they don't care' 'they don't understand me'  will pile on and help create what in my mind is a valid case for gambling.

Things are improving for me, but I still struggle with my emotions. I think what I struggle with most is the fact that I know deep down that I will look for reasons to gamble and can mould and shape my interpretation of events to justify my gambling. I can create a case for gambling. It's like I deliberately seek to self destruct on some level and have never really understood why I do that. Even if things are going well, I can still want to unsettle myself because I get discontent and impatient. I was as much addicted to risk as I was to gambling. I will take a look at what you recommend and see if it helps unravel the mystery of what goes on in my mind.

All the best.

A book tip. It is called zero limits by Joe Vitale. It is about a Hawaiian healing system called Hó oponpono. It is one of the stranges healing experiences I have ever come across but the results are actually quite intriguing. For me it brings peace. Maybe it can help you as well.

Thank you for your reply. I am amazed by the depth that you know yourself. It is impressive. Let me reflect on your words and I will get back to you.

I saw a super interesting youtube clip about dopamine and how it takes the focus out of everything else than what you are doing at the time. It also goes to explain the dopamine levels of alcoholics and of C*****e addicts. Those levels of dopamine far exceed any non-addicted person and that means that we have to go through a lot of gambling to feed that dopamine release. That is why most experts say you need more of the same to get on with the high. Now if that makes our triggers more powerful or not I don't know but it would make sense if they were as we have more dopamine release needs than a normal brain has. What does it mean? Well, there is both good and bad news. Our impulses are more like the four horses of the apocalypse than a donkey walking down a dusty road and once we get to that place of gambling bliss we are most likely stuck there without a single thought on anything else as dopamine focus just kills everything else until you run out of fuel to gamble with. To top that off our fight or flight brain handles 150 bits of information while our subconscious brain handles 150 million bits of information so our rationale drifts in and out of autopilot. Again my aim will be to see if one can even out the odds between the conscious and the subconscious by trying to prolong the impulse we get for all kinds of different reasons to give the rational brain a chance to think the impulse through before it is acted upon. I have no idea if it is even possible but I will keep you posted once I have the hypnosis license to practise.

Thanks again all of you for all the feedback. It has been interesting to read your thoughts on this.

Here is the film about dopamine again.

https://youtu.be/aqXmOb_fuN4

Thanks for the clip. Interesting. It's always annoyed me that addiction has become a sort of throw away word these days, people addicted to their phones, social media or too much junk food. I feel it does a disservice to people whose lives are devastated by this disease. Dopamine is a powerful motivation to gamble. What scares me is that even when I am not in the zone, not in the moment and not engaging with gambling, my brain is still soaked in the stuff just by thinking about it. I can feel that my brain is energised by my thoughts to gamble, (even watching the video, I could feel it).

Even without a trigger, I can sit here and think about gambling and I can literally feel my brain light up because it is remembering and anticipating......steering me and coercing me. 

That scares the hell out of me. 

The impulsivity to bet has faded now having gone these last 24 months without a bet, ( I used to think about betting and be logged in before I even realised it) but the desire to gamble remains fairly strong....the 'memory' that gambling feels good remains in place, despite my £40,000 losses. People often say things like, 'surely you have learned your lesson, you won't want to bet anymore'.....truth be told, I never really wanted to.....I just needed to. There is no lesson to be learnt because addiction is by definition compulsive behaviour despite negative consequences. I have always known that it was the act of gambling that I was addicted to, not the winning. That's why it never mattered how much I lost, it was the anticipation that gripped me and I needed it fast, hit after hit...win or lose, each spin would light up my thirsty brain.

I can certainly vouch for the brain working on standby almost while you are betting.....A tornado could take the roof off and I wouldn't bat an eyelid so long as I could keep betting. Truth be told, in my mind, I never really lost anything until I had ran out of money because while I still had money to gamble with, I was still able to get my fix and that was all that mattered. My balance did not register as money but as time and that's why I could never keep a win because deep down, I didn't really want the money, I wanted what it could give me, which was to spend 'time' gambling and the money was just part of the trade.

Lost and found. Well done for two years off. That's a great achievement. I feel for you as it sounds like you're white knuckling it rather than enjoying your time free from a bet. From my memory, you attend GA, and if so, have you tried to work through the twelve steps program of recovery? I know it's not used that much in GA, although it is in the orange book and GA is a program of recovery rather than just abstinence, but it has started to get a lot more use in our groups and everyone who has done it(with the help of someone else) has really benefitted. Just a thought.

C43h I see a lot of mention about dopamine as if if only there was a tablet that controlled it we would all be okay. I'm sure there is an over or under production of dopamine but when you are a problem gambler, something switches and gambling suddenly isn't the problem. We are the problem and gambling is the symptom. Could be drink, drugs, s*x, anything to escape me. I chose gambling because that was my addiction.

If I take a tablet and stop the dopamine release and so on, I am still left with me. I'm the problem that needs addressing and I have GA for my abstinence and a steps program for my recovery. My advice, don't look to much for a quick solution or a reason why, but abstinence initially to get a clear mind(GA is my go to place) and either counselling or a recovery program to work on you. I prefer something like a steps program with other GA members over counselling only because I can identify with the GA member whereas a lot of the counsellors haven't been through your experiences. Some have as I'm sure some of the moderators have but not all.

Hope that helps.

Chris.