Cognitive regret

So interesting to see how similar these stories are. Now I can not help but throw out another question to this thread. Has anyone ever been hypnotised before and had change work for addiction done? 

I haven't but I would be a willing participant. In fact i'd love the full ayahuasca experience. I believe that we are all spiritual beings and the source of our pain and suffering and hence are addictive behaviours can be found within our sub-concious. We were not designed to self-destruct but to learn and to grow.

Look up Freddy Jacquin who is an excellent hypnotist.  He has a practice on the west coast somewhere ( also does online work) and I am pretty sure that you would have an interesting experience. Very important is to be super clear with them so they know what to work with.

Remember they are only facilitators. You do most of the work with their help so you can do great changes when you are ready to do so.

Regs

C

I went into a quasi religious drop in shop in the late 1980s.

I was curious in a cynical way. The first hypnosis on a couch session was free. I thought I will prove its nonsense but it was a strange and very relaxing experience. I didn't want to open my eyes and was going with the flow more than I expected by talking about my inner feelings.

Was I completely under? ...I dont think so but I was strangely willing to give away control of my inhibitions. I wanted to relax and have a deep connection with people or an ideal. I was and remain a lost soul in many ways.

I think we agree that a trance like state occurs while gambling. I think there can be a part trance or a partly hypnotic state which controls or negates certain areas of the brain enough to continue on.  Addiction and reward chemicals create a soup of confusion

If I think too much about it I end up going round in circles. I can discuss it so far and then my brain hurts 🙂 

I am a compulsive gambler in full recovery. There is never any room for complacency and that is what I focus on.

Best wishes to everyone on the forum

Thanks for your input. Well, that's great in a way because as a now licensed hypnotist I know that there is plenty of change work that can be done that could make a good difference for the willing. The world has good hypnotists out there. James Tripp/ Freddy Jacquin/ Mike Mandel etc. If you find the right one you could see a big difference in your life. No one is selling you pills or potions but what if is the question. What if? I am now working on a self-hypnosis series for gambling addiction. When I am ready with that I will reach out to the admin here for volunteers and I hope they will see it as a positive step so they may let me look for the volunteers I need. I will keep you posted. Thank you again for all your feedback It has been great to read.

Regs,

C

There are so many reasons why one wants to gamble. Our brains have worked in a pattern where we are almost completely on impulse and that means reaching for the credit card or cash to have another go on autopilot, but how about not wanting to?  Where did that go? A huge majority here will have Gamstop or other blockers in place to stop things but there is clearly a lack of "I do not want to gamble today" going on in the brain or am I wrong? One thing one can do to make sense of that is to understand the difference between the conscious and the subconscious brain and I am not just thinking of knowing about it but to really have a go at separating what is what. Do you have an idea when your subconscious is talking to you or your conscious brain? Try separating them. The more you understand which one it is doing the talking the more you will start going back to that old feeling you may have had a long time ago when You did not want to gamble or give your money away. Sounds strange? Give it a try. The second part of this note is self-hypnosis for destructive behaviour. You need about 21 days to anchor a behaviour. If you find an audiobook which deals with the above mentioned. Try and make it a part of your daily routine for 21 days and see the difference. 

This stuff can be beaten. As a recovering gambler, I have been looking for the feeling of I do not want to gamble. I have that feeling today and it is peace. You should have it too.

All the best 

C

For me personally, I think the blocks are helpful for that initial stage of trying to stop after such a long time in the cycle, but you are right that it should then become a case of not wanting.

I am just over two weeks bet free and I think that I have reached a nice stage where the thought of betting doesn’t register with me for the majority of the day. However, I am still at a stage that when I do think about gambling I have to remind myself why I shouldn’t before quickly snapping out of it.

I look forward to the point that you talk about of just flat out not wanting to, but I am confident that when I have built up memories of the happiness I feel now that I can enjoy my time and experience things fully, I will have no desire to put myself back into a state of anxiety that I felt when having the constant worry of another possible loss

I have been studying for a while now and some of the best addiction healers on the planet are talking about the mind and how our memories together with emotions anchor a behaviour into an addiction. With time it could even be that the memory disappears all together but not the emotion so when we gamble we actually try and replicate an emotion in our mind even though we don't remember why. Now if this is true my question is this. What emotion are you trying to replicate in your mind? Because if you find that missing emotion you can begin to address why it is missing and then work the problem.

All the best

C

Ah...are you ready..... lol

Being Loved, Being truly in love... finding perfection with a loved one.

Not feeling alone ..being wanted by everyone.....being popular...being an alpha male...not feeling empty inside

Combating feeling shy and bullied..gambling in a sense was getting back at the man and proving my worth...feeling as though something was actually going to be kind to me.

Living in a perfect world...contentment...worry free...being very casual about problems like some people seem to be.

Not being anxious...being able to stand in front of a crowd and entertain them...being the life and soul of the party.

Rewinding time to make everything perfect. not thinking about the silly life decisions Ive made...not thinking about how young and naive I was in relation to jobs and government....not feeling like a slave and totally used.

Free money.... how smug and clever I would feel knowing I wasn't working hard for it.....what a laugh....not!

Being rich and successful..having my own tropical island...lol

I was trying to replicate happiness and I became hooked on the process.

I dont think I ever felt truly happy for long periods of time. Gambling was my drug of escape and trying to feel some rush of excitement and happiness. Very simply I didnt want to go home or to the shops because there was nothing there that felt as compelling as the gambling feeling

Best wishes to everyone on the forum

Well, there you go. We chase feelings to such an extent that we forget why we started but it sounds that you have already done this journey? Any feelings you still want to work with? Working with feelings are great in cbt/ gestalt/hypnosis or just plain simple group therapy and the advantage there is that you get to meet a lot of others who are on the same journey. We are not supposed to be alone. We are group animals and we need to socialise and that is why this COVID thing is not very good for any of us.

Work on the emotions you have because if you can get to them and loosen them up you can also change those bad habits to something better and more productive.

All the best!

C

Yes Im getting on a lot better now though. 

I have a job in hospitality I really like  (which is a first for me) and a few good friends.

I feel depression or emptiness causes people to try gambling and then they become hooked on it. Just like a hard drug people try it to escape and feel good with a high. Then they get hooked on it and it messes their life up.

My first gambling machine made me feel hyper excited with a rush of euphoria. I did not realise that would lead to a forty year addiction.

Yes I think we can all work on our emotions with good therapy. We should all have a therapist really as its good to talk things through and have a health check for strange feelings in the mind

All the best

Emotions,  well yes, a gambler goes through the whole range of emotions, good and bad. And not only are they incredibly powerful and addictive but they are likely to result in reoccurring behaviour. Sorrow, anxiety, anticipation, stress, desire, elation, happiness, joy, contentment, smugness, distressing, hopeful, distancing, anger, sadness and despair.

Problem is that the mind tends to reflect on the wonderful feelings rather than the soul destroying ones. 

Thank you for the replies. My point is this. If the emotion is the glue that keeps the gambling habit in place even though you may have forgotten about why you got into it in the first place. Then it should be possible to make that emotion redundant for the habit it is trying to replicate and then make the gambling less attractive. As a hypnotherapist, I know that can be done through certain inductions and I am pretty sure that the cbt specialists here have some techniques to deal with it as well. It is about getting down to the details. What exactly are you replicating when you are gambling. If you can nail that feeling you can start to heal it because what makes us change is new neural pathways that create new ideas and feelings not being stuck in the bad old ones.

Regs,

C

i think for me its anticipation, thats what im seeking, the anticipation that i invest money and play with the possibility of getting the jackpot whatever that may be..... not even when ive won do i feel that great but the anticipation of playing and being involved is what i seek if that makes sense.... ive now managed 1.5 years with only gambling 144 pounds and im 260 days completely gamble free.....now i would still like that anticipation again and to see poker budies but i know if i do i never do things in a restrained way its all or nothing ,  i either play five times a week every week or not at all..... and when i was playing i was saying to myself aftrwards its just not worth it ill stop altogether, then id start again the next week.... So i will now leave that anticipation to one side and address other problems in my life ..... for now gambling is not a problem i have to live with and long may that continue..... 

Have you ever thought about why we lose so much money on gambling? It is because we are being conditioned to lose money on gambling. If you lose money on gambling you will continue to lose money on gambling. The word cognitive regret is when you lose large sums on for ex slots and it just keeps on eating away because the algorithm of the machine is set to make you lose. The word mug punter is for the live betting folks out there who the bookies see as golden cows. Why then do we then think that we are chasing wins? It is hard to get ones head around the brain but if we toy with the fact that our brains get dopamine spikes on "near misses" ie almost winning you start to understand that we are being conned by the biggest white colour crime syndicate on the planet the casinos and the bookies.

Now ask yourself why you are being bombarded by advertising 24/7 all year round. Its because all of the above is true and when you start to understand it You can start to become free of it. It is all a lie. 

Allow yourself to get out of that lie. The best win you can ever have is getting well.

All the best

C