I have been reading about workplace bullying lately...I realise that I have been a victim of this in my previous role. However, this subject is taboo and people view your personality as weak and claim you should be more assertive. So, basically you have to change your whole personality and become a person that isn't yourself! I don't like the idea of that. Quite sad where we are at with all of this...I guess being nice to people is the wrong way to go? On the other hand, I have been subject to considerable stressors so many times throughout life, and grown older, yet wiser...Henceforth, I have fine tuned my attitude to be more empathetic...This is great to a certain extent but I find I'm preyed upon by people that have their own issues...I know I am sensitive and it seems that all of these isssues are a consequence of my behaviour...Difficult one to digest...

My post's are amusing of even entertaining sometimes...What I'm trying to acheive is; for us to be able to solve the problem of a gamblers mind by using lots of different pieces of data...Hopefully, professors will come up with a new hypothesis to test and then be able to cure this illness once and for all! I aint trying to re-invent the wheel-Just want answers and. to be able to, say no to gambling!

I'm 136 days free from the devil!

Top stuff derv keep the days climbing You're smashing it

Deano

Thanks Deano really helps when I get a post...

I used to be a real loser when I had no education and my children were so young, my partner used to go crazy when I lost the dole money...She would kick me out and I'd have to somehow make the money back...It was usually shoplifting or anything I could get my hands on...Only 50% of the time I'd grab a fraction of the money back...I gave up stealing a long time ago, but the gambling continued and I someohw learnt to accept the losses and move on without stealing...The losses I gained after me stopping stealing add up to more than that of what I ever stole!! Believe me!...The problem is, okay I have been caught and punished several times over the years....This I think has taken its toll on me and I find it really difficult to properly fit into society...

People in general hate criminals and I dont blame them for having that type of thinking. On the other hand, Teenagers that cannot find a job, have no confidence, have no money; what are they supposed to do? I cant do nothing about it but it is sad and sadenns me to see people with nothing and the divide is getting worse...

I look back and think quite a lot about who I was. Call me selfish but I had no 1...I had to eat...It could easily end up that way again for me or anyone today...How I made it this far I dont know!

What are we supposed to do when we lose everything?

The craziest part of this....I know a person who markets a well known brand and he travels to the slums of places...He met a guy who collects plastic bottles for a living- so he can eat...He probably make under 50cents a day....The most striking thing this person told me is that, this plastic guy is always smiling and seems happy!

What I'm trying to say is, hand to mouth is the best thing for today...Tomorrow never comes! Take the moment into your hands and smile! I can compare it to when I lost the money and made it back dishonestly, it was enough...

Like I mentioned, I have learnt to accept the losses and go without, after all the money I have blown over the past 10 years has all been honestly earnt! I couldn't accept the losses when I was younger and had a family to feed...My missus wouldn't let me in either...It was probably £70 in them days..Dole money was never enough to live on...

In my eyes and other's, I'm not a bad person, I think I did all of thess things for what I thought was a good reason...I never just went and stole to gain, I stole because I felt I had to!!

Maybe the government has my logic too? (thieves)...

I maybe sometimes give away too much information about myself....I'm not perfect, I try to be a good person and I probably am?

...Judgement is at the forefromt of everything we do these days...It seemsto me like we are trapped...

Today I went to the gym and did 30mins cardio and walked home, the guy in Costa gave me a free coffee because I'm a regular customer..

..I feel that I have been thinking too much today, I did actually feel stressed and gambling was crossing my mind, I was giving up and felt like putting in my money-building it up by winning and running away...Problem is there is nowhere to go!

I'm having negative thought that I'm constantly trapped, constantly running, uncomfortable in my own skin...The addiction teases me with a good life, I know to well it will torment me just like I think everyone else around me does...I cant speak to people these days because I think they aint genuine no more...Even my closest relatives only want something (especially now they know I dont gamble)

I feel that People just want something and it disappoints me...I love it when I find someone that doesnt have any intention of gain, although I would be very suspicious of these people!

How can we truly be happy? Without feeling like we have to win or gain....

dervkidd wrote:

The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned — and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, http://www.chasingthescream.com"} }" data-beacon-parsed="true" href="http://www.chasingthescream.com" target="_hplink">Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong — and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.

If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.

I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs.

I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind — what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can’t stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a C*****e addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me.

If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: “Drugs. Duh.” It’s not difficult to ***. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That’s what addiction means.

One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments — ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kS72J5Nlm8"} }" data-beacon-parsed="true" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kS72J5Nlm8" target="_hplink">a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or C*****e. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.

The advert explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called C*****e. And it can do the same thing to you.”

But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/277-rise-and-fall-of-the-official-view-of-addiction-6"} }" data-beacon-parsed="true" href="http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/277-rise-and-fall-of-the-official-view-of-addiction-6" target="_hplink">Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was — at the same time as the Rat Park experiment — a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was “as common as chewing gum” among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.

But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers — according to the same study — simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn’t want the drug any more.

Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you. It’s your cage.

After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days — if anything can hook you, it’s that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is — again — striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in http://www.chasingthescream.com"} }" data-beacon-parsed="true" href="http://www.chasingthescream.com" target="_hplink">the book.)

When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that i t felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don’t seem to make sense — unless you take account of this new approach.

Here’s one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right — it’s the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them — then it’s obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.

But here’s the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As http://drgabormate.com/"} }" data-beacon-parsed="true" href="http://drgabormate.com/" target="_hplink">the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.

If you still believe — as I used to — that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander’s theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.

This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It’s how we get our satisfaction. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find — the whirr of a roulette wheel or the P***k of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it ‘bonding.’ A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn’t shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me — you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers’ Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the C*****e and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table.

But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre’s book The Cult of Pharmacology.

Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism — cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.

But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That’s not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that’s still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture.

This has huge implications for the one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war — which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool — is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people’s brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren’t the driver of addiction — if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction — then this makes no sense.

Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. For example, I went to a prison in Arizona — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs6hUUL-5DM"} }" data-beacon-parsed="true" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs6hUUL-5DM" target="_hplink">‘Tent City’ — where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages (‘The Hole’) for weeks and weeks on end to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record — guaranteeing they with be cut off even more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world.

There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world — and so leave behind their addictions.

This isn’t theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them — to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.

One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other’s care.

The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I’ll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country’s top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass — and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal’s example.

This isn’t only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster’s — “only connect.” But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live — constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.

The writer George Monbiot has called this http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-loneliness-killing-us"} }" data-beacon-parsed="true" href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-loneliness-killing-us" target="_hplink">“the age of loneliness.” We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander — the creator of Rat Park — told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery — how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog.

But this new evidence isn’t just a challenge to us politically. It doesn’t just force us to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts.

Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention — tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won’t stop should be shunned. It’s the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction — and you may lose them altogether. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever — to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can’t.

When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along.

A lot of thinking going on with you at moment Derv, the 130 odd days seems to be giving you some clarity. I had read the above previously and just wanted to add this TED talk to it.................... https://youtu.be/PY9DcIMGxMs

Also agreed with what your pal said regarding the happy/ smiley chap who lives for the day on his 50 cents. Have met simlar in my existence Society tends to brain wash us from an early age as we lose grip with our values.... Hai ho addiction could be our ingrained human nature telling us something that something isnt right... Not sure whether i made any sense there ?

Yes Volcano, and betting shops are perfect to trap the underclass of society...Broke, out of work, on drugs you name it it all goes into that same category....

Earlier I was listening to the radio...All o a sudden there was an announcement, "The x Factor" (drum rolls and music) then it advertised Rainbow Riches and other casino style games; they had the audacity to hide behind a very popular show, using the same presenter and even original X factor track-The gambling industry is desperate to get into the main stream....You see once it has wormed its way into society there is nowhere to hide!!!

So sad...

Keep fighting...

' Trap ' is the optimum word there Derv. Every where where we turn, we get sucked into the subconcious trap with pretty marketing, billboards, gambling adds etc or even the new's with constant bleating about the new religion of terror/terror/terror. The list goes on.

So i guess re(dis)covery helps us to start seeing the wood for the tree's and also acts as a conscious place to hide... Gambling blinded us to the ' happiness trap '.

We're made then broken hai....

Keep racking them days up hai and beware of the traps.... I wish you well

Where's the like button for the last post?

Yes, it's all making more sense now...A certain amount of money is distributed into circulation..The govenment's part is to keep that money out of the poor folks hands and anyone that works for a living too....They know people cannot survive from paycheck to paycheck...Nor can the government afford their lavish lifestyle...The cunning plan is create a mini casino on every high st and in everyone's home....You dont receive goods for spending this money and it certainly doesnt go to charity...It's paying for something though...

To add insult to injury...

...They use the media to brainwash us with the 'no tomorrow' concept...War, e.t.c... Smart people know d**n well that life goes on and the uneducated are led to think it's all over!....We must spend everything today or lets win money so we dont have to worry no more...The thing is, the formula to continue being rich is not spending....Ultimately resulting in a larger divide between rich and poor, a broken economy ...They already are creating misery..People blindly throw their hard earned money on nothing!

...Unfortunately, my writings are just small words that cannot really reach the minds of millions and I am one amongst billions of people...But if I could help just one person today then I have acomplished something....

I nearly gambled this evening...I am aware of a trigger.....'THE UNKNOWN'....

Hello Derv, that above post is the first time I can recall on this diary that you appear to be susceptible to gambling. Regroup and get back on your toes. Take care

Thanks Volcano,

It is because yesterday I tried to find new employment, I went for an interview in a far away place..After some time looking for the location I became lost, and low and behold ended up in a village that had a convienient bookies on the corner...The moment of trusting my willpower and faith had arrived!...I was frantically looking for somewhere to park to go into the bookies and almost had made up my mind to just give up and relapse...I do remember at that point a flash of where i'm at in recovery and briefly reflected upon it; the thought that went through my mind was that I'd be back to square one regardless of winning or losing...

Some few hundred yards away from the shop I found a parking space and had probably circled the area- seeing as I was lost.... Finally, I decided I was late for the interview and would make my way back home....I was happy I never gambled and smiled to myself...Although I was unhappy about contemplating it!

The only other thing I can think about is being paranoid and thought that 'they' (whoever they are) want me to gamble? Like I was set up to go and gamble...

I totally forgot that I had banned myself from my local bookies and when it dawned on me that I could walk into this bookies so far from home without nobody knowing made the situation 'extrememly' tempting...

Today, I called in sick at work and think I need some time to rest and think about everything....

Thanks...

Hi, still off work and feeling a little confused whilst at the fork in the road...Which way do I go now!?

I just realised something about the last post and the day of temptation..I cleverly had put my funds into an account that couldn't have been touched whilst I was contemplating gambling on my recent journey...I had totally forgotten about this detail at the time...Therefore, if I had gambled there were blocks in place anyway....It is the trigger that counts and of course that first bet!!

Hello Derv,

' selfish in addiction, selfish in recovery ' . The reason i uoted that was to say Thanks, you'e made me think and helped with your thoughts of late.

I had intended to respond on your post regarding your trip into the unknown and responded my thoughts via Alan135 diary.

We've all been caught up in this S***e and we tend to keep ourselves down and not give ourselves credit in the strides we/ve made and you Derv has come a long way and probably doesnt really appreciate the strength you possess as addiction hoodwinks us to focus on weaknesses. I tend to think when we dismiss ' addiction ' as a weakness we are somehow worsening the problem with which addiction has stemmed from.............. As for which way you go now -----------Forwards!! and listen to the voice that speaks the quietest as the other f****r lies and is the one what has got us in this mess....