My life with addiction

Hi,

Sending you and Mrs Dan best wishes and make sure you look after you as well.

Wish you and your wife well, not easy at all for you. Hope things improve.

CW

All good things start with solid foundations. I get ya
Thank you for the post dan
X

hi dan, firstly sorry things are tough within your household , - you have been around a long time on here, some of your posts are really top, i need someone to get through to me, i have not been able to embrace recovery, so consequently i keep going back to gambling. i fully intend to stop for good now, give me some insight on embracing recovery please. - paul

No miracles out there Paul. It begins with honesty & grows through hard work & commitment. Wishful thinking never got anybody too far in my experience. Your looking for some kind of epiphany & sorry to say they dont tend to arrive with angels & trumpets attached. Get yourself to meetings. Get yourself to therapy. Do whatever it takes. Not just what your ego & pride are willing to endure.

Hi day at a time.

I wish you well in your recovery. Stay positive and put barriers in place.

I came on here for a rest from gambling.

Gamblers Rest.

Thanks Toad appreciate your wisdom.

Glad the hypnosis went well. Never heard of a 3 hour initial consultation before. Must have been the ribbiting company. Hopefully you managed to open up & be honest with them warts & all. Wishing you best of luck

Fab GA meet last night. 9 in attendance beating our highest number by 4! Two hours of therapy around Step 1 discussing question 2 of the 20 questions. Is gambling making your home life unhappy?
A pretty simple & obvious question & answer one would think. But its only once you begin to delve a little deeper & give specifics around the question that you begin to understand your powerlessness & the unmanagability in your life. Lots of common themes came up outside of the obvious tensions of financial hardship caused by the gambling. Things such as the emotional abuse of a spouse or partner to keep them thinking its their fault, belittleing them to keep them from asking awkward questions. The constant anxiety & tension in the home. Your anger at your gambling plans being broken because the children wanted to play or be taken somewhere. Lack of any real connection or intimacy except on your terms.
One thing quite hard to accept came up. It was that addicts pick their partners very carefully. Usually someone we believe we can manipulate. Someone who doesnt ask too many questions. Maybe we will find someone with even lower self esteem than ourselves. If they dont start out that way, we set about making them feel as worthless as we do.
A phrase ive heard many times in recovery is. We are not bad people we just made bad choices. I know i wasnt a nice person while living with addiction in my life. In fact i did many many bad immoral things. Good news it its possible to change.
Do you want to be the person youve always been or do you want something better?

Thanks, Dan!!

CW

Yeh sorry CW, i thought long & hard before posting it because its not pleasant reading it from your side or contemplating you may be guilty of such things from our side. I guess what swayed it was if you read the friends & family side of the forum & then this side, you could easily be mistaken for thinking each side were talking about two different sets of people. You hear horrendous stories about things that havs been done to partners & parents & siblings on your side of the fence. On this side you hear, i lost money.

A dark story of one of the many heinous things i did in my affair with addiction.

My parents were on holiday. I was asked to pop in a few times to check mail etc while they were away. I arrived at the house one day to find they had had the misfortune to have been burgled. Looked like kids as they had just made a mess & taken mums jewellery that was lying around. Just cheap costume stuff, worthless really. Thing was, i knew were the good stuff was hidden & the cash. I took the lot, smashed up the place a bit more, then reported the crime. Called my sister, all concerned, do i tell mum & dad, ruin their hols or wait until i dutifully pick them up from the airport. After a quick conflab we decide to wait until there return, my sister even congratulates me on my understanding. Anyway. I get the locks changed. Repair a smashed window they gained entry through, all paid for with cash stolen from them, which i later by the way got reimbursed for by dad & pick them up. Sit them down, empathise, lots of hugs, it will be ok etc etc. They get home, my mums terrified they will come back unaware that the real cold m**o whose most likely to fleece her is the son she gave birth to 30 years previously. They lasted another 6 months in that house, mum just couldnt live there anymore, they had to move.
Now its an extreme story & im aware not everyone sinks that far ( some sink even further) but my point is, as someone actively using there is pretty much nothing im not capable of. I care for nothing & no one. Sure i will kid myself i do. But whenever push came to shove. Addiction won everytime over any feelings i may have had for someone. My experience in recovery has showed me im not unique in behaving like this, infact im a pretty cliched addict as most of us are. Some have done less some have done worse.
Again the good news is change is possible. But for most the act of simply stopping gambling wont cut it. Changing things is simple. Changing you is hard.

The amount of people who when illegal actions or committing suicide are mentioned say they'd never do such a thing. I remind myself with this progressive addiction to put "YET" after those words. Rationally most gambling people I meet are lovely, kind and caring people but when they are in action and especially as the illness is affecting them more and more, boundaries get crossed.

So I say I've not committed an illegal act (yet) and i've not attempted suicide ( yet)

Tri

ps i have done both of those things. just using them as an example.

It's interesting Dan, but as ever you are spot on in my case, can't speak for anyone else. I was a sitting duck. I'm an only child of older parents, my mother was pretty a dominant personality and the family generally worked on the assumption that decisions required her approval. There were no cousins of my age, the children of my parents' friends were a lot older and I bussed to school in the next town. All isolating factors. Even now, I prefer approval to disapproval and am more comfortable with decisions that are endorsed by others.

When he told me that what was going on was normal and even desirable, I had no benchmark to compare it to and it's part of why I let too much go.

We live and learn. Thanks.

CW

Thanks for the share although I don't relate to any of it I appreciate where your coming from

AVOIDING RELAPSE

The only truth we will ever find is in our stories. We ARE our stories. Recovery demands we pay attention to what our stories have to tell us.

Look at your story. The answer is in there. Think about it. If you relapsed, why? What pulled you back into isolation & fear. What would have helped you make the next right thing rather than the next wrong thing?

The willingness to take a stand, to turn around & face what is chasing us, is the necessary task in avoiding relapse.
This courageous facing upto our lives as they are, with all the ghosts we may have inherited or created along the way, is the essence of ongoing, lifelong recovery as human beings.

Thanks for popping over to my diary. ..life and recovery are improving each day....still early days compared to you....but feel I've mad a good steady start on my journey..