The Name of the Ghost

Day 4: I relapsed on Thursday, June 20th. I had been fighting urges for a week, but in the end, I found the situation insufferable. I lost some of my savings. Thankfully, a month without gambling did have a small positive effect on my mindset, and this time I didn't fall into the "win back the money I lost" or "lose everything" mentality.

Based on this experience, I will make small adjustments to my strategy. First off, I'll start saving in cash and deposit my card whenever I need to make a purchase.

And of course, I'll embrace the discomfort much more than I did in the previous month.

I'll try my best to make this time better.

Peace

@h2gk3a76m1 Well done Goodfella.  Please continue to feel proud of yourself and not disappointed. You are putting all your thoughts and feelings on your thread and writing honestly.  This will keep you focused and remind you that it is just not worth making that deposit, going through the whole rigmarole with a dodgy betting company and then ultimately losing money (as those of us on here often do). This then affects your finances and even more, your mood.👎.

Keep you chin up, keep posting and keeping being honest with yourself👏👏.

Take care.

Pink Lady🩷🍎.

Thank you very much, Pink Lady, for your words of encouragement and support. I'm a little bit ashamed of reading support directed at me now, but I will definitely work on myself harder.

Appreciate your activity on this forum as well as your gambling-free streak, which, as I understand, has lasted since April 1st. The only reason I haven't shown up in your thread is that it is as large as Weirdfish's 😕, and need some time dedicated, but I will definitely check it out soon. I hope I can go as far as you guys have.

Thank you, and stay strong.

🖐️ 

@h2gk3a76m1 I have just caught up with your diary matey.  I hope that you are not beating yourself up too much about the slip?  Recovery is rarely a linear process, it is often about 2 steps forwards 1 step back.  The point is that you are heading in the right direction.

I set myself the goal of going 30 days GF last year.  I achieved it and even had the bravado to post in the 'Success Stories' forum.  What did I do later that day?  I gambled...  Won and then lost.

What did you learn from the most recent relapse? What was the trigger?  How can you build a plan of action for the next time.

The fact is that you have stayed on the course of kicking this habit.  That makes me, a random person... typing away in a suburb in England on a hot night about to get ready for a day's work and a train I have to catch 1st thing proud of you.  I want to check in again and see how you are mastering this.

I agree very much with your thoughts that 1 month is not long enough to reprogram your brain.

Phase 1. 0-3 months is just about focusing on the control strategies, taking control back over the thoughts and urges.  And rewarding the non gambling behaviour.

Phase 2. 3-12 months is about maintaining abstinence and continuing to build a life without gambling.  It is also about Completing functional analyses if you have a lapse.

Phase 3. 12-24 months continue all previous steps and if okay start a phased, controlled reduction of stimulus controls.

The above is a bit of the CBT I received.  I am currently GF but still on phase one, as are you.  I will not allow myself access to money or means to gamble.  I will go to great lengths to avoid anything gambling related (Just the sound of a roulette ball hitting the wheel can trigger something in me).

You are doing really well.  It seems that you are already implementing much of what you would be advised by a trained gambling councilor.

As you continue your GF journey you may start to feel more engaged with everyday things.  I am starting to and it makes me never want to go back to the dark place.  

I can't get back the money lost but at this point in my life it isn't about the money.  It is about the lost experience that gambling took from me.  I don't think I was ever 100% really present before, the dopamine highs dulled everything else.  Now I am making it about me!

Well done.  Don't be hard on yourself.  Reward yourself for the progress that you have made.  Learn from where it went in a direction that you did not want.  Also, cheesy as it sounds, love yourself enough to not gamble, it only hurts if you do and you don't deserve that.

Now I am going to stop telling you what to do lol

@thebean im soon to start Phase 3 according to that 350 days cleans this is when it gets dangerous for me

1 day at a time mate. Don't think of this a step back. Its only a pause in moving forwards. You learned allot from this experience by the sounds of it. Beating any addiction is tough. You have to learn how to beat it, how to catch your triggers, and most importantly how to not act on them. Those 30 days clearly had some impact on you and you've come straight back here with more changes made. No one said this would be straight forward, but perseverance and motivation is key. Just by coming back here and telling your story you've motivated others. I'm certainly more aware now of how things can slip. First you were tempted and beat it, but that was clearly on your mind. I will now be extra cautious if I'm tempted, especially in the following days. Seems to me, the temptation stayed with you and grew. Now you realise that and have made changes. Now i am aware of that too and will make changes, so thank you. We learn from each other.

I've tried to beat this before, without help, never worked as it was never really a committed attempt. I was tempted back easily but now I've experienced the power of this forum, and learned as much as i can from others experiences i feel like I'm finally in control. You've shown me that it can easily be taken away from me again unless i keep changing, keep growing, and keep learning. You are doing this too, i can see that from your posts. Well done for being so honest. Takes a brave person to beat addiction, takes a braver person to be honest with themselves and others, and as gamblers the only way out of this is with honesty.

Stay strong and keep moving forward 👍 

@thebean. Thanks, mate. No worries, I always appreciate advice from older lads like you and Weirdfish and take it seriously.

I haven't made any formulated conclusions after my relapse. I definitely need to do that. I wish I could stay longer in the state of constant urges attacking my mind to gain more information from it.

The three-phase approach looks intriguing. I will research similar concepts on phases of overcoming addictions, like drug addiction, to see if there are any interconnections with gambling. I believe your successes or failures in life affect the length and timing of each phase. Speaking about myself, I'm convinced that if I put more effort into building my new daily routine and new habits, as well as refining my mental models with which I approach life, I would be able to move to the next phases earlier.

I forgot to share this on the thread, but I decided to congratulate myself on my first gambling-free month. I couldn't come up with anything creative, so I just bought myself a few books. And, it was during that exact day I participated in the prediction challenge that ended my streak.

Thanks for the support. It means a lot that there are real people in this world who stand behind the words on the screen, who are familiar with my story, and are willing to help with their knowledge and experience. I hope I can help someone with a similar experience to mine too.

Take care.  🖐️ 

@p6z38njbqm Thank you, friend. In some ways, it was a step back, and in others, it wasn't. In the context of recovery from addiction, it was an important experience. I gained a lot of insights from it, and it was like stepping into a dark place with a flashlight in hand. But of course, in a financial context, it was an unnecessary loss and a step back. Now, I need some time to save the amount of money I had before relapsing. The only way I can use this experience now, is to let it make me more antifragile.

I'm happy to hear that this reading has armed you in your battle with gambling. The only advice I can give is to stay away from anything that could play the role of the springboard. In sports betting, this can be different fantasies and predictors. In the context of poker, it can be any type of card games. In both cases you don't lose anything but make a step closer to the world of gambling. Keep yourself engaged in some sort of meaningful activities when you're bored and there's nobody around.

At the end of the first month without gambling, I did not know what to write in this thread because I had nothing to tell and felt a little uncomfortable about it. But soon, I had a lot of stuff to share here because the previous week was emotional. I wish to get back to telling boring things.

Take care. 🖐️ 

Day 6: On June 21st, the day after I gambled and the first day of my current gf streak, two remarkable and unrelated things happened. I feel a little anxious about sharing them, but the reason I tell that something happened without specifying what is to emphasize the symbolic meaning I see in this. There are 366 days in this year, and on one particular day, two improbable things happened and this exact day was my first gf day.

"Human's clock is always in a rush, God's clock is always on time." This time I will succeed. I just know it. From this moment, I possess all the responsibility for my life because everything is in my hands. Now I'll pay more attention to changing my lifestyle and habits and adjusting my mindset in some ways. As this post is getting pretty impractical, I will move on to the other thing I wanted to share.

I continue watching the Euros. As you may know, if you've been keeping up with my thread, I made a mistake more than a week ago and took part in a challenge where I had to guess the results for the group stage. Yesterday, I calculated that there is no possibility left for me to claim any reward. So, I finally feel unattached to this story and can move on.

I did self-exclude myself from the gambling site and shared this in my thread. I discovered two layers of self-exclusion and used only one — the easier one. So when I relapsed, I removed it. After that, I didn't put the barriers back, in case I won a prize for the predictor challenge.

Now, I'm finally closing this chapter, putting up all the barriers I can, and moving forward. This experience was painful but beneficial for my further recovery.

Sending love and peace to everybody.

Day 10: Back to double figures again. I had a dream last night - a classic "drug dream" or a "gambling dream." In it, I got paid and was searching for a way to deposit into my sportsbook account. By the end of the day, I was sitting in a stadium, watching my bet play out.

I decided to do some small research to understand the reason for these types of dreams (I count this as the 4th time this month) and their consequences. I didn't come to a unified conclusion because some papers say that patients who have drug dreams are more likely to remain abstinent, while others say the opposite, suggesting that having these dreams increases the chance of relapsing sometime after dreaming.

I won't pay much attention to dreams right now and will give my full focus to my waking life. I'm trying to be more attentive to myself and my character so I can design the life I want to live instead of following what hustle culture and society demand. I'm working on optimizing my sleep these days as well as getting back to my preparation for getting hired soon. The possibility of earning a decent salary and being able to take a step higher is both intriguing and a bit scary.

All I can do is giving my best every day, otherwise, I will end up back at day one. One day or day one.

@h2gk3a76m1 Well done goodfella. Keep going day at a time and best of luck with your new job prospects 🙏.

Pink Lady🩷🍎.

Thanks a lot, Pink Lady. Getting hired is just a matter of time if I wouldn't gamble.

Have a nice week!

@h2gk3a76m1 a study into the dreams of recovering addicts would be fascinating.

My first real attempt at stopping gambling last year led to numerous vivid gambling dreams.

I know there are lots of theories as to why we dream, to organise our thoughts from the day or readjust our neurotransmitters and 'wash' the brain for the next day.

I think I had gambling dreams as my brain was so focused on the gambling that it couldn't leave the issue.  Also when I stopped gambling it triggered my brain searching for its fix even when I was asleep.

I did find that after a few weeks the dreams stopped.  This current period of being GF hasn't involved any gambling related dreams.  Maybe this is because of the CBT I received reorganising my thoughts before it triggers the need for my brain to have a gambling dream?

I would see it as a positive sign that you are processing a withdrawal symptom and one step closer to beating this nasty illness.

@thebean Well, drug dreams receive much more attention than gambling dreams from the scientific world. It's kind of difficult to conduct a decent study on the topic, which is why this question is still open for me.

For instance, in one of the papers, the story of a drug-addicted woman recovering from addiction was told. She was journaling her dreams as part of her psychoanalysis. She had drug dreams occurring for a few years, and the author of the paper deduced that drug dreams can appear for years and even for a lifetime.

I cannot really say where the line between drug and gambling dreams is, but it obviously exists. I always keep track of my dreams, and if I continue having regular dreams where I gamble (especially as detailed as the last one), I will revisit this theme in my thread. Your experience seems reasonable and maybe how it should normally be. Hopefully, my dreams will also end soon because I did not like the last experience.

Day 14: Two weeks. Small payments from past projects are coming up, so staying gambling-sober will be a little harder, but I'll be doing my best to maintain a normal life and stay away from gambling.

Nothing interesting to share from the previous days. I've been following my routines, studying to get a job, and adding some courage to my everyday actions. After the past years and different events in my life where gambling played a major role, I believe I've become quite socially anxious and isolated. Now, I'm trying to slowly break this isolation by doing uncomfortable actions.

Today, when cleaning my face, I turned on a brighter light and found out that my acne is almost gone. I've had acne since my early teenage years. It wasn't severe but was noticeable. In the last few years, I've only had some acne on my forehead.

So, having a clearer face seems like a symbolic representation of not gambling. I don't know the exact reason: it could be some of the healthy routines I've started doing more regularly, like cold showers, small workouts at home, and a more balanced diet. Or it could be from reducing the stress I dealt with while gambling and attaining a clearer mind. Perhaps everything I listed contributed in a complex way, or maybe nothing played a role, and it was just the hot summer days making me sweat more and cleaning my skin in this way. (last argument is incorrect, I googled and find out that hot summers have a negative effect on the skin health)

This post turned pretty dermatologic, and I still have some time to study and relax today, so I'll get back to my improvised workplace.

One day or day one.