Main image (above) by Andrik Langfield via Unsplash
Recently, I was answering someone in a “quit gambling” chatroom who had recently had a bet and was mortified. I made the comment, “do you know what triggered the bet.” He didn’t answer directly, but someone else in the room said, “breathing was my trigger. I didn’t need any excuse to gamble.”
Now I have always found it useful to think about what led up to the gambling event – I know for me, there was usually a reason for it, an unmet emotional need, but I accept that everyone is different.
Whilst I was mulling this over, I read an article about domestic violence, where the author said, “people call them triggers – I just call them excuses.”
That helped me through this, maybe triggers are just excuses unless we learn from them. So, what this chatroom participant was saying was the only excuse he had for gambling was to breathe, whereas I would be considering what my emotions were needing at the time and looking at how those needs could be met without gambling.
Strangely, I then felt a slight unease which I recognised as the first inkling of wanting to bet. They were the first thoughts of, “what could I be doing with myself to make me feel better.” In the past that might have been playing a fruit machine. Not possible now because we are in lock-down because of Covid-19, and I don’t do online. Lock-down might have been reason for the unease, or it might have been remembering how I felt a bit put-down by the “breathing” comment. But by looking at my emotions, (irritation, hurt and frustration) I was able to see that the way out of this was to work on what had happened in the chatroom, find a solution to the impasse within me and exorcise it by writing this piece.
All this begs the question; why do I think that triggers are so important? Thoughts about gambling just seem to come out of nowhere. Once they are in my mind, they are difficult to shift. I found that if I looked at when I first had the thought, I could capture what was going on for me at the time, both physically and emotionally. As I have said elsewhere, boredom was a big factor. That the moment, in itself, wasn’t enough and I needed something to “spice up” my life. Gambling solved the “boredom problem.” My life was full of worry and upset after betting, so I had no space to be bored. Once I had worked this out, I could look to more positive ways of excluding boredom.
Another trigger was loneliness. This was a more difficult need for me to overcome. For most of the time when I was “in action” I was cut off from people. But sometimes a phone call would do the trick. I quickly found out that the wrong strategy was to go to a pub with a fruit machine, hoping to meet somebody!
Anger was also a trigger. I know that if I was feeling upset over some hurt, I would go and “relieve” the pain by gambling. Of course, I was only making the torment worse. I realised this when my marriage ended. I did have the fleeting idea of going on a binge of gambling, but by then I was well into my recovery and was able to use my brain, not just pander to my emotions. My thoughts were that if I gambled, I would become even more upset than I was now and why should I suffer more. I made the decision to do other things that made me happy and turned away from a binge on the fruit machines.
My new way of dealing with anger is something that I learnt from co-counselling. That is to be cathartic, to act into the anger by feeling the rage and letting out noise and actions to help with that. It is recommended that you only do this within a co-counselling session as there is a need to keep yourself safe – both by not doing actions which are dangerous in themselves (thumping the floor instead of a strategically placed cushion) and by being emotionally present. In co-counselling there is a technique called “coming back to present time” where the counsellor (the person working with you) will ask a series of questions which are not to do with the session, with the aim of bringing your brain and emotions round to the here and now – instead of the red mist (in the case of anger) you were in whilst you were letting emotions out. Learning to discharge my emotions and learn from them has been and continues to be the best thing that I have ever learnt through co-counselling and why I think it is an excellent way for recovering people to work on what they are going through. I will talk more about this in another post.
Of course, there have been times when I have been unable to identify a particular trigger and have just had an overwhelming desire to gamble. It happens. Recently, finding out about mindfulness has helped me to understand what I was already doing but put a name to it. The term I would use would be “meta-observation.” It is the idea that (in my head) I watch myself struggling with my desire. Then as I observe, I become compassionate with myself and give myself a sort of “mental hug.” I may do things to pamper myself – eat a comfort food or take a long slow bath. I might decide to do something which will change my mood – often watching a comedy video on youtube. If it happens in the daytime – it’s usually the signal to go out for a walk in the countryside where somehow the cooler air and the ability to breathe more deeply seems to wash the gambling desire away.
Later, if I care to analyse what had happened, I can usually find that there was a cause that I was not aware of at the time. Perhaps something that I have been putting off doing (I am a great procrastinator – maybe the subject of another post, if I can get around to it!) Or something that is missing from my current situation that I need to make time for – getting hugs comes to mind as the corona virus lock-down period drags on.
To sum up: I think it is important to know where the urge to gamble comes from so that it becomes no more than an urge. I was told that the relapse into gambling comes not at the time of the first bet, but when the gambler first thinks about it. If I didn’t deal with things at this stage, I would be continually thinking about them – and then my mind would snap with the thought that the only way to get these thoughts out of my mind would be to gamble … the start of another cycle I would rather not be in.
