When I was in my “trying to stop” phase and attending Gamblers’ Anonymous on a regular basis, I thought it would be cool to do a straw poll on the cause of my being a compulsive gambler and see if it applied to anyone else in the room.
I could see that one thing did apply without having to ask anything, but more on that later.
The first query I raised was about being an only child. Here, there was a mixed response – some were but others came from a large family. There didn’t seem to be an in-between.
The next question was having a parent who was a gambler. This time a definite majority – but there were exceptions, including one guy who said that his parents had no addictions whatsoever. They didn’t drink, smoke or gamble at all (it’s a good job they were into sex or he wouldn’t exist!).
The third thing I asked was whether our parents had split up whilst we were kids. Again, a mixed reaction and some painful memories here, but out of that discussion came an agreement. Every one of us had been bullied at school.
Now this links into my visual appraisal. All the men (and it was virtually all men in GA in those days) were short. I am 5’6” and at other gatherings I am used to being the shortest by far. Not so in GA. Virtually everyone is below average height. Okay, there are exceptions, but they usually do a different type of gambling from the majority of us. More on that later.
This is where the bullying comes in. Most bullies don’t pick on the tall or the strong… so I guess that lack of height goes with the territory for being bullied. From that day on, I used to check the height of new people coming into the room and it ticked the boxes maybe nine times out of ten.
So what has this got to do with low self-esteem (LSE)?
In my first draft of this post I wrote a list of all my achievements with the aim of saying, “this is all I have accomplished and I STILL have LSE. Luckily for you I deleted this. (It can be sent to anyone who is interested!)
But low self-esteem is something that is hard to eradicate. Perhaps impossible. Like being a compulsive gambler – I am one but I don’t have to act it out.
Let’s consider Mark Manson. Now for those who are not familiar with Mark’s work – he writes books with titles that I would never use. I feel it must take high self-esteem, (HSE) to dare to have those words on a book cover. Mark has written on self-esteem in an article here – and it is probably worth taking the time out from this post to read what he says. (link here)
Okay, for those of you who couldn’t be arsed to read Mark’s article: he was saying that the view on self-esteem has changed over the years, especially as it has been noticed that some violent criminals have very HSE which goes against the old theories. He concludes that there are two types of HSE, healthy and toxic.
Healthy self-esteem is (according to Mark) a bi-product of dealing with things that are within our control. Toxic self-esteem derives from uncontrollable things and can often occur when we pursue self-esteem as an end in itself, instead of feeling good about the things we have accomplished.
Now this was interesting to me as I have long believed that people with a gambling problem also fall into two camps. There are the majority who gamble to try and recapture good feelings about winning and to blot out the difficult things that they know they should be dealing with in their lives.
There is also a minority of gamblers who come to gambling because it fits in with the lifestyle that they want to portray, one of being able to lose money and is coupled with being seen in the “right places” having the “right car”, etc. These tend to be high-rollers and get into a lot of trouble (as they usually have access to large amounts of credit) and crash much further when things start to get difficult. These gamblers seem to start out with HSE and it doesn’t crumble no matter how bad things get, but if and when it does it shatters the person’s self-image and can have serious consequences. (I am aware I am observing this second-hand as it has not been my experience!)
One of the papers that Mark refers to https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/1529-1006.01431 comes to an interesting conclusion. In the abstract it says that “the benefits of HSE fall into two categories: enhanced initiative and pleasant feelings.” On the pleasant feelings front, it is seen that people with high self-esteem are less likely to become depressed but it was the “enhanced initiative” that caught my eye. I have often tried to overcome my tendency to delay, indeed I became quite infamous for the “procrastination joke which I kept putting off…” But I am aware, as I have written elsewhere, that it does take a lot of tenacity to overcome a gambling problem. I am known to raise an eyebrow when I hear someone say, “I tried GA / counselling once but it did nothing for me…” It bears repeating: I only overcame my addiction when I PUT AS MUCH EFFORT INTO MY RECOVERY AS I DID INTO MY GAMBLING. If I was willing to be out at all hours and to travel miles to a casino to gamble, then surely I must be capable of doing the same in order to get myself well. Not all GA meetings are the same. The first counsellor you meet is unlikely to be the one for you. I feel that I need to keep going until I find something that fits with what I need and then see it out to the end. I am doing the same at the moment in terms of my battle with bowel disease. More on that in another post.
What are the answers to the problem of having LSE?
Well we can go back to Mark Manson for some good advice. Again, if you haven’t read his article (if not, why not? The link is here!) he suggests 1) accepting that you have it.
One of the issues that Mark doesn’t address and I feel is of importance, is that of not belonging. Gambling is essentially a lonely occupation – most CGs do their addiction alone and are too ashamed to involve other people (even if they started communally.) Bullies also pick out people who are different from others and who may separate themselves from their peers because they feel that they do not fit in. That might be because of sexuality, of being somehow different because of dyspraxia, dyslexia or having Asperger’s; what is now known as Neurodiverse.
For me, it was because being the son of a compulsive gambler made me stand out. I have already written elsewhere of being the “Pig-Pen” of the school (the Peanuts character who is dressed perpetually in filthy overalls with a cloud of dirt and dust that follows him wherever he goes). Another factor that may have had an influence was the fact that this was a grammar school, the only one in the town and most of the boys there were middle class, so as a working-class child (and remember my parents weren’t even working) was seen as somehow not “one of us” (a muggle in a school of wizardry – to borrow from another, far more successful, writer.)
The effect of class on self-esteem may be the subject of another blog post, but I should perhaps make it clear that it is not the fact that I was working class, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this and I have no wish to get rid of that label for myself. The problem is (for me) a feeling of not belonging. I don’t feel comfortable in a middle-class setting (dinner parties anyone!) nor do I at some working-class settings (karaoke) and end up straddling the divide.
Some of the suggestions from Mark are to simply ignore the whole idea of low or high self-esteem. It is a construct in our minds, a self-indicator as Mark puts it, and we don’t know how other people rate themselves. In my own case, I mentioned to someone that I found it a lot easier to give up gambling once I had come to a point where I could say I loved and cared about myself. The “someone” surprised me by saying they had never reached that point – and yet this was someone who I saw as having high self-esteem as I felt they were a high achiever.
Mark also talks about accepting where I am on the self-esteem scale and refocussing my attention elsewhere and practising self-compassion.
“The mark of true self-esteem is not feeling like you lack nothing – it’s being comfortable with what you lack.”
I think if we strip away the double negative, he is saying that true self-esteem is knowing that you are not perfect, that you can’t be good at everything. I might be good at very few things – but I don’t need to beat myself up for that.
Another suggestion that came from a fellow co-counsellor was to “act into high self-esteem.” Acting into is a method of trying to get into an emotion that we are not feeling at the moment in order to work on something from the past. So I might act into grief or sadness or (most famously) anger. Acting into HSE was a new one to me but makes perfect sense. How would it be to have HSE? Would I be more confident, do more things, make quicker decisions, write better blog posts? I could decide to try it for an hour or even ½ a day at a time, just to put it on and discard it when it starts to feel uncomfortable. Then look at why it feels uncomfortable, because there is probably something to be learnt from that.
So in conclusion.
LSE may be all in the mind of the beholder, but it is when it gets in the way of everyday life that it becomes a problem. Is it one of the barriers to growth? Do I stop myself from trying because I already see myself as a failure? Is mulling over my LSE another way to procrastinate? Is the best way to get over LSE to ignore it altogether – or as mentioned above to “act into” higher self-esteem and see what happens?
Most importantly – and the original question – did I gamble because of my low self-esteem or was my low self-esteem one of the causes of my gambling problems?
I think it would be true to say that there is an interplay between the two things. Just as I escaped from the bullies at school by hiding in the library, I was probably hiding from “life” by hiding in the arcades and alongside pub machines, drowning out all that was going on. Stopping gambling has forced me to become more aware of my interactions with others and how I am “moulded” by them. I feel I have much higher self-esteem now than when I was gambling, partly due to the sense of accomplishment I feel in having stopped. Does it really matter? Yes – I feel better about myself and bring more joy to my friends and the rest of the world and that can only be a good thing!
