Gambling Addiction & Recovery Support Group
Compulsive gambling is an urge or addiction to gamble despite harmful negative consequences or a desire to stop. A preferred term among many professionals is problem gambling, as few people described by the term experience true compulsions in the clinical sense of the word. Problem gambling often is defined by whether harm is experienced by the gambler or others rather...
You can erase it all at the machinesyou can even erase yourself, an electronics technician named Randall told me. Contradicting the popular understanding of gambling as an expression of the desire to get something for nothing, he claimed to be after nothingness itself.
Excerpt From: Natasha Dow Schll. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. iBooks.
I am on day 10 and realizing how much this played into things for me. The ability to go into the"zone" as it's called. I remember everything fading even the feeling of having to go to the bathroom or my ability to feel the cold I had- it all disappeared.
We will all have our things that are difficult. For some it will be the desire to gamble again for the thrill or the chance or whatever reason we each have. For me it will be sitting with the pain of my mom's alzheimers, facing my empty nest and trying to recreate myself as a mother of adults and my loneliness as I do not have a bosom friend and miss that so much.
I do have an amazing partner/husband and I am very grateful for that but I do wish for a girlfriend to do things with and really connect with.
Thanks for being here and all your support
Sabine.
Excerpt From: Natasha Dow Schll. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. iBooks.
I am on day 10 and realizing how much this played into things for me. The ability to go into the"zone" as it's called. I remember everything fading even the feeling of having to go to the bathroom or my ability to feel the cold I had- it all disappeared.
We will all have our things that are difficult. For some it will be the desire to gamble again for the thrill or the chance or whatever reason we each have. For me it will be sitting with the pain of my mom's alzheimers, facing my empty nest and trying to recreate myself as a mother of adults and my loneliness as I do not have a bosom friend and miss that so much.
I do have an amazing partner/husband and I am very grateful for that but I do wish for a girlfriend to do things with and really connect with.
Thanks for being here and all your support
Sabine.
See you when you return.
I meet some very nice people tonight at Al-Anon.I think It will really help me get to the bottom of what drove me to gambling in the first place. I was escaping the pain & hurt I was feeling from losing my only son to drug addiction. I felt like a failure as a mother. I was heart broken and I still am.
I have been working on my recovery for over 2 years now and hopefully this is the right road for me to finally get away from the grips of this gambling addiction. Those machines are not good friend material!
I meet a lot of people and am well liked at work but people are pretty young, mostly 30 and under and I just don't have a lot in common with them. I think it's harder that I am not a drinker as I am not a person who one goes out for cocktails with, you know?
I will make a friend. I am going to work on it. I wish we lived closer too. I would love a friend to walk, go to yoga with, maybe take some art classes, share gardening joys with- that sort of thing.
:)
I remembered one time the weather channel reported that the road from Dallas to Shreveport would be icy and snlowvery dangerous... I totally disregard the warning and got myself on the road to Shreveport right after work on Friday night... Sure enough the road condition was very bad and dangerous and I ended up stopping in Tyler Texas for 6 hours because they shut down the highway... by the time I get to the casino I had already spent 12 hours on driving(normally 3.5 hours). That just tell you how dangerous this addiction is!
I too have the need for friends. I do not have a husband, so I am alone most of the time. That was always my excuse to go to Casino...so I could be around people. Funny thing is, I was around hundreds of people, but didn't want to be bothered when I was playing! So, I was still all alone.
then the loneliness, well, you are not alone you just crave the attention
of a differnt sort, being able to relate, maybe your GA group could do a girl thing.
I know that the other group I tried definitely had a girl group thing going on.
You are blesses with a good man, a mother that you can still see and take care of, and your recovery.
Most addiction lit will tell you of the need to escape and avoid feelings. "zoning out". Before we wake up and see what was happening while we were "zoned out, wigged out, addicted" !!!!!!
I think that is why we are uncomfortable NOW with feeling these strange sensations and feelings because we forgot how they did feel.
we can only keep what we give away, never more true than here.