What recovery looks like for me - the first months

I think that recovery must be different for each addict. I've heard more than a couple of people purport that there is only one way to recover. Usually that someone is either talking about GA or praying to their god. It seems a bit close minded to me and simple too. Not one of us have shared the exact same path into and through our addictions. It's okay if we don't share the same path away from them. This is the path that I have taken. I've had to turn around a few times but so far so good and if what I'm currently doing to manage my addiction stops working, you can bet that I'll strike another path. 
I was focused on gambling my life away for about 3 years. Before that I had gambled for fun for about 4 years. Since last June, I've been focused on not gambling my life away. That's a lot of focus on gambling! I consider my recovery start date to be around the time I FINALLY figured out that I was powerless over gambling. I had tried to manage it for so long. I had run the cycle of quitting for a little while and then going back hard core for a little while - over and over again. In the last year, maybe year and a half, I just stopped trying to quit and decided that I would run my life into the ground with it... because I didn't see any other way out. 
Completely defeated and trying, one last time, to save my life I called a therapist. I was going to tell someone my heavily guarded secret and it was terrifying. I still gambled for about the first month of therapy. I could literally not stop going to that casino. During this time I was reading everything I could find on addiction. On an online addiction site, I read about surrendering to your addiction and for some reason it finally dawned on me. It's hard to describe what surrender is to me. It's more of a feeling. It felt like all of the weight of the world was lifted for a moment. I had known that I was an addict in my head but surrender was knowing in my heart. It was comforting in a way to know that I had finally come to it but it filled me with sorrow too. I felt so hopeless and helpless at the time. I had been so lost but now I had a starting point out of the darkness. I was a full blown addict. I was not going to be able to fix this. I was going to have to learn how to manage it, live with it. 
For a little while I did every single thing my therapist said to do... whether I wanted to or not, whether I could see the point in it or not. My way had not worked and it was time to face that. I found myself not wanting to do the things that needed to be done like giving away access to my money. I didn't want to throw away my casino coupons. I didn't want to make plans for the weekend so that I wouldn't have any free time. It was confusing because I wanted to quit gambling more than anything in the world but I didn't want to do what it took. Looking back, I can see that I was fearful of what it would be like to have one of those strong urges and not be able to satisfy it. During this time I discovered that I had moments where I felt stronger. In those moments I would do what needed to be done. And when those strong urges came, and they came all day everyday for the first month, I couldn't go because of the roadblocks I had put in place. I was sick over it. But I made it and looking back I realize that those urges can't hurt me. 
For the next couple of months, I was in a place where the urge to gamble would build in me. I felt like it was a pressure inside of me and it would just keep growing. My therapist didn't have the answers I needed about how to handle this. It got harder and harder to live with. I told myself that if I would just go, I could stop worrying about it so much and focus on the real changes that needed to be made in my life to heal. So I went to an unfamiliar casino out of town and it did relieve the pressure and I didn't want to go again.... until it built again....... and I went again and won. That win threw me directly back into hard core urges. I felt like I did in the beginning. It scared me, really shook me to the core but the lesson was invaluable. Again, I could not "manage" my gambling addiction by gambling. It was managing me. This is when I entered into the next phase of my recovery. I call it the sad phase and by sad I mean the deepest level of depression I had ever felt in my entire life sad. 
....to be continued