September 13, 2013
A month and a half ago, my CG recovery began with the biggest mistake of my life, brutal honesty, and then forgiveness. I’ve continued to follow-through on my decision to live a gambling-free life through daily introspection, meditation, and an effort to get back to my core through new activities and ventures, like cooking and therapy. I’m also reincorporating old interests, like reading and writing. Music has made a comeback too. I started connecting with random tracks in TV and movies, and spending more time using my music apps. I hadn’t noticed how much I was dulled to music and didn’t notice when I had stopped listening to it. The renewed sensitivity to music actually makes sense to me, as the numbing and distracting effects of my gambling addiction begin to wear off. And that’s when the showdown with what I’d been suppressing for the last 7 years happened. The day I was expecting for some time came around two weeks ago, during the holidays. The “feelings” I had been avoiding through compulsive gambling finally caught up with me on one of the busiest day of my year. Maybe it was the long weekend and a combination of the break up with my boyfriend, but the whole week was leading to a meltdown.
It only took 33 days of recovery to move from my state of emotional avoidance–to bouncing off the walls in fury. For twelve hours, my head and heart were making the rounds through past disappointments, betrayals, heartbreak, rip-offs, and bad endings. I hadn’t been successful at completely making sense of key events in my past, and the process of reconnecting with myself surfaced some deep-seated feelings of anger. The more I reflected on the past, the angrier I got. And I eventually worked myself up into such a fury that I spent a sleepless, restless night and a 6-hour day of work doing exactly 4 tasks. That was new. As a workaholic, I was a pro at avoiding feelings by burying myself in work and effectiveness, so this constant distraction of overwhelming, intense waves of hurt and fury were a very different experience. I’d always been able to bury feelings in work, gambling, exercise or other activities in the past. It wasn’t working anymore. So, I gave up trying to figure it all out on my own and called the 800-Gambler hotline. Even as I made the decision to call, I had to squash the thought that I was supposed to be able to handle my problems on my own. Whoever programmed that into my thinking early on – thanks! Deciding that it was okay to seek help from someone more educated and qualified to tell me what was going on in my head, was another decision I made differently. Plus, I obviously didn’t have my **** together enough to figure it out on my own. My therapist was kind enough to put it more gently, “Let’s just say you’re too close to the problem.” Even though I didn’t have the cravings or urges to gamble, I knew that the feelings I struggled with were what nudged me towards trouble and allowed my addiction to take hold in the first place. The phone call to the hotline calmed me down just a little bit. But the exercises that the counselor suggested, like ******** to ten (I was way beyond that) and redirecting my thoughts didn’t help. What did help was this: After I hung up, I noticed a news article on the table that was about a woman who had been kidnapped, held hostage and held for ransom in Somalia for 460 days, and had 12 minutes of freedom during that entire time. She was never alone, and most days she didn’t even know whether she was going to live or die (gulp). Here I was, banging my head over feeling ******* out of the last few years of my life, and then I realized that there were people out there who actually were ******* out of years of their life, and also deprived of their freedom. Thank you, Universe, I got it. Hotline counselor should’ve just prescribed a dose of the NY *****. But I’ll take the help in whatever unexpected form it’s offered.
Processing those intense and difficult feelings ended up becoming the most important part of my recovery these last couple of weeks, even though it felt like hell. I learned that when I felt “it” was becoming too much to process, going out into the world (figuratively or literally) helped to break me out of my cycle. It was exhausting. And I was so relieved to hear that my feelings would probably not be as intense moving forward now that I’d gone through this thing. My counselor said, “That was so good for you to go through. When it happens again, you’ll know what to do and be better prepared.” The analogy she used was it was like going to the dentist. It’s gotta be done. Somehow, I need to learn to regard my feelings less like a root canal and treat them with more respect and attention as they come up. I am so bad at sitting with my feelings, stewing in them and exploring them like some of my wacky, but emotionally in-tune friends. I grew up with great examples of stoicism and toughness–emotional acknowledgement and expression, not so much. Since attaining emotional coping skills overnight is pretty unrealistic, I know that getting through my redo (my new chance at a different life) is going to require some new behaviors where my emotions are concerned. That or suffer the consequences of a relapse. The power of negative feelings to undermine health and happiness is astounding to me. My dark side behaviors came from a place of avoidance, and I definitely do not want to repeat old patterns.
I suppose some feelings, like some things in life, can never be fully explained or justified or analyzed. They just happen. The things I had been obsessing over …it was just life happening to me.
But I think that’s only half of it. The implied idea that life was happening “to me,” versus me making my ideal life happen…Yes, there are things that happened that I didn’t choose, and then there were things I did do to try to create a life of meaning. When the latter didn’t work out it, it was alright on a normal day. But when the two converged, my actions with other major bad experiences not of my choosing, during a period I was severely burned out and had no energy left and battling other issues, I think I had shut down just to try to protect myself. I began gambling more during that time period.
When the time came for me to tackle and square those things in my past, I had a chance to rework my leftover feelings in one maddening day, and I survived.
I recently read an article about the value of suffering: http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=InCMR7g4BCKC2wiZPkcVUiGuHDNB+q0J&user_id=a23e19ec8f6de54508d485d07e071c1b&email_type=eta&task_id=1378649399125298®i_id=0.
And I thought to myself, “What possible use or value could suffering serve?” Apparently suffering does serve a purpose.
It’s called growth.