Days Since Last Betting: 12
I attended a meeting last night and again found it very useful. During the meeting, we ran through a tool called Playing the Tape.
The way the tape was described is that it has 2 sides – A and B – Side A is a full record of what has happened any previous times that you gambled (and what will happen if you gamble again). while side B is what life looks like now that you are to stay gambe free (if gamble-free a while) and/or what life can look like if you stay gamble-free.
There are a number of ideas behind this exercise
- Icrease motivation
- A go to task for when you feel an urge to try and help control that urge
- Help prevent/ limit Euphoric Recall – When we look back at and activity, we tend to remember the good stuff, and not the bad stuff
The final point really resonated with me, whenever I feel an urge to gamble, my mind often thinks back to any good feelings or times that I had while gambling including any previous winnings, completely ignoring or blurring out all of the bad things that also came from it (finance trouble, hurting relationships) as well as the fact that even when winning bets occurred, any winnings and more were later lost back.
This wasn’t covered in the meeting, but thinking about it further afterward, I think there is also an extension to this Euphoric Recall where our mind tries to effectively record over some of the tapes by saying “what if we bet, but limit it to only one bet, that was the damage is limited to a small loss if we lose, but we have the upsides and no downsides when we win” Again the counter to this blurred way of thimking is both playing a tape the whole way throug,h and then looking at how many tapes we have from previous experiences where this started out as our intention but is not how things ended up.