Addiction is a contradiction to living.
It convinces us that gambling are necessary to maintain our sense of well-being.
All throughout our life, we kept telling ourselves, “I can handle it.” Maybe this was true in the beginning, but not now.
Peace of mind was non-existent. We had a distinct desire to gamble. We could not live normally with or without gambling. Our gambling defied all rules of common sense. We had an abnormal craving for gambling and give in to it at the worst possible times. We do not have the common sense not to place the first bet.
We went through stages of dark despair because of gambling and were sure that there was something wrong with us. Other times, we were under the illusion that we had gambling under our control.
We are like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We may be one of the nicest person around when we are not gambling.
We are often perfectly sensible and well-balanced concerning everything except gambling, we often possess special abilities, skills, and aptitudes, and have a promising future ahead and then we pull everything down by gambling.
We puzzle ourselves, especially in our lack of control. We do absurd, incredible crazy and tragic things while gambling.
The things we had to tolerate to support our gambling reflected our desperation and total disgust. We sank to the depths of borrowing, cheating, stealing, lying. We manipulated and control people and conditions to gamble.
We hated ourselves for all the trouble, disappointment, frustration, suffering, and pain that we have brought to our families and others as a result of our gambling.
The mental aspect of addiction comes with our inability to deal with life on its own terms.
We, in the grip of a compulsion, were often forced to survive in any way we could, at all costs.
We could not handle any mind-changing or mood- altering behavior such as gambling.