A new year’s around the corner.
Too, nine months without gambling / in recovery. In four days, to be precise.
It still comes down to: one day at a time.
These nine months, nearly, have brought enormous challenges. Obstacles, mind-blowing frustrations, disappointments. Not to mention three moves! Yes. Three. Each residence very different from the one before yet all sharing commonalities of people invading and violating my intrinsic God-given personal space.
I have issues with boundaries. Serious issues. Deep issues. Issues stemming from young childhood that are far from deeply explored or resolved.
Therapy is needed. It’s on the agenda for 2015.
Why do I bring this up in a blog about gambling?
Trauma. Traumas. Trauma has impacted and colored the whole of my life. It’s also fueled the gambling fires.Even when the fires quiet into embers, the urge to self-anethesize from pain, trauma, stress, life as I’ve known and experienced it remains. Like a sleeping dog beneath the surface. Ready to return roaring back into my life the second I feed a bill into a slot machine.
Last night I dreamt I gambled.
The casino environment was low key, a very mild version of casinos with their blazing lights and ding-ding-dings and cacophony of bonus-round voices and tunes.
Yet there I was, at a slot machine, again an old-fashioned simple style without all the bells and whistles of today’s.
I slipped some money in. Not a lot — by my gambling standards. Like a couple bucks. Verrrry conservative. The money disappeared I’m pretty sure.
But the juices began to flow again. I may’ve put in a little more for a second spin, I don’t recall. Nothing.
I stepped left to the next machine. Opened my wallet to get more bills. I didn’t have a lot of money on me. I hadn’t come prepared to gamble. Those days when I did, I came prepared with as many big bills as my so-called budget allowed and the more the better.
In my dream, I had $1’s and maybe $5’s. Low spending money. Opening my wallet to retrieve more bills for that second machine … there was an urgency to it, not blazing hot like it’d been when I was gambling for real, rather like a low-grade fever. And WAY WAY familiar, that urgency and desperation of seeing the bills dwindle and disappear from my wallet. It came back to me.
I fed some money into the second machine. Again, not a lot by my standards. It was a three-images machine. Two pink chrysanthemums spun into place. One more and it’d be a jackpot.
The third wheel nudged and teased. It made me mad and it made me hopeful. Would the third wheel land with a pink chrysanthemum? Could I help it along by touching the screen? Or would that fuck it up?
I didn’t know and I never found out because I woke up.
Whew. Breathe.
Why did I dream about gambling this morning, right after Christmas? The reasons are many. I could speculate. Holidays, increased stress, unresolved emotional turmoils and more.
As important as it is for me to explore those, it’s perhaps more important to recognize that the old feelings don’t go away because I’m in GA and recovery. Sleeping dogs may be slumbering but they can come barging back into my life to ruin it and destroy it and make raw-meat mush of me with one bet. One simple bet.
Gambling can be arrested and healing chosen, which requires first and foremost: quit gambling. The inner gambler is, I’m told by that dream, truly no different from that sleeping dog. The dysfunction, the madness, the mind-set, they’re all still there, ready to resurface … any time that I place one bet.
And it doesn’t take long. As a gambler, I can go from 1 mile an hour to 50 in less time than it takes to toast a piece of bread.
I can go digging into a wallet with bills to one exhausted of all bills AND coins in less time than it takes to drive from my town to the next.
I can go from reason and sanity into desperation and terror of money slipping through my fingers like water in less time than it takes to bake and frost a cake.
I have a gambling problem. I’m reminded of this by my dream this morning.
Therefore, I cannot look at the dream as a bad thing … “ohhhhh, I dreamt about playing the slots and maybe winning a jackpot.” No, that response only makes me feel bad about myself.
I look at it as a good dream, a blessed one, a godsend even. A reminder that at a moment’s notice — when that moment begins with sliding a bill into a slot machine — I’m toast. Back to where I was: a serious gambler living a deeply fucked-up life.
But for the grace of God and GA go I forward into recovery and healing. One day at a time.
bad bets 