I quite often talk about the importance of reflection. I found myself reflecting on my experiences from gambling, and how in a way it’s made me grow as a person. Now it hasn’t been easy; gambling addiction impacts you in all sorts of way. As well as the financial problems, it leads to all sorts of stresses, impacts your personal relationships, can lead to anxiety, depression, and the list continues. However, I always try to take the positives from a bad situation, and that shouldn’t be any different with gambling. Whilst I can’t look back and say “hey, I learned how to stop gambling right away and everything was suddenly okay”, what I can do is reflect on how the experiences can help you in other ways. Take a difficult or stressful work situation; without my personal struggles I have no doubt that I’d find certain projects, meetings or situations incredibly stressful and difficult. But given all the personal struggles resulting from this addiction, the work issue really isn’t that huge in context. I suppose this contextualisation allows me to be much calmer and more level headed at work – it’s not that I discount the value of the work project of its importance, but the contextualisation allows me to act and behave in a way that would very probably be different if I hadn’t had my personal struggles. A gambling addiction has all sorts of negative impacts and I’ve found myself in the past focusing on all the bad. How much I’ve lost, what I could have done had I not lost the money, the things I can’t do because I have no money, how much interest I’m paying, how it distracts me from pretty much everything and the impact it has on my relationships. I suppose this is me trying to look through all of that to try to find a little bit of shining light in a world that addiction fills with darkness. When you can start trying to look through all the negatives, focus on the future instead of the past and stop rationalising why you lost money and how unlucky you were, you’re definitely taking a step in the right direction. Being able to then reflect on gambling and maybe, somewhere, somehow, find the one small positive that could have come from it, then you’re shifting your mindset to a growth mindset. At that point it becomes much easier to move forward, even with all the daily reminders of your past (the various letters chasing overdue debts!).
Tanya
8/3/2020 03:53:22 pm
Hi,
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