All bets are off, p.10
All Bets Are Off, page 10
When I was gambling and felt hot, if I had six dollars in my pocket that meant two dollars for tolls, two dollars for admission to the track, and two dollars to bet the daily double. You know, money burns a hole in the resolve.
I believe that true recovery means being able to take care of your own life needs and make your own decisions. The twelve-step program’s pressure relief meeting begins to address that. It’s a difficult problem. The gambler has to live on an allowance and it can’t be an endless thing. Genuine personal needs come first. But at some point he must be able to handle his own daily needs like a normal person, and we can’t say exactly when to turn it over to him. The sponsor has to be a guiding voice through this and the whole twelve-step process:
The Twelve Steps of Recovery
1. We admitted we were powerless over gambling—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to a normal way of thinking and living.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of this Power of our own understanding.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral and financial inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have these defects of character removed.
7. Humbly asked God (of our understanding) to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having made an effort to practice these principles in all our affairs, we tried to carry this message to other compulsive gamblers.
Printed with permission of Gamblers Anonymous® International Service Office.
Relapse and Maintaining Recovery
Very few people walk into a twelve-step program and stop from day one. Most of us have relapsed at least once in the beginning. I know when I hear somebody at a meeting tell of being at a racetrack and describing his horse nosing into the lead approaching the finish line, I can feel my juices flowing.
When I ran the Council on Compulsive Gambling in New Jersey, part of my contract called for me to meet with people from the Casino Council Commission and the Racing Association, but in my office not theirs. I knew I couldn’t meet with people in one room while there was racing on the other side of the door. I knew myself well enough by then.
At one of our twelve-step meetings, there was a woman who, in addition to gambling, was also dealing with a drinking problem. She had to make the decision whether to go to her daughter’s wedding. It was a terribly difficult challenge. She was in very early recovery, very shaky. She knew she couldn’t stand being around alcohol all day and she wouldn’t ask her daughter to have an alcohol-free wedding. So she decided, “I won’t go. I will be in church.”
That was her respect for how vulnerable she knew she was to her addiction.
Once we took the kids to some fast-food place and the girl behind the counter asked, “Where is Hoover Dam?” I guessed; I didn’t know the answer. She said, “Sorry, you didn’t win,” and rang up our order. If I had won two dollars worth of food my broken brain might have told me, This is my lucky day. And I would have headed for the casino.
Life has its unexpected sand traps. I play a little golf, not very well, but enough for a twelve-step member to invite me to play at his club. On the short second hole, there was a sign that promised, “Make a Hole-in-One and Win a Car.” I was shaking like a leaf as I addressed the ball. I was afraid to take a swing. I “accidentally” knocked the ball off the tee, so according to the rules of the game now I was shooting for a hole in two—an eagle. I was safe.
For years, people would come up to me on the street and say, “Come on, you’re still betting. Who do you like in the football game today?” because they didn’t believe I had really stopped. You have to figure out for yourself how to handle that. I stay away from anything that gives me anxiety or messes with my recovery or my serenity. You have to honor yourself.
After all these years of having a sponsor and being one, when Sheila and I go on vacation or on a cruise we make sure there’s a meeting in the place we’re going or on the ship, and also that I know how to reach people in the program if I need to. I’ve been to twelve-step meetings in forty-two states and seven countries. At home, a good sponsor will phone almost every day, even to talk for only a few seconds. Maybe I had a fight with my wife or I’m having a bad day and have an urge to gamble, and that call helps. I know how much that daily contact from my sponsor at the beginning made me feel like a big shot; I needed that assurance. And slowly, somewhere along the line, my urge to gamble faded.
I stay away from anything that gives me anxiety or messes with my recovery or my serenity. You have to honor yourself.
In recovery, you begin to work on finding out who you are, and hopefully start spending more time with family instead of thinking about who’s going to win the fourth race at Belmont. Over time, the twelve-step process begins to ask for self-evaluation: taking inventory of your assets and liabilities and deciding to make whatever changes are necessary to help you be the person you want to be. That’s a lot of punishing work. Even with help from a sponsor and a supportive partner, it could take a long, long time, if it’s ever fully completed. The recovery process is about self-awareness and the desire to do better, one day at a time. This was—and is—my inventory:
As gamblers get better, they will see positive changes in their lives. Sometimes it’s those closest to them who see the changes first. As gamblers get honest with themselves and with others, they begin to see to what extent gambling has ruined lives and strained relationships.
Much of the time in early recovery I was thinking Sheila was going to find some other guy and run away, and then I’d be screwed because everything was now in her name; I had nothing. It was in my head for months that she was going to leave me. Sheila tells me that for the first seven years of our marriage, I had a tic—blinking—and I often had headaches. One time I pulled the phone out of the wall. Those were things I recalled for my inventory.
All that inventory-taking is intended to encourage recovery on a daily basis. That’s discussed at every meeting. People go on to discover themselves, then to make amends, confronting things they’ve done and are not proud of and learning ways to approach or repair the damage, such as working on their marriage. A father may dwell on how he treated his children or his spouse. He may try to be a better friend or coworker. There’s a lot of self-examination at this point. You have to face the ways you’ve hurt yourself and the people you care about with your gambling. You can’t make lasting progress without it.
All that inventory-taking is intended to encourage recovery on a daily basis.
The last three steps—Ten, Eleven, and Twelve—are maintenance steps. After you make amends and some real changes in yourself, these three steps tell you to take personal inventory on a daily basis—to stay aware, keep yourself in check, and not let yourself be the ball player who thinks he has the game won before the final whistle. You improve your spiritual life. Then you reach out and help other people. You can become a sponsor, lead a meeting, and do service in the program in some other way. If you can’t put your mind into a meaningful state, then you’re throwing away what progress you’ve made. Don’t get complacent; that’s what fighting relapse is about.
Restitution and Repayment
For the first six months, I was pissed working those extra jobs and giving the money to Sheila, all the while arguing with people in the program who kept saying things I didn’t want to hear. I was an arrogant son of a bitch. I had that big ego, even though I had rotten self-esteem. And I didn’t believe I was a compulsive gambler; I wasn’t even sure what that meant. I still had it in my head that I was going to gamble again down the road. It was just that I didn’t have the money to gamble, or that I was having a run of bad luck. I thought I could quit when I wanted.
I was running the factory in New Jersey; then I’d go to my second job loading trucks in the Garment Center in Manhattan. On weekends, I was working with a photographer doing weddings and other social events. Frank was dragging me to meetings five or six evenings a week, wherever he decided. At night, I’d get home exhausted and go to sleep. Physically running from place to place wasn’t a big deal because while I was gambling for the previous seven years, I would leave the factory, run to the Catskills every night, and get up early to drive to my job. I was always out—always running—so I was used to it.
The only positive thing in my mind at the time was remembering that when I stopped gambling and went to those meetings, Sheila and I had a bank account with $8 in it. That’s it—eight bucks in the bank. After I stopped gambling, we were building up money in the account and I felt, eventually, that we were going to buy a house. I was working and we were saving money.
But for years, we were like ships passing in the night. We had almost no communication for at least my first year in the program. Sheila might say the first couple of years. She wasn’t even yelling at me anymore; she was fuming on the inside instead. If I never came home, it wouldn’t have mattered to either of us. But we weren’t fighting; it wasn’t like she was begging me to stay. For the most part, we had nothing to fight about.
Still I was refusing to accept that I was a compulsive gambler. From time to time, I’d look in the papers to see how the horses or jockeys I used to bet were doing, and how the pitchers I liked to bet were doing. I still had some intention of going back to gambling because that was something I loved. I was still looking in the newspapers to see what the winning lottery numbers were. God forbid the numbers I used to play came up. I was still thinking I was going to hit a big one, go on a streak, and win a lot of money. I can only imagine how I would have responded to the enormous money offered in today’s lotteries. But back then in ’68 we didn’t have mega-million-dollar lotteries.
I kept bothering Sheila about my earnings that she was harboring, and one day she gave in to frustration. She took fifty dollars from our food envelope and almost threw it at me as if to say, “Go to hell!” I was talking about having two dollars to bet on each race, but then I realized I would bet two dollars on the first race and then in the second race I would bet the other forty-eight. I wouldn’t be able to restrain myself. It was like some kind of spiritual awakening.
Before I had committed myself to this so-called twelve-step program, in a meeting they mentioned something called a “pressure relief” group. I certainly knew about pressure. I owed $16,000. Today people come in owing a million or more. In those years, $16,000 for me was three years’ salary. To me, what could “pressure relief” mean but that they were going to give me money? How foolish. What they were talking about was a budget meeting, and I had to bring my wife. They wanted me to put our life into financial order so Sheila and I could live together like human beings: paying our living expenses, paying off our debts—debts I ran up—while still being able to go to the movies and even take a vacation. It was a lofty concept. At least that’s what I thought at the time; living responsibly didn’t come naturally.
The pressure relief group told us we could do it. For the gambler, this is usually the first time he or she knows how much the electric bill is, how much food costs, or what it costs to get your kid’s hair cut because he or she hasn’t looked at anything like that, ever. Bills are what other people have to pay. Money is for the bet; bills will take care of themselves . . . later. The gambler has to face this strange new reality and way of thinking. It doesn’t come naturally.
It was a boost for me when Sheila got involved in the spouse/family aspect of the twelve-step program. It meant something to me that she was trying to understand what I was going through. It was Sheila’s role in her program to work with me in identifying and writing down each item of regular expense—things the gambler doesn’t pay attention to. There’s rent or mortgage, gas and electricity, food money, telephone, kids’ clothes and diapers, car insurance, gasoline, and transportation for Sheila. It was no longer just me who had to get around; I had to think about Sheila, too.
If there’s alimony to be paid, that comes in here. It’s part of recovery that gamblers pay back everyone they owe; all of that comes first. A recovering drug addict doesn’t go back and pay off his dealer. A compulsive gambler in recovery pays off his markers though.
The committee at the pressure relief group studied all our paperwork and came back after a couple of weeks with recommendations. We began living life on the new budget. After the family, whatever I had left was for paying back loans from three finance companies, my boss, the bookmaker, and a loan shark; all told I owed thirty-two people money—for both legal and illegal gambling funds.
The program tells gamblers to call all the people they owe and ask for a moratorium; tell them you are in a twelve-step program and you will pay them, but a little at a time. That includes casinos. Banks and credit card people are more difficult because you often can’t get through to the people who might make those decisions. At the time I stopped gambling, credit cards were new, and I didn’t have one—thank God! Everybody got a tiny piece of me, though, and it took me two-and-a-half years to pay everybody what they were owed.
Even bookmakers and loan sharks will usually give a moratorium—often ninety days. They’ve heard of twelve-step programs and know there’s a chance they’ll still get paid by a recovering gambler, even in dribs and drabs. It’s still money, and nobody wants to turn down money; anything is better than nothing.
I learned—and I had to learn the hard way—that some gamblers hang on to the myth that they are somehow different: that they’re not that bad yet. Well, I know better. Sheila knows better, too. And sometimes others you wouldn’t suspect also know better. For example, after a few months of paying small sums, I was able to tell my loan shark I was going on vacation and wouldn’t be able to pay for two weeks. He said he could accept that. Even he didn’t try to entice me back. I guess he didn’t want to risk that if I started to bet again, he would lose even more money with me.
Nobody believed I could make it at first. But restitution gives hope to the recovering addict. He has tried telling himself that if he doesn’t make another bet, things will get better financially because he knows that makes sense logically to most people. Yet in the gamblers’ illogical mind, it really doesn’t. It’s only when he sees in black and white that there can be an end to the debt and hope for financial security, even if it’s years down the road, that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
All those months of putting ten dollars, twenty dollars or thirty dollars in the bank became a point of great pride. We were building a house in Sayreville, New Jersey, about forty-five minutes from my job; once a week I’d go there at lunchtime and watch them building it. Every two-by-four plank I saw them put up would make me think, Never in my life did I believe I would I have that. I thought I’d never stop gambling. I thought I would chase a big win and then a bigger win for the rest of my life.
Robert L. Custer, MD, the psychiatrist who was the pioneer in the field of compulsive gambling and treated it on the same level with drug and alcohol addiction, summed it up by pointing out the signs and traits of a gambler in healthy recovery. The compulsive gambler was typically male when Dr. Custer did most of his work. But these signs apply equally to women:
Custer’s Signs of Recovery
1. The gambler admits that he has a gambling problem, a sickness, and that his problem isn’t his need for money to gamble, win, and recover his debt; and that it is the sickness causing all the troubles and the gambler wants to be rid of it.
2. The gambler begins to gain some understanding of his maladaptive emotional traits, his behaviors, and how they perpetuate his gambling problem.
3. He looks for help in finding a job and resumes work quickly.
4. He soon develops a detailed, long-term budget and institutes a specific plan for restitution of debts owed.
5. He becomes an active member of a twelve-step fellowship and is eager to help others with the same problem.
6. He develops a sincere concern for his family’s needs and demonstrates this concern by concrete deeds.
7. He has an increased ability to isolate specific problems, develop a plan to deal with them, and to take necessary action to solve them.
8. There are fewer problems and crises in his life.
9. Decisions he makes are sound ones.
10. He develops a sense of pride in himself, what he is doing, and where he is going.
11. Relationships with his wife, children, and other members of the family improve; he spends more meaningful time with them.
12. He accepts himself more realistically and his strengths and weaknesses, without exaggerating or dwelling on either.
13. As the subject of gambling comes up less frequently, his interest in gambling dwindles.
Adapted from When Luck Runs Out, by Robert L. Custer, MD, and Harry Milt
Family Recovery
The family of the gambler suffers, as well. I know Sheila suffered through our marriage for seven long years. She was sick, too, which was why she went to the fellowship for family and friends of compulsive gamblers. In the family fellowship, members learn what makes gamblers tick, why we do it, and why we can’t stop. Above all, they learn self-preservation. They learn to help themselves to get better before they try to help the gambler, because they can’t help anybody if they can’t learn how to live a healthy life of their own. They learn that the gambler may not get better after all, and that they may wind up in prison, a mental health facility, or worse. But they can help themselves to live a better life in spite of those possibilities.
