âIt is all about relationship. We are all about relationship. Everything is about relationship. It is all about our relationship with others and our relationship with ourselvesâ. That is the answer I have finally formulated. Gambling addiction, for all its increased profile in the media, remains one of the least understood and one of the most misunderstood of all addictions. After more than 13 years of clinical practice in the area of problem gambling and specialising in women and gambling addiction and being asked, oh so frequently, âSo, what is it all about?â, the answer I have just quoted is the answer that seems truly to capture the essence of what gambling addiction is all about at its core. Of course, you might be wondering if surely am I not over-simplifying things, and you would be right; and indeed there would be nothing else to write if gambling addiction in women could be summed up as neatly as that. And that is the thing; it is all about relationship but relationships are not neat and tidy. They are messy and complex and complicated and if we are engaging in them we are going to be feeling a whole lot. Sometimes we might feel joyful and exhilarating feelings and sometimes painful, anxiety provoking and depressing ones. As my first clinical supervisor once said to me, any close relationship is like a jam sandwich: it can be sweet, juicy and delicious, and equally messy and sticky and hard to clean up from; it can leave things stained and ruined.
The underlying motivation for gambling addiction, especially so in women, can always be found in relationship, whether it is in the âtoo muchâ or in the ânot enoughâ. It is about having relationships that cause too much stress and pressure, are too demanding and leave a woman too exhausted to meet her own true needs, or relationships that have been damaging or, in the worst cases, abusive. Or it is about having not enough relationships, so that she is unsupported, lonely and isolated. Whichever it may be, the outcome is the same. When we scratch just below the surface of gambling addiction and the chaos of loss chasing and debt, the tangled web of lies that she has woven in an attempt to conceal her gambling and doing so also to protect herself from judgement and the shame that would come from having witnesses to the consequences, the woman with addiction to gambling is trying to cope with the negative impact of relationship. She finds that when she is gambling she is not thinking about anything else or anyone else. In that sense her gambling is self-soothing. A little win here and there might temporarily lift a low mood, but gambling addiction is not about winning money. It is about buying herself time out of her real-world experience, where the focus on the slot machine or the computer screen as she gambles online help her to feel in control, if just for that time, of her spiralling anxiety-driven merry-go-round of irrational thoughts and so too her stalking scare, her searing and relentless emotional pain, or darkly depressing feelings. These thoughts and feelings have been caused by her life situation, either in her current life, or by memories from earlier life experiences that are still troubling her, still influencing how she sees herself and affecting how she relates with herself and therefore with others. We find without exception that something about her relationships â past or present â has created a barrier to her healthy here and now relating, that she finds that she cannot ask for her needs and wants to be met, or set firm boundaries around herself, or is driven always to please others to the extent that she loses herself. Sadly, sometimes that loss of self has become almost complete to the extent that a mere spectre of a woman is all that is left in existence, with such a frail whisper of an inner voice as a guide for what is right for her that she can no longer hear it herself. All of these, and any of these, and a myriad of other fine details of the damage done by poor relating have left her mistrustful of being close, and so she is cut off from the many benefits of healthy relationship. Perhaps she has now forgotten what they were. Perhaps, sadly she has never experienced them. All she does know, although it may still be in felt sense rather than conscious awareness, is that gambling her troubling thoughts and feelings away feels like a safer option than the risk that experience has taught her is associated with being sufficiently intimate with another in order to express them. She is not gambling to take a risk, but to attempt to take emotional and psychological control.
The result predictably and paradoxically is not control but chaos. Unaffordable amounts of both time and money spent buying herself escape into the haze of gambling creates an additional set of problems. Her preoccupation with gambling means that focus on commitments such as work and any existing routine and okay relationships begins to fail. She grows increasingly secretive and withdrawn, constantly in conflict with rationally knowing that she has to stop gambling or the situation will worsen, and yet feeling that she cannot face life without it. All this creates additional anxiety, depression, isolation and loneliness. The only way to take control and to stop gambling is to stop running and to face her fears. These fears are of facing up to and managing the mess that gambling has now made; unmanageable debt, broken trust, painful truths yet to be fully disclosed to her, let alone to others. Underneath the layer of gambling are concealed the original fears that drove her running to isolate herself in the barren and limiting world of addiction. These fears are the hardest to stand and face because within them is where the pain and terror lies. Whatever lies there, she feared it so greatly that she chose instead to put herself continually through the miserable cycle of gambling addiction rather than to face these monsters.
The only way to take control is counter-intuitive; it is to stop running and to turn and face, and to confront, resolve and adjust. To do whatever it is that needs to be done. In order to do this she will need all the support and help she can get from good healthy relationship ⌠and yet it is unhealthy relationship that triggered the use of gambling as a replacement for missing healthy relationships. Can we perhaps begin to see her dilemma? The antidote is made from what she feels has been her poison, and that is close relationship. That is why the findings of my clinical experience have been that encouraging women to engage in womenâs groups for problem gambling is difficult, but also why the womenâs groups I have facilitated consistently produce such satisfactory results for the women who do somehow, despite all their understandable fears based on their frame of reference for relationship, find the courage to attend. They are reversing the process. They are standing and facing their fears, learning what it is that needs to be different and how to make adjustments and to resolve; they are learning how to safely express rather than to suppress by gambling addiction. They begin to replace gambling addiction through the experience of the all-round benefits of belonging to a group, at first, and slowly, within the therapeutic group, but then expanding the learned skills to both give and receive the benefits in their world outside of the therapeutic space.
From the day we are born we belong to a group. The primary group of course is that of our family. Our family group is the root of all other group experiences. Being our very first group experience, and needing the care and protection of our family group in order to survive, we eagerly learn what we perceive to be our place in the pecking order, and observe the values and expected ways of relating within our family, which we use as material to write our own metaphorical âRule Book for Relatingâ, which, although incredibly powerful, we may not even be consciously aware of, and so we may carry that book of rules, unedited, for a lifetime. The dynamics of the family relationships begin to write a script for the role that we feel we should play in order to be accepted in future group situations. Our family group not only hands us the set of rules for relationship and the script for the role that we are expected to play within group situations, but of course has a direct influence on many of the subsequent groups we may join. Our family signs us up for playschool and nursery, the schools we belong to, the clubs we attend in our recreational time. They perhaps sign us up for belonging to particular religious groups. More subtly, we are being enrolled into social/socioeconomic groups; we are being influenced early on by our particular culture, by those our families socialise with. We are none of us as a baby born with middle-class or working-class values; we learn these norms and values from what we see modelled to us by those around us. We take what we have learned as the group-appropriate morals, norms, values and aspirations and take them out into the world as our template for life. Often we then seek employment that reflects our learned group mentality. We leave home and create a home of our own, which makes a statement about the group we feel we belong to. Grayson Perry, in his recent television programme (Channel 4, 2012) exploring our predilections for particular interior design style, analysed the ultimate reason for our choice to be that of reflecting through our home environment a belonging to our chosen or aspired-to social group. So, be it a preference for bone china and Chesterfield or the latest minimalist style, we have still not moved far from the symbolism of the totem. We mark our territory, we make displays that symbolise the group we belong to, and by implication so too the groups we do not belong to. We are saying that we are the same as, or that we are different from.
We feel afraid of the difference. Difference brings with it something we do not understand and so brings uncertainty. Uncertainty is a condition that I have consistently witnessed throughout my practice as being amongst the hardest for any of us to tolerate, often triggering acute anxiety. If we are different we risk judgement from our chosen social group and deep within ourselves still fear the same things that we all have feared since the beginning of time: separation, rejection, abandonment and loss of the connections that help to form our identity but on a primal level help us to survive. Often both sexes are amused by the stereotypically feminine question that women might ask each other before a night out: âWhat are you wearing?â If we examine that question in any depth however, we would usually find lying at the bottom the fear of being different from the others of our chosen social group. It is perhaps a question asked more by younger and/or less confident women who feel less able to stand alone, and asked less by more mature and/or more confident women who feel a strong enough sense of identity and have enough experience to know that standing out as being different does not have to risk annihilation by our group. We sense that alone we are vulnerable to attack, we have only our limited individual resources to depend on in lean times financially or emotionally. Alone we constantly run a higher risk of our destruction. If we think about it, even in our teens when we often so desperately desire to create our own identity as separate from our parents, we frequently just move on to join another group albeit of a different kind and display our separation from our family group, and our transferring membership to the group of our peers, marked through the fashion we follow, the car we drive, the music we listen to, the tattoos with which we mark our allegiance to a group or a set of beliefs. In the secular culture most of us now inhabit, our group identity is now more often reflected in the visible and the material. In the spiritual and religious world we have been gathering together for group comfort and security for thousands of years, taking comfort in having our existential beliefs and our fears witnessed and validated by others, being with others who are similar. If we belong to a religious group we are also handed a guide for life for times when our moral compass might steer us a little off course. We have a frame of reference and a framework for life, which is reassuring and frees us up from needing to make every decision autonomously and moment by moment as we can measure it up to the template given to us by our religion. Making independent decisions is a mixed blessing; it can feel wonderfully emancipating to be totally free to direct the course of our life, but with freedom also comes sometimes terrifying responsibility. For women, it is not so long ago that we were fighting for even the most basic freedoms, such as the right to vote. It can take very many generations to move into truly feeling a match for being responsible for huge life choices such as do we stay at home with children or have a high-flying career? Do we, as so many women have, try to have both? We find frequently that the latter choice often results in little time for supportive relationships, and to high levels of anxiety and depression. The Medical Research Council in Glasgow found that 38 per cent of middle class professional mothers with a degree reported high levels of stress, only slightly lower than those of women from more deprived backgrounds (The Times, 2013).
âWomen are beginning to discover that nothing is more frightening than the escape into freedomâ (Dowling, 1982). Within our group we feel we belong. We are the same as. If we are the same as, we are more likely to be accepted. If we are accepted by the group, we are more likely to be protected by it. Protection in modern western society is more likely to manifest itself in terms of approval and the maintenance of friendships and other desirable social relationships, but still through this sense of stability and security that it offers we feel stronger. Recently, we have marked the two-year anniversary of the London riots in 2011 when gangs of youths set fire to property and looted shops. The media pursued stories of those involved, revealing the backgrounds of some of the most serious offenders, and found consistently a lack of strong family group (Smith, 2011). Many involved were members of inner city gangs, where the skills of keeping good, healthy personal boundaries have never been taught by family groups and so are replaced by rigid physical boundaries marked by area and postcode and fiercely guarded. Where no strong sense of identity has been nurtured by family values and morals, any tiny graze to the self-esteem by another is experienced as a deep wound, resulting often in the wish to attack and destroy the other, the feared one who is different. However horrified we might have been with the actions of these gangs, does it not make sense that if, as we have discussed, one of our deepest fears is of not belonging to anything, such as a cohesive family group or a workplace relationship, that we choose to belong to something? It would naturally be easy at this point, with our tendency to wish to tidy things up and apportion blame, to aim that at the parents of the youth involved â the absent fathers, the irresponsible lone mothers. Yet the single mother at home is more than exclusively âmotherâ, she is a woman with needs for a support system herself if she is to do the best she can to raise her child.
Just as children are absolutely dependent on their parents for sustenance, so in all but the most primitive of communities, are parents, especially their mothers, dependent on a greater society for economic provision. If a community values its children it must cherish their parents.
(Bowlby, 1951)
Seventy-four per cent of women whom I have treated for gambling addiction over the last seven years have been single mothers. Often, they are found not only to be from a poor socioeconomic background but to have a very poor support network, and gambling to suppress their feelings has been a replacement for the avenue for expression that might be offered by the community John Bowlby describes above.
So when touching on the desire to belong to a group we are dealing with innate instinct. It is about survival and security and a defence against our existential fears of being ultimately individual and alone. We all know this to a degree, be it consciously or unconsciously, and it is reflected in so many aspects of our life from films about teenage cliques within high school and what happens if one is the overweight kid or the geek, through to Sartreâs work Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 2000).
Human beings seemed condemned to live in total isolation from one another, in the lonely grandeur of choosing for themselves. But in the critique it is specifically shown how human beings can by their own choice break down this isolation and form themselves into groups.
(Warncock, 2000, p. xvi)
What, then, meets our instinctual needs in our ever increasingly frantic and secular world, where there is so little time for the coming together into group meetings of family and friends and religious gatherings, that might meet these instinctual needs? When the media fills us so full of fear regarding the threat to the safety of our children, should we allow them past the safety of the front door to go out to play and to learn about friendship and team work and community? We might answer that the coffee shop has become our gathering place. Certainly, it reflects more than a little of our instinctive tendency towards group mentality and our desire for routine and ritual that might go with our tribal instinct. We head for our preferred chain of coffee shop, often at the same time, the same day of each week; we seek out the familiar sign of our preferred shop if in a foreign town, seeking out the sense of identity, security and belonging that goes with group membership, not so much out of the need for caffeine (unless of course that has become a little addiction in itself !) but more out of the need to meet with others of our family and friendship group and to partake in the ritual it offers of slowing down, to sit with another, to listen and to be heard without the distractions of home or work life and technology. Ideally without the distraction of technology because we do not have to be at home or in the office to access the benefits and the pitfalls of a life lived online. To return to the question of how we meet our needs for group gathering in contemporary western culture, for the answer I would take the risk of saying that for everyone reading this book â and I include myself as the writer in this particular group â we need look no further than our pocket, bag or briefcase. The smart phone, the tablet, or the laptop contains instant access to our modern day social network. Our Facebook friends, the colleagues with whom we are LinkedIn, our Twitter feed, these become our social groups. How far does this truly feed us, however, and satisfy our natural longing to be a part of a group and a support network? Perhaps one way to answer this question lies in the recent reports of online bullying via social media. Within a two-week period we have news in the UK of women receiving threats of rape via Twitter and another teenage girl who committed suicide as the result of being bullied relentlessly by her peers online. Arguably, of course, this type of abuse has been committed by bullies and abusers since time began, but online perhaps it is easier to say what one would not say face to face because one cannot see the face of the victim? If we might include the reasons for the UK financial crisis and the role of the banker in this, it has been suggested that when trading became electronic, and therefore client contact limited, it became far easier to leap from necessary and appropriate risk taking to being reckless with other peopleâs money and lives. It is far easier to bypass any empathy, to disconnect from feeling, if there is no physical evidence of the emotional pain and psychological distress. The effects of which have been proven to be no less than the physical act of violence or abuse that they may threaten, and in fact are the cause of the deepest wounds that never heal.
Thus, although betrayal, powerlessness and stigmatization are integral to certain forms of sexual abuse, they are in fact psychological traumas arising from at least partially psychological events.
(Briere, 1992, p. 24)
Counsellors and therapists who conduct online sessions frequently report that clients are quicker to a depth of emotional disclosure again because they do not have to sit physically with another who is witness to their pain and the shame that they might attach to it. This could be a great thing or this perhaps might be unhealthy avoidance of what ultimately is necessary if we are not to be eternally alone or to continually wear a mask that shows the fixed smile of âI am okayâ designed to keep enquiring others at a...
