Imagine yourself in the company of people for whom you did not need to translate; people who understood not just your words, but your feelings; people who did not judge those actions and thoughts for which you judge yourself. Imagine yourself both lucky and blessed to no longer feel like the perpetual stranger.
I drove back from the national conference of the National Council on Problem Gambling feeling both lucky and blessed. I had heard stories of hope from recovering gamblers and messages of hard work done by treatment professionals. And the phrase I heard more than any other was: I am finally able to choose life. Someone read part of one of my favorite poems by Juan Ramon Jimenez:
What an immense rip
in my life and in all things,
in order to be with my entire self,
in everything:
in order to never cease being,
with my entire self, in everything…
“That’s precisely it,” I thought. “To give up always wanting more in order to have more. That’s what we do when we stop using.”
And I’d learned more than that I was not alone. I heard savvy professionals in the gambling addiction treatment and advocacy fields tell us that we were all up against lousy odds. There isn’t enough funding to reach gambling addicts and their loved ones, much less all the physical and mental health care practitioners who may be the first point of contact for an addict desperate for help.
Even the best counselor cannot truly help a gambling addict if the counselor is not trained in working with gamblers. Gambling addiction is different in many ways from alcoholism or substance abuse. And it may be more deadly. More recovering gambling addicts go back to their drug that any other addicts. More commit suicide. It takes gambling addiction-specific training and education to save lives - and money to fund training and education.
As I listened to speakers and sister/fellow addicts, I heard stories that chilled me. An E.R. in-take doctor asking the family of a near-suicide if the gambling addict had won; the psychologist who responded to a patient expressing despair that they could ever stop, “Want to bet?” The difficulty of persuading mass media to report on an epidemic that smothers and kills as thoroughly as the British Petroleum negligence is slaughtering wildlife.
We learned that 1% of Americans meet the criteria for pathological gambling and 2% for problem gambling. There are 6-9 million adults in gambling trouble – and 500,000 adolescents.
500,000 teens, maybe your kid, either sneaking into casinos to torch their brains or hidden in their rooms lost in on-line gambling, their social lives, their ability to connect, their education disappearing. The husband that starts coming home later and later, or the wife who hides the credit cards are not having affairs – except with an addiction that may leave them dead.
And I learned that there was a simple opportunity now available to give back to all those who have helped me live with (after ten years of relapses) a year of not placing a bet, a year of increasing clarity, connection and joy. The Comprehensive Problem Gambling Act (CPG) had been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2009 as H.R. 2906, and in the U.S. Senate in May 2010. Both introductions were bi-partisan. In these divided times, that’s a tribute to both the deadly seriousness of gambling addiction and the clear vision of a few politicians. You can be part of passing this historic Act. To read the CPG, go to: http://www.ncpgambling.org/files/Comprehensive_Problem_Gambling_Act_of_2010.pdf
Then ask your Representatives to support H.R. 2906; and your Senators to support S.3418. There is a satisfaction to be gained from doing the right thing, a sense, albeit temporary, of having just enough.
Note: Portland and Portland area conference participants, if you were unable to get copies of my books at the conference - because they ran out - Annie Bloom's bookstore, 7834 Southwest Capitol Highway, (503) 246-0053, has them in stock.
And for those of you not in the Portland area, you can find my books at the independent bookstore websites: Changing Hands, Powell's, and Tattered Cover.
