Changing Is Always Difficult

"Why do we always press harder on the buttons of the remote control even when we know the batteries are dead." - Unknown

Sound familiar? We press harder because we are either to lazy or to stagnant in what we are doing to find the energy to get off our backside and replace the batteries. Believe it or not, many of us lead our own lives in a very similar manner. It is so much easier to believe that the way we are today is just fine. It is so much easier to believe that it is the other person who has the problem. It is so much easier to look at the other person and carefully define their faults, instead of looking deeper into our own lives and highlighting our individual faults.

As addicts, the only true way to find abstinence and the only true way to maintain your abstinence is to make the necessary, but difficult changes in your life. Lasting change, complete change, is never just cosmetic. It has to alter your entire life. You need to be able to look at yourself and see a totally changed person from the person you knew as the addict. Physically, you need to change what people see. Whatever your trademarks are, you need to lose them. Why would you want to maintain the image or reflection of an addict? Why would you want to constantly keep retelling the stories of your failures in life, when it is so refreshing to tell of the successes in your life.

Emotionally, you need to find your own balance, a place where you are comfortable within your own skin. Emotional balance, for an addict, is the most difficult to achieve. Our emotions always seem to be on a roller coaster, changing sometimes by the minute, thus making it very difficult for the people who are closest to us. For me personally, it is my greatest challenge. Finding an inner peace, that permits me to re-connect with society, usually gets me running in the wrong direction. It has to be extremely difficult for the people in my life to deal with my many emotions, especially when my own imbalance is so affected by these same emotions.

Spiritually, is where we can find the majority of our answers. Most recovering addicts have some type of relationship with their own Higher Power, as they believe it to be. For me, my faith has saved my life. My belief that God will never burden us with something we cannot handle, as well as my belief that anything I cannot handle can be given to my Higher Power, has carried me to where I am today. The "First Step" is admitting that we are powerless over our addiction and that our lives have become unmanageable, and the "Second Step" is coming to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to a normal way of thinking and living.

Physical, emotional and spiritual change, difficult - yes, possible - yes, rewarding - definitely. Saying you want to change just won't get it done. Admitting that you have a problem and that you need to make some changes just won't get it done. Believing that quitting alone will solve your problems just won't get it done. All you are really doing is pressing harder on the buttons hoping the channel will change. Change will come, rewarding change will come, when you make the commitment to get off your backside and get a new set of batteries.

Your Life

"We generate our own environment. We get exactly what we deserve. How can we resent a life we've created ourselves? Who's to blame, who's to credit but us? Who can change it, anytime we wish, but us?" - Richard Bach

My life has changed dramatically in the past two years. The gambling environment that controlled my life for nearly ten years is now a memory, a painful memory. The environment that I choose to reside in today is more healthier, more challenging, more rewarding, more loving, has more faith, more hope, more trust and more opportunity. Just as I take full responsibility for generating the gambling environment, I also take credit for the new environment that I enjoy today.

Where ever you are at this moment in time, your choices and your decisions placed you there. If you are not happy in your life today, a new set of choices and a new set of decisions can change a portion of your life or your entire life, whichever you choose. Blaming others for your current situation does nothing but solidify your belief that someone else is responsible for your life. You cannot claim to be an adult, free to make your own set of choices, without accepting responsibility for those choices and the consequences they bring into your life, positive or negative. Your life is a product made up of your ingredients, your input, your direction.

If this makes you feel a little hopeless or if you feel the mountain is to big to climb, remember this - "no matter how dark the night, there is always the dawn, no matter how strong the storm, there will always be the calm". By placing a little faith in yourself and a great deal of trust in your Higher Power, nothing is impossible. This world is full of examples of people who made adjustments in their decision making ability and took a chance that a positive decision would produce a positive result.

Two years ago, this month, I made the decision to stop gambling for one day. At the time I wasn't capable of doing anything else. The only thing I could promise myself and the people I loved was for that day I wouldn't gamble. Each new day, I would make that same commitment, always to myself. Before long, days turned into weeks and weeks into months. This new gamble free environment permitted me to make other positive choices, because now my mind was free to think about the good things in my life. No longer was I bound by the chains of a VLT machine. One decision, for just one day, a very short twenty-four hours, has altered my life far more then I could have ever hoped for, surely you could try it for one day.

Recently my wife gave me a book that has the following quote, read it, trust it, believe in yourself and the power of the human spirit.

"No test or temptation that comes your way is beyond
the course of what others have had to face. All you
need to remember is that God will never let you
down; he'll never let you be pushed past your limit;
he'll always be there to help you come through it."

Finding Hope

"Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

At what point do you say enough is enough? When do you begin believing that your way is just not the right way? Where is the tipping point in your recovery? How will you know when you reach it? There are no easy answers to any of these questions. As addicts it is much easier for us to advocate for the negative than to accentuate the positive. We find it difficult to believe we are loved, as a matter of fact, it is much easier to believe the opposite and carry on with our life in the safe confines of our addiction.

The thing that we always need to remember as addicts, as well as the people who love and support us, is there is always hope. Where there is love there is hope. Where there is courage there is hope. Where there is a true belief in the goodness of all people, there is hope. The easiest thing in the world for any person to do, is to quit trying, quit believing, quit hoping. My addiction to gambling was spread over a ten year period, there were many, many mornings and many, many nights that I truly wanted to quit gambling, but I didn't. During that time I suffered through depression, confusion, anger, fear, embarrassment and guilt, but through it all I managed to hold on to "hope"

Today, as I approach the two year anniversary of my abstinence, I still live with that hope. No matter where you are at in your life today, whether you are mired in your addiction or struggling with your recovery, keep hope alive in your life. Finding hope can be as simple as watching the miracle of a bird in flight, seeing the freedom as it soars through the air, and believing in the miracle of a new way of life for you and your family.

Even today, as I struggle with all of my human frailties, I believe in myself and in those around me. The pain and suffering caused in our world today by a multitude of addictions is intimidating, however when we pool our resources of hope, love and our belief in one another, no addiction, regardless of its' strength, can win. We all win when we help each other, we all win when we believe in each other, we all win when we unite, addict and non-addict, in finding hope in our future.

Choices

"Life is the sum of all your choices." - Albert Camus

As I look back at my life, it is almost impossible to believe the choices I have made in my life. While some of my choices have been very good and the result has been outstanding, a great number of my choices has caused both myself and others a great deal of pain. The biggest change during my recovery, however has been my wording, early in my recovery I was looking for someone to blame my weaknesses on, today I am aware that my weaknesses were really very bad choices. When things go wrong for most people, the first thing they look for is a reason or excuse or something or someone to blame their troubles on. In reality all they need to do is look at the choices they made prior to the arrival of the trouble in their lives.

Today, something happened while I was working, that really caused me to reflect about my gambling and the tremendous turmoil it caused in my life and the lives of those around me. I picked up a gentleman at a club and he told me the address where he wanted to go. He seemed a little agitated and spoke only about the weather. When we got to his home, he asked me to wait for him. He hurried inside leaving the front door to his home completely open and returned in less than thirty seconds and asked me to bring him back to the club. As we drove he fumbled with a number of twenty dollar bills, counting and re-counting, almost like he expected there to be more. Once we arrived back at the club, he paid me and hurried inside.

As I sat in the parking lot my mind drifted back to my gambling days. Everything I witnessed in this man today, I remembered myself doing many, many times before. He had obviously gambled all of his money and instead of quitting and going home, he had to get more money, he had the belief that this machine was going to pay. He had no regard for his own self or anyone else in his life. It was between him and the machine and he was certain he was going to win. What he didn't realize was that the real winner was the addiction itself, the addict was in control and the addict was calling the shots.

Now take a moment and examine the ten minutes in this man's life that I just related to you. Look at the number of choices he made in a very brief period of time, and think about what his life would be like had he made a different choice at any given time. His first choice was to get more money, to achieve this he needed transportation, so his second choice was to call a cab. When he arrived home, he could have stayed there, but no, his third choice was to take more money and his fourth choice was to return to the club and his fifth choice was to feed the machine more money. In less than ten minutes he made five choices, if either one of those choices had been different, I guarantee you his life would have improved as well.

From the moment we open our eyes in the morning we begin making choices, some habitual, others because we believe we have no other options, and still others because we believe it is the proper choice to make. Life is the sum of all of our choices, both good and bad. My belief today is that we all need to take a moment and reflect on the choices we are going to make. Think about their impact, not only on yourself but on others as well. There is one bit of advice I can give you - as sure as you take control of the choices in your life, you take control of your life.

The choice is yours.