Life After Gambling: How to Stay in Recovery and Rebuild Your Life
Recovery Is a Journey, With Many Winding Turns
Stopping gambling is a huge achievement and lots of people tell me that being gambling free feels great at first. But if you’re reading this, you may be discovering longer term recovery can feel tough emotionally and bring its own challenges.
Even after you’ve quit gambling, life can feel like an emotional rollercoaster, just in a different way. The rollercoaster no longer feels like the highs and lows associated with the wins and losses of gambling. Instead, you can really feel your mood shift with the ups and downs of everyday life, as well as experience the dark tunnels of difficult memories and overwhelming emotions.
This makes a lot of sense when you think about how gambling would have once done a great job in blocking out intense emotions (at least for as long as you were in the gambling bubble), and now you don’t gamble, the emotional blocker is gone, and you’re left with raw and alive emotions.
Of course, if you’re experiencing a pleasant feeling, like happiness, then that’s great. But if you feel stressed, anxious or low in mood, then that’s really very challenging. As one person once told me:
“The best thing about not gambling is you feel your emotions, and the worst thing about not gambling is you feel your emotions!”
To add to this, many people I work with in longer term recovery can also experience:
Urges to gamble that can feel overwhelming at times.
Boredom or emptiness without gambling in their life.
Lingering guilt or shame about past actions.
Strained relationships that need repair.
If this sounds like you, you might be relieved to hear this is all very normal. Building a life in recovery takes time and often brings into your awareness aspects of life and emotions that are, and in fact always were, difficult to manage.
The good news is you’re in the right place with gambling out of your life to begin to learn how to master the art of coping with emotions and the challenges of life, as well as resolve any trauma from the past that may be affecting you now.
Foundations for Staying in Recovery
To stay in recovery, it’s important to find your own magic formula of what works for you, and everyone is different. Based on my work with people who do recovery in many ways, here are some ideas you might want to think about to support you to stay in recovery.
If I think about people who successfully remain in recovery, they share the following foundations:
1. Gambling Barriers
In gambling recovery circles, we have a phrase that feels helpful here:
‘Give gambling the respect it deserves’
For some clients, once they’ve stopped gambling for a while they can be lured into a false sense of security and think the barriers they put in place in early recovery are no longer needed. This may include thinking they don’t need the self-exclusion, the gambling blocking software or support from loved ones with holding money or overseeing their bank accounts. People tend to have this expectation of themselves that they should be strong enough to go it alone.
However, give gambling the respect it deserves. Gambling was once a very powerful coping strategy when life got tough and has a potential of creeping back in when you’re vulnerable – maybe you’ve just been paid, maybe you’ve had a big argument with your partner, or maybe you just feel so low in mood. These are your vulnerable times and you’re building your mechanisms for coping with them without gambling, which will take time.
In the meantime, having the barriers in place can be a life saver. The more barriers you have, the better. If you get around one barrier, you need another and another and another to make it extra hard to get to gambling in times of vulnerability.
Make gambling as near to impossible as possible. Self-exclude online, self-exclude in land-based venues, get help with oversight of your money, get a bank account that blocks gambling transactions, put under 18 restrictions on the wifi coming into your house.
If an urge happens, make it so difficult and frustrating to get to gambling that it’s not even worth the effort to try to get access to gambling, or the urge has passed well within the time it would take to get around all the barriers.
Having gambling barriers aren’t a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength. They’re also a very important signal to yourself and the gambling part of you that you don’t cope with life like that anymore.
2. Develop Your Self-Awareness
In my experience, in group settings when people who are very new to recovery and are learning how to stop gambling are asked if they believe gambling ‘just happens,’ most of the group will raise their hand or nod in agreement.
However, contrary to this popular belief, gambling is always triggered by at least one aspect of experience, but more often, a collection of multiple triggers that come together to create a perfect (or imperfect!) gambling storm.
People who maintain their recovery build a really good awareness of their gambling triggers, which can include internal thoughts, memories, emotions, bodily sensations and external people, places, situations, sounds, smells. They’re also aware of when they’re triggered and how their mind and body react to the trigger.
I like to work with people to:
Develop a list of their personal triggers and have these written down.
Learn how to take a mindful pause of their experience when they notice a trigger.
Have a plan of how to cope with a trigger, if it happens.
Taking time to quietly reflect at the end of each day can be very helpful, especially when new to recovery. Asking yourself whether you’ve encountered any triggers that day and how you responded helps you to nip things in the bud.
3. Stay Connected
Whilst it’s true to say that nothing will match the buzz that gambling once offered (although let’s face it, it really didn’t feel like that towards the end for most people), it’s important in recovery to begin to build a life for yourself that involves doing other things you either enjoy or get a sense of accomplishment from. Connecting to a few new hobbies is a great way of being connected to your life and other people who are important to you.
Another aspect of staying connected that many people who develop a solid longer-term recovery tell me about is staying connected to other people. This may include people who are new to your life and support you with gambling recovery. It’s also great to stay connected with important people in your life who’ve been most affected by the gambling.
By being present and spending time with loved ones, as well as learning how to share thoughts and emotions, is a great way of showing them how things are different. Not only is spending time being with and talking to important people a great coping mechanism when triggers are around, but it’s also a way of rebuilding relationships and trust. Loved ones affected by your past gambling are looking for you to ‘walk the walk’ and not just ‘talk the talk’ about the changes you’re making. Staying connected to them is one of the best ways they can rebuild confidence and trust in you because they can see the changes with their own eyes.
Addressing the Emotional Side of Recovery
Having these three foundations in place can be very stabilising and can help you get through and grow from challenging times in recovery.
Sometimes though emotions can be very challenging to manage in recovery. This may be because:
Anxiety or depression may persist even after quitting gambling, or you may become aware of these difficulties for the first time now your emotions are not being blocked out.
Relationships may be hard to manage because of the lack of trust felt, or because knowing how to communicate your thoughts and feelings can be difficult.
Past trauma might resurface in ways that don’t always feel understandable, but can affect emotional reactions, and more often than not relationships with important others.
If the emotional side of recovery is particularly difficult, it might be time for your to consider if therapy could be helpful to you. Therapy can support you to:
Understand and process lingering emotions.
Strengthen coping skills for daily stress.
Develop your relationships by helping you to open up emotionally to others.
Explore deeper causes of gambling to prevent future triggers and urges.
How Online Therapy Supports Ongoing Recovery
Many people think therapy is only for when people are wanting to stop gambling to support early recovery. However, ongoing online therapy once recovery is established offers:
Accountability and guidance for long-term recovery.
A safe space to explore urges, setbacks, and emotions.
Tools to strengthen resilience and prevent relapse.
Support for rebuilding life and relationships.
Opportunity to understand and resolve past trauma.
Recovery isn’t just about stopping gambling — it’s about creating a fulfilling life you want to live and overcoming any past trauma that’s standing in the way of this. Therapy can help to make that possible.
If you’ve stopped gambling but still struggle with the emotional side of recovery, you don’t have to face it alone. Please get in touch for a free therapy consultation today.