Specialized Online Counseling for Gambling Addiction Recovery and Work-Life Balance

Addiction thrives in silence and I think the recovery comes from being able to learn to open up and connect and realize, like, hey, first and foremost, you're not alone in this. My name is Joey Gdovin. I'm a licensed chemical dependency counselor. I'm located outside of San Antonio and Spring Branch. And I've been working in the field for approximately seven years, seven and a half, almost eight years now. Coming from working in the substance abuse realm of things was the study of addiction coming from there. And so then being able to relate my background and knowledge from utilizing substance abuse to really like in your process addictions and kind of creating a lot of the parallels between the two. I wanted more of that work-life balance to be entirely honest with you, so that I can go see my family in between sessions. That was also really important. Think just taking a step back from the hustle and bustle of the day-to-day stuff to being able to, like, work from home and still be a little bit more engaged with family. So, I work with individuals struggling with gambling addiction and all varying degrees, but usually it all funnels down into the same thing. This has become too much and I need to. Take some action. This is much more than just losing finances. I'm losing relationships. I'm losing time. And if you're not going to be alone in this, then we need to maybe address some of those cycles that you keep creating for yourself where you have to feel like you have to remain silent, whether that be shame or secrecy or embarrassment or whatever people want to refer to it as. The longer you stay in silence, the longer you're going to suffer. There's usually so much more to that. That just led to gambling as wind up being your escape. It's that emotional hijacking you go from proactively thinking about how you're going to gamble in a more responsible way to just reacting to how you're gambling in the moment. And I think that causes individuals to then act more impulsively, take out more money, chase that illusion that if I just play a few more spins or just put a few more hundred dollars down, then I can get back to where I was. That's not the case. It's no different than a pack of cigarettes and people still smoke. So. Knowing what some of those risks are is equally as important. think sometimes we're just an autopilot and it starts off as fun and then it switches to the there's an emotional attachment. The old adage, you're only as sick as the secrets you keep really kind of holds true in those regards. Like I was too nervous to tell my spouse that I gambled a thousand dollars, but you were willing to take the risk of gambling a thousand dollars instead of talking to your spouse. So these things I think that we're afraid of are the narratives that get developed through that emotional hijacking to try to rationalize. The behavior, I think, is the biggest aha moment. I do talk a lot about guilt and shame and because I think that that's a lot of what keeps people silent, right? If recovery from really anything is going to be dependent upon opening up and connecting with people, you can't do that if you're going to continue to not be honest with yourself. If you can't be honest with somebody else, you're definitely not going to be honest with yourself either. Most individuals, when I say, what's your total amount of debt caused by gambling? And they just rattle off a guesstimate number when they put pen to paper and actually Lay all that out in an Excel sheet or a piece of paper and they write out what's owed, where and how much, it becomes the visual aid for them. So chasing the illusion of the losses is probably the biggest one. But then honestly, a lot of it is not knowing that there's actually help out there for this. So I talked to a lot of people that say like, I didn't know where to go prior to this. You know, I was having anxiety or depression and I was seeing, you know, a psychiatrist, but they didn't really understand the addiction component of things. Or I would go to a GA meeting, but then I felt so foreign to me because I didn't have any dialogue or understanding about how this was actually affecting me. So it can be kind of layered, I guess, but the biggest thing is not knowing that there's actually help out there. The clients that I'm working with that are on more of the mild scale, where I'm starting to believe this was a problem and yeah, there's a couple thousand dollars worth of debt and they kind of catch it early because maybe they were a little bit more self-aware enough to kind of speak out against some of that silence. I've worked in the substance abuse field longer than in working with gambling addiction. And I can tell you that the two were very synonymous with one another, right? I stopped drinking, I started gambling, I stopped gambling, I started drinking. So we're giving up one behavior to replace it with another unhealthy behavior to cope. If we just address the one unhealthy behavior and ways to cope with it, then my hope would be that you don't turn to some of these other maladaptive coping skills as a backup. You don't have to do this alone. And there's help out there. My big thing is, you know, mental, physical, spiritual and emotional, try to At least hit one little micro goal on those daily. So it doesn't have to be this grandiose change overnight, but if it's 1 % better today than the day before and 1 % the next day, then you're moving in the right direction.