This week’s guest blogger is Catherine Townsend-Lyon, an author, blogger and marketing guru. Catherine lives in Arizona and is a recovering gambling addict. For the next two weeks, Catherine will feature segments of her book “Addicted to Dimes” in this blog.
The Woman in the Mirror
I used gambling to get reactions from people who didn’t communicate feelings or get reactions from people who had hurt me.
I know I’ve always had a compulsive type of personality and high anxiety most of my life. I had to always be moving or engaged in something. While in treatment, and during my first time in the crisis center, I found out I suffer from severe depression, severe anxiety and PTSD from my childhood trauma. I started on medications for them, in November 2002. I also remember, while in the crisis center after being there only a few days, I was getting ready to take a shower and I looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t recognize the woman looking back at me. I’d always been a fun, bubbly, caring person, but this woman looking back at me, I didn’t know or recognize. I also was suffering with mood swings sleep problems and felt as though the medications I was taking weren’t helping these symptoms. I sure wished they could come up with a cure or a pill for gambling addiction.
Needing My Parents Love I Never Got
I found that there were other people going through some of the same things with their addiction as I was. The amount of money lost to our gambling may have been different, but I didn’t feel as though I was alone in this insane disease. There is a lot more to the addiction than just placing a bet or being in action. I learned to use my addiction as a way to cope with feelings and disappointments that I had pushed deep down rather than dealing with them. I would gamble to escape reality, which was very immature in retrospect. I was selfish and only cared about myself. Just as the addiction makes you selfish, so does recovery. Recovery requires hard work and the desire to want to stop gambling.
You have to put those first, before everything else, to get well again. For me, I know the problem started a long time ago. As I was growing up, I had this nagging feeling of always having to prove myself to others, especially my parents, and I wasted many years doing just that. The only thing I ever wanted was my parents’ unconditional love. I became emotionally drained after years of waiting to hear they were proud of me. My parents were not the type of people to share their feelings or emotions, so it led me on a long journey of trying to win their approval of me.
Bah, Bah Black Sheep
It seemed I was destined to be the black sheep of the family, and seemed to be treated as such as I got into adulthood. I think that’s where I got my feelings of a sense of entitlement, later on in my life. Because of the way my family had hurt me so much through the years, I used my addiction to hurt them. But the only one I really hurt was myself. Growing up, I just wanted to be heard, or acknowledged. That’s all. We didn’t have any family history of gambling problems. When my parents had friends or family over, they would play cards, or my mom would play bingo now and then. My dad was in the Air Force, so she’d go to the air base at Norton to play bingo. My sister and I would tag along sometimes and we’d win things like irons and toasters.
I hope you enjoyed reading the first few sections of Catherine’s book, Addicted to Dimes. The series will continue for another week. We know in recovery that we turn to addiction for many reasons, and that we can recover without knowing the reasons why we walked down such a dark path. And sometimes, we discover some of the underlying issues of why the addiction sucked us in.
Author, Catherine Townsend-Lyon lives in Arizona writes a blog on her web site: https://catherinelyonaddictedtodimes.wordpress.com/author/kitcat4459/
And works with other authors on marketing their books at:
https://anAuthorandWriterinProgress.wordpress.com
You can Email her at: LyonMedia@aol.com
