[Guest blog post by Alex Thorne-Vale]
The most convincing liar I ever met was the voice inside my own head. For a long time, I thought gambling addiction was about losing control. Now I think that, at least for me, it was something far more complicated. I didn’t feel out of control. Quite the opposite. Most of the time, I was absolutely certain that I knew exactly what I was doing.
That was the problem, every bad decision came with an explanation.
One more bet wasn’t really one more bet. It was a chance to recover what I’d lost. Increasing the amount wasn’t recklessness; it made mathematical sense under the circumstances. Breaking a promise to myself wasn’t really breaking it because this situation was different. And if I won, then surely that proved the decision hadn’t been so irrational after all. There was always a reason, and the frightening thing was that I believed those reasons.
I could recognize irrational behavior in other people easily. Looking at someone else’s gambling problem from the outside, everything seemed obvious. Stop. Accept the loss. Walk away. But from inside my own head, the exact same behavior looked completely different. I wasn’t an idiot. I understood probability. I understood that gambling companies exist because the mathematics favors them rather than me. I understood what addiction was. I understood what it was doing to me. None of that knowledge prevented me from gambling. My brain simply became better at finding exceptions.
Yes, but this time…
I think those four words contain a surprising amount of what addiction was for me. I knew I needed to stop. In fact, I decided to stop more than once. I made promises to myself and genuinely meant them when I made them. But deciding to stop and maintaining that decision turned out to be two very different things.
This is where the first point of SMART Recovery’s 4-Point Program—Building and Maintaining Motivation—resonates strongly with my own experience. Wanting to stop in a moment of regret is one thing. Remembering why you wanted to stop when the urge returns is something else entirely. Addiction was remarkably good at making yesterday’s reasons seem less important today. The consequences hadn’t changed. The mathematics hadn’t changed. Everything I had previously understood was still true. But suddenly there was an exception.
This time is different.
And once that thought appeared, another process began. I started negotiating with myself, and I was an excellent negotiator. That is why another SMART Recovery principle—Managing Thoughts, Feelings and Behaviors—speaks to me even more strongly. The urge itself was only part of the battle. What frightened me more, looking back, was what my own thinking could do with that urge. I could take something I knew was harmful and construct a chain of reasoning that made it seem acceptable, exceptional, or even rational. The deeper I went, the harder it became to distinguish reasoning from rationalization. And I think this is one of the most dangerous things about addiction.
We don’t necessarily lie to ourselves because we’re stupid. Sometimes we do it precisely because we’re intelligent enough to construct convincing arguments for what we already want to do. Eventually, I realized that perhaps being rational doesn’t mean always having the right answer. Sometimes it means being willing to question the answer you desperately want to be right. And that requires something surprisingly difficult:
The ability to look at yourself from the outside.
I believe this is often where solving a problem begins. From inside our own reasoning, every step can appear logical. Every excuse has context. Every broken promise has exceptional circumstances. Every surrender to desire can be explained. Step outside that reasoning, however, and suddenly the pattern becomes much easier to see. I was fortunate enough to overcome my own gambling addiction. But that experience left me fascinated and disturbed by how deep this hole of supposedly rational thinking and self-deception can become. It also changed the way I thought about responsibility.
At some point, I had to look at what I was doing without allowing the “person” inside my head to explain it away. Years later, those experiences became part of what led me to write my novel, One in 4096. The book explores many ideas and asks many questions, but for me it also has one very important purpose–I want to give the reader an opportunity to look at himself from the outside.
I didn’t want to write a book telling people that gambling is bad. Anyone struggling with gambling already knows that. I wanted to do something different. I wanted the reader to spend time inside the mind of someone who is extraordinarily good at explaining himself to himself. To watch his reasoning. To judge his decisions. To become frustrated with his excuses. To see him repeatedly choose what appears obviously wrong and perhaps think:
How can he not see what he’s doing?
Or:
I would never do that.
And then, perhaps, recognize something uncomfortable. Because self-deception is much easier to recognize when it belongs to somebody else. That distance is important. When we watch another person construct increasingly elaborate explanations for his own behavior, we aren’t emotionally invested in protecting those explanations. We can see the contradictions. We can see where desire has disguised itself as reason. We can see the gap between what someone claims to believe and what he actually does. And perhaps, after seeing it in someone else, it becomes a little easier to recognize the same mechanism in ourselves.
That is one of the things I hope One in 4096 can offer people struggling with gambling addiction. Not instructions. Not treatment. Not a promise that reading a novel will somehow solve an addiction. A mirror. Sometimes the first step toward dealing with a problem is being able to see it from a different angle.
I successfully overcame my own gambling addiction, and that is one of the reasons I want to share what I learned from it. If my experience or the story allows even one person to recognize the trap of rationalization and self-deception a little earlier than I did, then writing about it was worthwhile.
I know what it is like to be inside that cycle. And I know how difficult it can be to recognize what is happening while your own brain is constantly providing reasons why what you’re doing still makes sense. For a long time, I thought overcoming addiction meant defeating an enemy that was trying to control me.
Today, I see it differently. Sometimes the enemy doesn’t sound like an enemy at all. Sometimes it sounds reasonable, intelligent, persuasive.
Sometimes it sounds exactly like you.
[One in 4096 is currently available to Kindle Unlimited readers at no additional cost, and is available on Amazon]
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