We hear often in our Gamblers Anonymous meetings that pain is the touchstone of spiritual progress. We eventually realize that, just as the pains of compulsive gambling had to come before our abstinence, emotional turmoil comes before serenity. We no longer commiserate with all people who suffer, but only with those who suffer in ignorance—those …
At certain moments, wrote Coleridge, a single almost insignificant sorrow may, by association, bring together all the little relics of pain and discomfort, bodily and mental, that we have endured even from infancy. The Gamblers Anonymous Program doesn’t teach us to pretend that hardships and sorrow are meaningless. Grief really hurts and so do other kinds of pain. …
One thing, more than anything else, that can relieve my occasional feeling of depression is love. I have to keep myself lovable in the sense of being able to love others, rather than being concerned with whether others love me. In somehow losing myself in others, emotionally or spiritually, I usually find myself. Today I understand what they meant …
Years ago, Dr. Alfred Adler prescribed this remedy for depression to a patient: You can be healed if every day you begin the first thing in the morning to consider how you can bring a real joy to someone else. If you can stick to this for two weeks, you will no longer need therapy. Adler’s prescription, of course, …
The longer I’m in the Gamblers Anonymous Program and the longer I try to practice its principles in all my affairs, the less frequently I become morose and depressed. Perhaps, too, there’s something to that cynical old saying, “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed, but instead will be delighted daily by …
We are told that no situation is hopeless. At first, of course, we find this hard to believe. The opposites—hope and despair—are human emotional attitudes. It is we who are hopeless, not the condition of our lives. When we give up hope and become depressed, it’s because we’re unable, for now, to believe in the …
If you’re not all right the way you are, it’s been said, it takes a lot of effort to get better. Realize you’re all right the way you are, and you’ll get better naturally. Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation so difficult that it seems insoluble. The more we think about it, the more we get on …
As practicing compulsive gamblers, we were all too familiar with depression, that pile-up of dark feelings that seemed to close over our heads at regular intervals. Even now, when I am not making progress at the rate I expect I should be, when I expect a total turnaround in my spiritual self overnight, those familiar …
We’re often told that compulsive gamblers are perfectionists, impatient about any shortcomings—especially our own. We tend to set impossible goals for ourselves, struggling fiercely to reach our unattainable ideals. Then of course—since no person could possibly meet the extremely high standards we demand of ourselves—we find ourselves falling short. Discouragement and depression set in; we …
Though I have prayed at various times in my life, I realized after several months in Gamblers Anonymous that I’d never really prayed properly. I’d always tried to make deals with God, much like a foxhole atheist; I’d always pleaded, Grant me my wishes, instead of Thy will—not mine—be done. The result was that I remained self-deceived and was …