When I see new members come into Gamblers Anonymous, I am reminded first of the pain and the unmanageable mess I found myself in, and then the hope I felt once I became willing to accept the Gamblers Anonymous Program. When I see and hear the Old Timers, some with twenty years or more in …
We learn from others in Gamblers Anonymous that the best way to deal with painful situations is to meet them head on, to deal with them honestly and realistically, and to try to learn from them and use them as springboards for growth. Through the GA Program and our contact with a Higher Power, we …
No one welcomes pain with open arms, but it does have its uses. Just as physical pain serves as a warning that we may be suffering a bodily illness, so can emotional pain be a useful sign that something is wrong—as well as a warning that we need to make a change. When we can …
Until we came to the Gamblers Anonymous Program, our lives had been spent running from pain and problems. Escape by way of compulsive gambling was always our temporary solution. Then we started going to meetings. We looked and listened, often with amazement. Everywhere around us, we saw failure and misery transformed by humility into priceless …
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 …