It’s been a while since I wrote anything on my blog, not because I don’t have anything more to say, but rather because I needed to turn my attention to another book project which has nothing to do with gambling (it’s about black women playwrights and theater designers).
Also, I spent much of the summer traveling to New York, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, London and Wales attending theater events and a women’s theater festival. I’m thinking about adapting my book, CONFESSIONS OF A SLOT MACHINE QUEEN: A MEMOIR, for the stage, but not as a solo show.
I want to put some people on the stage in what I think will be more of an abstract rather than a realistic dramatization of my struggle with gambling addiction.
What I wasn’t able to write in my book, mainly because I had such trouble understanding this as an addiction and was in deep denial, was the therapeutic experience, that is, my sessions with a private therapist and the intensive group sessions I went through in the Fall of 2009, at Gateway Recovery in Madison, Wisconsin, after I was arrested for drunk driving on July 10, 2009, while I was trying to get to Ho Chunk Casino to finish myself off.
By the way, I ended up in group therapy for alcohol and drug addiction, mainly because there wasn’t a group program for addicted gamblers. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog, there are very few mental health professionals trained to deal with gambling addictions
I remember thinking that nearly disastrous night, “Why don’t I just go to Ho Chunk and gamble until I lose everything, so I can finish destroying myself?” That’s how crazy I was. I now realize that I was suffering a mental illness.
It was sheer craziness, that feeling that the labyrinth that is the casino (any casino), was hell and I deserved to be there, that I needed to be punished. But for what? Well that’s where the private therapist came in, to help me understand some things about myself, so that I could begin to change my behavior.
I was in personal therapy for about five years. I said goodby to the lovely lady who worked with me just a few months ago. Only then did I feel that I could go, travel and start other work, that I could trust myself to stay away from casinos and from alcohol. I don’t drink any alcohol or gamble anymore. It’s a very liberating experience to be so sober!
This is not to say that I don’t think about gambling. In fact, although I have no problems staying away from drinking alcohol, my experience getting arrested on July 10, 2009, and the realization that I could have injured or killed someone on the road to Ho Chunk is sobering in itself, I must very careful about things that trigger the impulse to gamble on slot machines.
I’m very careful about the kinds of images I allow myself to focus on. For example, I am getting to the point that when I drive to Chicago on interstate 90, I barely notice the big billboard advertising the Grand Victoria Riverboat Casino in Elgin, Illinois.
It wasn’t too long ago when that billboard would be the trigger that set me on a gambling binge despite my best intentions. I also am careful about spending too much time on the internet on websites that are active, with pulsing images and electronic sounds. They are triggers; mini slot machines right here on my computer, at least in my mind. Which brings me to something that I find very troubling.
I’m absolutely dismayed that a website, gamblingkingz.com, which is supposed to be offering “gambling therapy” also promotes gambling on its page. There are several advertisements right next to the text about online gambling therapy that are promoting gambling. I don’t see the point of this at all. What’s the difference between this and serving alcohol at an alcoholics anonymous meeting? It’s downright insidious.
Sandra Adell, Author, CONFESSIONS OF A SLOT MACHINE QUEEN: A MEMOIR
