Why the Unconscious Loves the Near-Miss
As with other addictions, hypnosis can help with gambling addiction — meaning addiction to games of chance, not to computer games. Since pathological gambling now falls into the same category as substance addictions, the treatment approach is similar too.
The Hypnotic View of Gambling Addiction
To understand why some people sacrifice so much for gambling, and in the process distort their whole sense of reality, you have to understand how the unconscious works in a situation like this. The unconscious is fundamentally geared toward survival — and that includes taking the easiest path to resources. That's why, in some people, it rewards a win with a disproportionate rush of feel-good hormones.
Many people who've developed a gambling addiction describe an initial winning phase — the first wins, and the rush of happiness that came with them, are often the first step toward addiction. For the unconscious, gambling becomes an easy way to get satisfaction. The excitement and tension involved can also be used remarkably well to cover up other things or balance out negative feelings — caught up in the urge to play, people often forget everything else.
A kind of gambling trance sets in, where much of it runs on autopilot and the conscious mind barely gets a say anymore — which is also why gambling addiction is classified as an impulse-control disorder. Many people describe feeling "like a different person" while it's happening. Gambling or betting increasingly becomes the unconscious's main tactic for balancing out problems — no wonder thoughts increasingly circle around the game.
The More, the More
The more gambling takes over a person's life, the more it becomes part of their identity too — people brag about wins and play out the ideal image of a winner. Yet every game of chance, whether in a casino or online, from roulette to scratch cards, is designed so the house comes out ahead over time and the player ends up behind. Play long enough, and you almost always lose — with correspondingly growing financial consequences, and sometimes the first signs of despair.
So what has the unconscious picked as the perfect solution for those negative feelings? Gambling itself. That creates a vicious circle of negative feelings and an increasingly failing attempt to compensate for them — the more you lose, the more you play. The reality of the losses has to be talked down more and more, and many people believe they can make up for losses with future wins. The fact that this is statistically next to impossible stops mattering, because the conscious mind has lost its influence.
On top of that, the system gets used to the excitement: it takes higher and higher stakes to reach the same level of tension, and more and more money has to be found — begging, borrowing and stealing included. Relationships often break down in the process, which deepens the isolation further and blocks off possible ways out.
The Course Isn't Always a Straight Line
A gambling addiction doesn't always steadily get worse — in the lives of many people affected, episodes of crashing and catching themselves alternate. But once these patterns are set in the brain, they're hard to shake. The risk of relapse remains until the unconscious is convinced of a different tactic and has learned new routines — only a change from the ground up leads out of gambling addiction. Where the conscious mind alone can't manage the necessary change, hypnotherapy offers a good route to real progress.
How the Treatment Works
Whatever stage of a gambling career you're at, hypnosis offers ways to treat gambling addiction, much like it does with substance addictions. At its core, the unconscious needs to be convinced it no longer craves gambling. Since the unconscious part differs from person to person, the exact process looks a little different each time — but certain elements keep coming up.
With gambling-related addictive behaviour, there's often a split between the conscious mind and the unconscious parts — it usually shows up in the sentence "I know I should stop, but I can't." In cases like this, the unconscious is still too much at the helm, and the impulses aren't yet sufficiently controlled. In hypnosis, all these parts can connect with each other: through more direct communication, the conscious mind regains some control, while the unconscious is, at the same time, brought a little closer to logic — which creates better understanding and often noticeable stress relief too.
Once some control is back and the hole isn't being dug any deeper, gambling can genuinely come to an end. To get there, it's usually replaced with something positive — hypnotherapy often uses this to essentially reset the reward centre. After that, different routines are practised in the unconscious to break the old pattern: gambling loses its place as the go-to tactic, and the reward in the brain gets reduced or dissolved altogether.
