The Depths of my misery were fathomless

My recovery evolves.

The g.a. meeting that I attend reads the combo book from cover to cover at the start of each meeting….that is a line in the combo book…THE line…the ONLY line that I could see..that made any sense at all to me for a long long time… “and the depths of their misery were fathomless”.

Hope? Joy? Dreamworld of a gambler? Roadblocks? Honesty, openmindedness and willingness??

I am telling you…I heard NOTHING…I could relate to NOTHING..except “the depths of their misery were fathomless?.

I knew misery…I knew fathomless misery.

I was living it.

I was drowning in debt.

I was so ashamed…I had never done anything like this before…I am not a rule breaker…I don’t want to disappoint people…I am RESPONSIBLE.

Who the hell had I become?

And how?

Incomprehensible….Fathomless…all of it was.

Some of what was in that little yellow book, I scoffed at …some of it just didn’t make much sense….but that one phrase…kept me coming back…I KNEW I was in the right place…. fathomless misery.

Then…one night….I was in a meeting…reading that book…and something that I had previously taken offense to….that did NOT apply to me…suddenly made sense….yes…it did..it DID make sense…and it was soo me…”a desire to have all the good things in life without any great effort on their part”.

And then….I kept hearing people in recovery talk about how we tend to ‘stuff’ our feelings and we need to learn how to ‘dump’ this stuff…to deal with our feelings, etc….so one night…I am in a meeting..reading that little yellow book….when another light bulb came on…”compulsive gambling is an emotional problem”.

I used to feel like…people in recovery don’t really TALK about what it all means…that the steps and recovery in general are mysterious things….but…I’m finding that the more that I learn..the more difficult it is to discuss…to find words.

That combo book wasn’t clear to me at first because it is a gradual process….this learning thing….it has to be….

You cannot teach a three year old who has never learned to count how to multiply fractions…first…they must learn to count whole numbers….then addiction…subtraction…multiplication….decimals and fractions….it is a PROCESS…things slowwwwly begin to make sense…a little bit at a time….

I wonder what I will think when I look back on this blog in the years to come.

I have often wondered…after having an aha! Moment..”why didn’t they just say this” …but then I realize….that wouldn’t have helped me to arrive any sooner, really.

Being openminded…and listening…those are the things that were necessary …

My progress (or lack thereof) in recovery, seems to be directly related to my readiness to learn something new.

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When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. ~Victor Frankl