The Four Stages of Compulsive Gambling
No gambler becomes a compulsive gambler overnight. The first time you gamble won’t make you a compulsive gambler automatically. A gambling addiction comes to you in stages.
For some people it happens faster than others, but typically there are three or four stages that you will travel through before you become a compulsive gambler.
The first stage is the winning stage. Don’t we all love that stage? This is where you are just discovering gambling and above all: how it feels to gamble and WIN!! The feelings produced by winning are great. You feel wonderful! You are happy, and everything is right with the world. You are making money and feeling great at the same time, what could be better? This stage sometimes lasts a day or two, or sometimes it will last longer depending on your luck. During this stage, you might start feeling confident about gambling, and you may think that you have the system beat, and therefore may place larger and larger bets. You’re on top op the world, and nobody can beat you!
That’s when reality kicks in. The second stage of gambling is the losing stage. You’re no longer invincible and you begin losing your bets. This is where you will feel the ‘high’ of gambling less and less, until you rarely experience it at all. Typically, you will start to gamble alone, and may begin hiding your gambling habits from friends and family.
What then follows is the inevitable wish to win it all back: the getting back up stage, which is the third stage. The compulsive gambler starts to bet heavier and heavier, in an attempt to make win back the losses and make everything right. You have won once, haven’t you, so why should you not be able to win again? But as you lose more and more money, you may begin borrowing or stealing money to pay for your gambling addiction.
The fourth stage of gambling is the most serious. During this desperation stage, the compulsive gambler increases the amount of time and money that you spend gambling until you are in serious trouble. During this stage, you start to experience the deep low of a gambling addiction: serious debt problems, your family life begins to suffer, leading to divorce or separation. You lose your job and find yourself in a dangerous cycle without much hope to escape. It is in this phase that some compulsive gamblers will resort to desperate measures to fix their problems including illegal acts or even attempting suicide.
The progression through these stages a gambling addiction will vary, depending on the personality type of the compulsive gambler and the type of gambling that they engage in. It has been found that people, who play instant gratification games such as the slot machines, video slots or video poker, including online gambling, will experience these three stages faster than other compulsive gamblers.
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