TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the subject of gambling. Back when I was a psychotherapist, I had a few clients over the years who called themselves pathological gamblers. Also, I have met people just out in the world who I was friends with sometimes or acquaintances with, who told me that they had gambling problems.
I thought about my experience gambling when I was a child. I haven’t gambled since I think I was maybe 11, 10 years old. My gambling experiences happened in relationship to a carnival that came to the small town where I grew up. It came once a year, and there was a game that they had at the carnival where there were all these little holes with different colors. They had a rat that would run across the top of all these holes, and then it would go down one hole. Whichever hole it went down, that color won, and you could bet on those colors.
Well, I saw this game, and somehow it called out to me. I had a belief that I just knew which color the rat was going to go down at different times, so I would bet. I didn’t have a lot of money back then. I think I brought two dollars for my whole afternoon at the carnival, which was a lot of money for me. That was like, it took me a while to save this up back in like 1981 or 82.
I put a quarter down, and as it happened, the first time I won. The rat went down the hole, and I won like four quarters back. It was like it did something to me, and so I continued to bet. I had a belief that somehow I knew, could just intuit where this rat was going, or I could maybe even mentally communicate with the rat and get him to go down the hole that I wanted. And then I lost. And then I lost again. I couldn’t believe it. There was some part of me that just believed that my knowledge about this communication I had with this rat was bigger than, sadly, reality. I ended up losing all my money.
Then I wandered around the carnival and saw my friends, and they still had money left. They were having fun going on rides and doing shoot games and things like this, and I had no more. I felt sick about myself, really sick that I’d done this. And why did I do this? I asked myself, and I walked away from the carnival because there was no more fun for me there.
I thought about it, and I came to a realization very early in my life that it actually related to my relationship with my mom. My mom had raised me to believe in magic, that I even had a magical control over things. She had taught me that she had magical control, that she had magical powers. She used to hide things like pieces of gum in our house, and then she would say, “Oh, I can just tell where pieces of gum are hidden, big special gum that I like.” She taught me this when I was three, four, five, six years old. She would say, “I don’t know,” and then she would say, “I think it’s there, no it’s there.” And then I would look, and there would be a piece of gum there. I’d say, “Did you put it there?” She says, “No, no, no, no,” but she had put it there. She taught me to believe in magic.
She also taught me, “Daniel, if you focus deep enough, you can just know things.” And this wasn’t about knowing truth. This wasn’t about knowing honesty, knowing who I really was on the inside, which I could know, but this, that was that. When I learned that I had that power, that wasn’t magic. That was the ability of a self to consciously know itself. She was teaching me that I could manipulate and control reality through my thoughts in ways that I couldn’t. She could control me because she had power over me because I desperately needed her love, but she couldn’t control a greater reality. She was lying and faking it, and so I was raised to believe this distortion.
What happened when I went out and gambled was I got it proven to me that reality was more powerful than the lies I had been taught by my mother, and it was very painful. I had to go back and look at her in a different way and realize that she’d betrayed me at some level. She’d actually betrayed me in many, many different levels, in many different ways. Some of those ways I didn’t want to look at and couldn’t look at for a long, long time. But in this way about magic, some part of me did reject her lies pretty early on because I saw the terrible consequence of I lost at gambling. I was fooled by this carnival man. I was fooled by this statistical game that set me up to lose, and I lost my hard-earned money for cleaning stoves with a brush to make 20 cents an hour. It’s like I lost my allowance that I had to work for.
So when I think of the greater subject of gambling, and I think of people that I’ve met who get really into gambling, I think somehow they’re not able to look often. I mean, obviously, there are exceptions, and there are some people who understand the statistics well enough to know how to statistically beat certain games. Those people are mathematical geniuses often, and those are the people that can do well at gambling. But a lot of times, people are deluded at their own ability to understand statistics.
I had a friend once who was a card counter. He could count cards mentally in poker and different games, and he just had a photographic memory for cards. Therefore, statistically, he could consistently win money. Most people don’t have that. I’m good at math; I don’t have that. Most people, I think, really are lost in a sort of delusion that they are more powerful mentally than they really are. They feel that luck, that they have some control over luck, that somehow life loves them enough to give them good luck, but it doesn’t really.
What I’ve seen again and again and again is when people get really lost in addictive gambling, the kind that I got addicted to for one afternoon when I was 10, it’s really an unresolved profound desire to believe that one’s parents really were good and loved you. It’s a terrible painful thing to realize that one’s parents failed. They failed you. They failed me. They weren’t all they said to be. And then, well, reality is bigger than that, and that reality is bigger than magic and luck, and that those things don’t work. Games and gambling especially are set up to fool people who are immature enough to believe that they can win the contest just because their fantasy is so powerful.
Well, I really think that’s what it is. When people are gambling, they’re betting that their parents were better than they really were, and then they’re losing consistently because their parents really weren’t. In a way, it’s a displacement of their inner struggle to know truth and their inner struggle to deny truth, deny the truth of their historical reality.
What I’ve seen is when people begin to connect with their history of having been betrayed by their parents, that betrayal being a profound abandonment, a trauma, an actual emotional trauma to the child. When people can face that trauma and begin to heal from it by facing the reality and grieving, literally emotionally grieving the horrible reality that one experienced of that betrayal, people don’t need to believe that fantasy anymore. The fantasy that lady luck is going to come and save them, that statistics will warp their own desires, that life will be just to them, that they will get a sort of reparation for what happened to them when they were a child—all of this happening on an unconscious process. Well, that’s not how justice works.
What I’ve seen is the only justice is to know the truth of ourselves and to connect with that truth of ourselves. The truth of what happened to us as a child, to grieve it, to heal from it, to integrate, to know the truth of our history, know the truth of who we are, know the truth of what we’ve done, and not try to undo that contest, make up for what happened.
By having a game that addictively, you might sometimes statistically win, but most of the time you won’t win, and you will lose. In a way, it’ll end up just replicating the traumas that happen to you along the way. Because when people lose at gambling consistently—and I’ve seen people lose so much, lose all their money, lose their homes, lose their cars, lose their relationship with their husband or wife—mostly it’s been men from what I’ve seen. But when some women too lose their partners, lose their relationship with their children, lose their inheritances, lose other things, it can be really, really devastating. And the only way to get it back, from what I’ve seen, is to reconnect with that truth within. And I’m so glad that I learned that lesson so painfully in such a short, hard way when I was a young child.