How Australia is leading the world in gambling addiction - my luncheon with Gamblers Anonymous

In my highly exciting life that mainly revolves around people and cats, I sometimes get to do something a bit different - last week, that was lunch with the people from Gamblers Anonymous, or GA for short.

This lunch was put on for professionals, to give them an overview of what GA is all about. I am sharing this here because some of the facts about gambling in Australia simply horrified me.

Australia has 0.2% of the world population but 20% (twenty percent!!!!!) of the world's poker machines. They multiplied when the state governments discovered they were a great way to fill their coffers, as Rev. Tim Costello so eloquently put to us at the lunch; so we now have a state-sanctioned and state-taxed addiction.

The amount of money that people in Australia lose to gambling is simply staggering (on some poker machines you can "feed in" - read lose - $56,000 in less than 6 hours). For those of you who cannot see the lure of "the pokies", imagine machines devised with music pictures and all the modern interactive bells and whistles to get you addicted (and yes, psychologists have worked for the manufacturers of poker-machines, to help make them even more addictive). Of course gambling can take many shapes, betting on sports (this is how young blokes first get hooked), the horses, casinos, cards, online gaming - you name it, and someone else than the punter is raking in the money and the state governments take a percentage of it.

How does it start? Well, we had a lovely young lady, who of course shall remain anonymous, share her story with us: some incredible abuse and hardship in her childhood, leaving her isolated and in constant, intense emotional pain. When she sat in front of a poker machine for the first time, with the music and the pull of maybe winning enough to change her life, the loud voices constantly battling it out in her brain became quiet for once.

I won't take you to the whole cycle of addiction, suffice to say this academic overachiever ended up facing fraud charges in court, as she started stealing from her employer to finance her addiction. The weirdest part was that she didn't realise that is was an addiction, until the cop who interrogated asked her, surprisingly gently, whether she might have a gambling problem.

He pointed her towards GA, there was a meeting going on around the corner that same day, and this is where her story really starts, because what she found at that first meeting of GA, was a whole community, welcoming her like no-one had ever done before. She found support, practical help, but most of all, she found friends. When before she relied on gambling to deaden her unbearable emotions, suddenly she experienced human kindness.

I have previously written about how research seems to be showing that human connection might be the antidote to addiction. Her story was exactly about that.

We heard some more stories that day, all showing another facet of the addiction, and more facets of what GA stands for. The fact that GA isn't accepting donations or subsidies (from anyone) tells you a lot about their integrity - they will do what is best for their members, being beholden to no-one else.

Whenever I read about the latest (bad) news, I sometimes feel hopeless.
That lunch with the people from GA has given me back my faith in humanity - we may be capable of the worst, but we also are capable of the best.

Tolerance versus judgement

This blog is my personal soap box, so today I will share my thoughts about tolerance versus judgement, using a topical subject: the "burkini" ban debate.

For those of you living under a rock and only reading my blog, the burkini is a swimsuit covering the whole body and the hair, mainly worn by Muslim women trying to stay within their religious clothing norms yet wanting to enjoy a swim, and a very va-va-voom cooking show star who shall remain nameless, who may have wanted to swim without showing off the consequences of all the yummy food she cooks and eats.

I must admit that inside me, the arguments of both sides were fighting it out: should someone's fear force other people  to undress to fit in with the environment? where do we draw the line? and by extension what do I think about the whole burka debate?

First disclaimer: my mother is muslim, though not practicing (I'm protestant for those who want to know). She only wears the minimum enforceable head-covering (i.e. a scarf, preferably Hermès lol) when travelling in muslim countries, and dresses like you and me when in Europe. She tells me that the one advantage of being dressed according to the local customs when travelling is that it gives her an enhanced feeling of security. She has never been indecently approached even when on her own on public transport. For me, having lived in Paris where being chatted up is the best case scenario, and felt up the worst, that sounds not like too bad a deal, except it's bloody hot and sunny in Iran in summer.

My thoughts on the burka are that if a woman freely chooses to wear it, she should be allowed to. Freely though means no pressure whatsoever has been applied on her to wear it, not by her family, not by the society she lives in. If that freedom is not present, I think the burka is just another instrument of oppression of women.

Now, to the burkini. We don't expect nuns to wear bikinis or one-pieces to the beach, and yet we don't seem bothered by them not "looking like everyone else". So clearly, this debate is not just about fitting in. What this debate is really about, is the visible presence of muslims.

I understand that in the light of the terrorist attacks in France in particular, the temptation for knee-jerk reactions is quite high. I also understand that French people are scared of potential suicide terrorists, so that any clothing that could hide a bomb is suspect. Yet the burkini can hardly hide anything - try smuggling a bomb under a wetsuit and you'll quickly understand the difficulty.

So what we are really left with, is the question of how to react to people who are different from us.
And even that question is two-pronged: because what we feel, and what offers the best outcome, are not always overlapping.

In the burkini ban debate, clearly what most people feel like is "if only they looked like us, they would become like us" and I think that is a fallacy.
Forcing people to look like something they aren't cannot possibly the best possible outcome.
Separating them into "you're different because your beliefs are different, so you must be a threat" cannot possibly be the best outcome.

Let us not forget that some 4.7 million muslims live in France, of which I would guess 4.699 million are not a threat to anyone, are getting on with their neighbours, and generally contributing to French society like any other minority there. Oh I know, someone will dispute that number, and explain to me that only 4.4 million (or whatever) of them are actually good citizens. It still leaves an overwhelming majority of decent people, who have done nothing to merit judgment or intolerance.

What the burkini ban will do, what this picture did, is divide people into "us and them". It will make it easier for extremists to recruit because it shows our occidental society to be intolerant.

If my neighbour is different, does that mean he is "not as good" as me? My answer is: value has nothing to do with sameness. Some time ago I wrote a blogpost on how our judgement reveals more about us doing the judging than about the person we judge, and I stand by it: if I judge my neighbour according to my own personal standards, it just shows the narrowness of my mind, and has nothing to do with his value.

The way out of the very difficult, complicated situation that the world is in, cannot possibly be an arms-race, where we just try to "outgun" those who threaten our way of life.

If all of us, normal, decent people were to reach out, to the other, to the different, if we engaged the conversation, were generous, like the muslims I personally know are, wouldn't we stand a better chance to win each other's hearts?

Psychotherapy and language

Psychotherapy being "the talking cure", it seems appropriate for me to ponder about language.

A bit more than half of my clients come to me because I speak their mother tongue (German or French). Why is that language communality so important to them, that for some, they prefer therapy over Skype with me, over trying to find a different therapist "in the flesh"?

For one, it is about feeling at ease in whatever language they do therapy in.
But more importantly, it seems to be about what language structured their brain in their childhood.

You learn to express who you are, and your feelings, at a very early age, in a certain language.

Part of the work we do in session is to look back to find the moments where things may have "gone wrong" and where certain behavioural adaptations have occurred to deal with those problems, to then examine if they are still adapted to the present (they mostly aren't).

To feel at ease with your therapist takes a bit of effort - having to overcome a language barrier can make it that little bit harder.

Yet I have had clients whose mother tongue was obscure enough for them to choose me despite that, and we use English as our common language. It is not per se an impossibility, but it requires both from the therapist and the client an additional layer of effort that may be too much for some.

I enjoy my work in whatever language I use. English has become the one I favour, just because I have been using it every day for the last 20 years. Yet both German and French are still so deeply ingrained in me (and I still regularly read books in both) that even if I sometimes feel it's harder to express myself, I never struggle to understand my clients.

Funnily enough, all the therapy work I have done on myself has never been in my mother tongue. Only rarely do I bump against the difficulty of trying to explain an expression to my therapist that just doesn't have an equivalent in English, and so fails to conjure up the same picture to him that it does to me.

So maybe speaking the same language is just about making therapy that little bit easier.

Maybe in the end, it is not so much about which language we use, but about the willingness to truly hear the other.

How to make the most difficult decisions in your life

Quite often my clients come to see me because they are faced with really important, really difficult decisions; often it's about whether to change their country, their partner, or their job.

Most of the time, the decisions they are faced with are so difficult because all the options have good and bad sides. They all have a pay-off but also a price to pay.

Tempting as it may be for me to just give them my opinion when they ask me "so what should I do?", my role is rather to tease out what they really want, deep down. I help them by digging up the underlying motivations, both helpful and unhelpful ones. Some come from their unconscious "programming", and some are conscious choices they want to make.

So we look together at their needs and wants, and see if some are more important for them, or more urgent, and also how the different options will play out in the short, medium and long term.

In the end though, in most cases, there isn't just a good choice and a bad choice; so whatever their choice is, it will be "right" - though only as long as one important condition is satisfied, and this is at once the easiest to understand and the most difficult to apply:

You can decide whichever way, but then you have put 100% of your intention, energy and work behind that decision. Concretely, that means:

- If you decide to stay, stop looking at the other options, and invest all in what you have decided to stick with.
- If you decide to leave, start building your new life, don't look back at the old one wondering what it would have held for you.

If you can satisfy that condition, whatever you choose will most likely be the "right" one for you. 

How "family systems theory" can help us change the people around us.

The main mantra in psychotherapy is that you can only change yourself, not others.
So why do I now say that it is possible to change the people around us?
Bear with me, it's all going to make sense in a minute.

When a client comes to see me and tells me how unhappy they are, and could I please change their wife/husband for them, I have to let them down gently: I am not in the business of casting spells, I can only work with the person who is actually in the room with me, not with the one at home...

So how does family systems theory help us change the ones at home?

A family is a system like any other. There are inputs - the acts and words of all the people in the system, there is a "system" that mixes them up, interprets them etc. according to their own underlying and unwritten rules that differ for all families, and there is an output - the stuff that happens in the family.

Now like any system, if you want to change the output, you simply need to change the input.
Concretely, in your family system, what does that mean?

It means that every member of the family has the power to change things by changing their personal input. What does that look like?

Well, if you usually nag and don't get results, it might mean to stop nagging.
Or if you do everything for everyone, and get frustrated that they don't pick up the slack, it might mean doing less.
Or if you usually take the same person's side in every argument, to stop doing that.

And because the family is a system like any other, once you have changed the input, the system will give you an outcome that is different to the one you've had so far.

A bit like this: if your system were an adding machine, and you changed the numbers you were adding, the result would become a different one.

Basically, the other people in your family system will have to adapt to the "new you", and that means they'll have to change. Now, I cannot guarantee that your outcome is going to be exactly the one you're hoping for - every system complex, but there are certain rules that generally apply, which will help you work towards the outcome you want.

And sometimes, the change in input might be that you remove yourself altogether from the system.

This is how psychotherapy makes a difference. By working on yourself, by changing yourself, you are changing your input in your family system, and you will get a different outcome.

Worth trying?