the net makes it super easy for addicts of many things to fall off the wagon. gambling, porn, shopping, even sexual predators might be attempting to recover and find the pull of the computer too strong. it isn't entirely logical to just eliminate computers from one's life, but surely there must be avenues to curtail the availability of such things. gamblock has been mentioned, but there must be free software of similar nature or other ways of preventing oneself having access to certain sites/services. what if you just uninstall all your casino software and instruct your computer to disallow access to all the sites you know host casinos? you may still be vulnerable to new casinos that open up and you somehow find them, but if you can find the power to block before you can download, then you can hopefully keep casinos out of your life. we could keep a list here so anyone interested in this could easily copy the list into their internet block list, plus it would be interesting to attempt to list the website of every active casino on the internet.
someone said "take a walk, make a call" etc to get your mind off it kind of thing, well even if the compulsion to gamble is go great it feels overwhelming, you could do this. take only your driver's licence and a reasonable sum of cash (100-200 maybe, something that is totally expendable), and NO means of getting more money on you (like a debit/credit card), drive out to a live casino. leave a twenty locked in the car just to cover any emergency situation on the road, and if you lose your money and think you're going out to the car for the twenty, once you get there to grab it, just jump in and head home. i liken this to a safe-shoot/methadone clinic, it gives you what you need at a minimum of risk. and also, knowing that for you to gamble would take driving x miles and consume at least h hours of your life, then you will begin to not want to do it. quitting smokers often lock their smokes up and put them in like 20 ziplocs so getting them out is so much of a pain that you'd rather not smoke given how much of a task it is.
and i think restricted supervised preportioned gambling is not as bad a thing as if a recovering alcoholic were to go out of town and have a drink. gambling has a point to it, to try and win money, and there is a possibility of doing some good by gambling. abusing a substance does harm every time. the tough bit with gambling is that the instrument that provides it sits right in your living room or wherever your internet hooks up. surely recovering alcoholics wouldn't keep bottles of liquor within arm's reach while trying to abstain.
the best advice for addiction is ONE DAY AT A TIME. that's only the best you can do. wake up each day, and try your hardest to do what you need to to survive and be healthy.
