This research was performed to assist a theory of gambling addiction and practical application by analyzing the nature and significance of recovery through gambling addicts’ experience, developing the theory about maintenance of their gambling recov...
This research was performed to assist a theory of gambling addiction and practical application by analyzing the nature and significance of recovery through gambling addicts’ experience, developing the theory about maintenance of their gambling recovery. The main research agenda herein was “how is the recovery maintenance process of gambling addicts?”.
For this research experiment, 25 subjects were selected who have had gambling addiction before and then received gambling addiction counseling or participated in self-help meetings and stopped gambling for 3 years or over. The 25 subjects are all males between the age of 30 and 70 years, averaging 50. Their gambling suspension period was at least 2.9 months to 27 years, averaging 7.6 months. Research materials were collected through in-depth interviews with experiment participants. The collected data materials were analyzed according to Hermeneutic Grounded Theory suggested by Rennie (2006) in order to search a unit of meaningfulness to be conceptualized. Those meaning units were grouped according to their similarity and their resulted phenomena described with the focus on analytical themes.
It was found that, in this research, the key category of gambling addicts’ recovering maintenance process was ‘self reflection and behavioral implementation toward change and growth’. As analytical themes for the recovering maintenance process, we imposed significance on suspension, survival, realization, practice, change and growth. The participants reported that once they became addicted to gambling, they could not stop but keep doing it until they lost all funds and reached the very final end of the status. The forced gambling suspension was like the lowest bottom of their lives and they had to bear the enormous load of life and survive another day without any social status of trust from family. As they started to work and earn for a day, they realize more and more about themselves and the characteristics of gambling addiction. They started to make their supporters around them, change attitudes toward the life and put it into practices actively day by day. Changes through action were demonstrated as new recognition about oneself and new interest in others. Such a process was a road of overcoming the current situations and a path for growth in character and spirit. The research participants were once suffered from gambling addiction and its caused damages to their lives, but as they endured the hardest period, they came to know about gambling addiction and addicts themselves. Then the subjects started to act and practice about it to now experience a totally different process of recovery towards change and growth.
It was found that gambling addicts’ recovering maintenance process was in 4 phases of facing reality, acceptance, behavioral implementation, change and growth. First, facing reality is a stage where addicts lose trust and relationships due to their continued gambling and face the worse financial situation impossible to continue gambling. Second, the acceptance phase is where they stop repeated gambling, try to survive the current situation, review own gambling addiction and accept the reality they are in. Third, behavioral implementation is where they try more specific and practical behaviors to escape from gambling addiction. Forth, in the change and growth stage, people try to maintain and reinforce the way of life without gambling. Through such process, the participants came to accept that gambling addiction is a kind of disease and they could not do anything. They also worked to address their desires and change by restoring trust from others. Further, they worked to change character and personality with the understanding that the ultimate change would come from not just suspending gambling but form the whole life aspects.
This research has focused on long term recovery process of the subjects and examined their experiences of change and implementation process for specific behavioral changes. The present research is significant in that it went beyond the single focus on addiction itself but looked at and explored related recovery maintenance. Also this research has demonstrated that the characteristics of gambling addiction suspension were different from those of other addictions. In terms of empirical area, addicts in the process of recovery will need assistance to recover their financial status along with other aspects of life for long-term in an environment favorable for their recovery from addiction with broader resource availability in a phased manner. Subsequent studies will need to look at diverse groups of recovery such as natural recovery, female recovery and recovery counselors to research their recovering maintenance process from a more individual-specific and diversified perspectives.