Seeking help with any addiction is an enormous challenge, it involves acceptance in the addict that they cannot cope with the scale of their problems alone. For gambling addicts, enormous financial losses, the burden of keeping secrets and the breakdown of family relationships finally put unbearable pressure on the addict to seek help. A gambling addict who steps through the door of an organisation like the Living Room also, if only temporarily, steps through from one reality to another. In the first reality, they convince themselves that they are in charge, they know what the risks of their behaviour are and they can cope with the losses (but in their mind, there are fewer losses than wins). The second reality, which is effectively created by the decision to seek help, is one where the truth of the addiction can be embraced by the client.
Sessions last an hour or thereabouts at the Living Room Cardiff, not long to create a deep trust and leave a desperate lonely person with a firm sense that there is hope for them. In the cases where we have our most immediate successes, however, trust and hope are the most fundamental ingredients of change. The combination of therapeutic interventions used in any session – Motivational Interviewing, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Voice Dialogue Therapy – are all fairly useless unless a therapeutic relationship exists first. For those not learned in counselling language, therapeutic relationship is longhand for trust.
It’s important before attempting to build trust with anyone recovering from addiction, to consider what sort of experiences they might have had before. It’s likely they will have tried several approaches to dealing with their problem and seen a number of different agencies. For whatever reason those approaches have not worked so far, and the client may well feel let down, hopeless, cynical about counselling and resentful. They might have attended the session expecting nothing and thinking that it might well be a waste of their time. These views shouldn’t be seen as problems for the counsellor, but opportunities. They are inroads into allowing the client to describe their experience and paint a picture of their world. When a client begins to do this, they are presenting a counsellor with a tacit invitation to step inside that world for a moment and experience it.
A client will more than likely come to a session burdened by shame, guilt, self loathing, anger at their own ‘weakness’ and a sense of living grief for themselves. They will invariably be utterly confused by their own compulsive behaviour that has sent a wrecking ball swinging through their lives, even when they have professed a desire to stop this behaviour. Trust happens, invariably, when a counsellor meets the client on the emotional level that they currently exist at. Telling someone in intense pain that ‘I know how you feel’ is hollow and rings falsely because it is hollow and false. As I counsellor I can make educated guesses at how someone feels based on what they allow me to see, but I know nothing because I am not that person and have not lived their life. Interestingly, when I tell clients that I will never say ‘I know how you feel’ to them, the bond of trust starts to grow.
I have the advantage of being in recovery from addiction myself and whilst many practitioners would argue that self disclosure is questionable practice, in this case it is essential. Self disclosure is always frowned upon because it detracts from the client centred nature of the therapeutic process. When I have disclosed my own addiction it is simply to show to the client that I have lived experience and am coming alongside the client as a skilled helper but most importantly, as a peer, not a practitioner simply dispensing advice. Trust invariably develops at this point, as the client becomes aware that their condition and the physical, mental and emotional sensations that go with it are experienced by another person.
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