What GA Does for Recovering Compulsive Gamblers
In Gamblers Anonymous - it is a cliché of the group that one is not only a compulsive gambler but also a compulsive loser.
However, the reasons for wanting to lose are never explored, at least publicly.
What frequently happens that a person will talk at length about the severity of his neurosis, without verbalizing much content, or, to put it another way, he is much more guarded than the quality of his performance would indicate.
Since religion of a generally accommodating and vaguely specified, variety is part of of the group's official ideology.
Weather reports will also refer to the spiritual nature of the program and frequent mention is made of a newly acquired religiosity which is incorporated into the person's pronouncement of a reformation of character.
The anecdotes in the weather reports are often variations on the gambler's perennial prayer, 'I hope I break even today, I sure need the money.' Jokes are frequently old-time vaudeville one-liners, for example, 'I bet on a horse at 20 to one and it came in at 10 after six.'
Jokes may also express the theme of the renunciation of hedonism and the (avowed) internalization of new, austere values. And so it goes; all traces of poignancy are quickly obscured by the sentimental and the farcical.
In the bull sessions, conversations are sometimes confined to gambling, sometimes not.
References to sexual behavior, unofficially tabooed in the weather reports, crop up periodically when the wives are out of earshot.
Values and attitudes of this sort are as much as of sociologic as psychologic interest. What is at stake here is the relevance of theories of alienation to people like the members of the Gamblers Anonymous.
The emergence of alienated man (or mass man or marginal man) is often viewed as a product of the change from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, that is, the transition from small, organic communities to the impersonal, mechanized urbanization of contemporary life.
This, in addition, concurrent with this change supposedly, has been an increasing tendency toward alienation.
The concept of alienation, once the property of Marxists, is not without its ambiguities, but if it is given the meaning of a feeling of estrangement from oneself and the world, it has now appeared in the field of psychopathology in the form of an 'identity 'problem.'
To lack an identity is to be cut off from a sense of historical continuity in one's life, and any awareness of one's place in the social scheme of things.
The quest for identity - to use Wheelis's phrase - must necessarily involve, then, attempts to reject one's anomie or feelings of marginality.