Gambling recovery with Hypnotherapy – Dave

Dave’s gambling recovery with hypnotherapy

Dave had a serious gambling addiction which had been a problem for a number of years now. His gambling was entirely undertaken in betting shops where he focused mainly on racing. He could spend up to £500 in a week which left him without any spare cash and having to cadge and borrow wherever he could. But he had had enough of it and was ready to seek help, having failed to stop whenever he had tried on his own.

Dave was a builder and had worked on the Olympic stadium – both on the original and on its conversion to football. He was a skilled labourer and was well thought off. But he needed to work in London and so stayed in digs. He lived in mid-Wales and returned periodically to see his mother. He had a son living there too, who was now a teenager and who lived with his mother with whom David had a difficult relationship.

When working with Dave, it was clear that the gambling filled a big hole in his life, which would need to be filled up with something rather better.

But there was something else and this became very clear in our first session. It was that the memory of the breakup of his marriage to the mother of his son and left a powerful imprint which was still with him and which was affecting his confidence.

One of the wonderful aspects of my Human Givens training, is that it was quite straightforward to free Dave from this bad past experience and then to build up his confidence.  And this is what we did using hypnotherapy.

And the result was profound and immediate.  Dave felt a great weight had lifted and he was now adamant that he was ready to stop his gambling – in its tracks.  Further, he could see how he would change his daily life – both in London and when he went back home.  And then we had an extended trance session, which was about rehearsing the changes he was ready to make and about neutralising the trigger situations.

I saw Dave a couple of weeks after that session and he was transformed. He had not gambled since that session and he was filling up his time with fitness work and visiting mates. I told him that all of this would be laying down new patterns of behaviour and he was well on his way. He was off to Wales that weekend and we talked and rehearsed how he would approach it differently.

And that was the last time I saw Dave.