AG 060: The 7 Stages of Grief

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Full Episode Transcript

This is episode 60 of the After Gambling Podcast, and in this episode, we’re going to cover the seven stages of grief.

Jamie: Hey there, and welcome to the After Gambling Podcast. My name is Jamie. I’m a former problem gambler, and I’m also the host of this show. I haven’t gambled in over nine and a half years.

For today’s episode, I wanted to share a framework that’s really helped me just to identify some things and some themes in my life. I’m very observant. I tend to pride myself on being curious and observant and looking for patterns and recognizing patterns. This is one that I didn’t have a framework for, but once I saw this, it was eye-opening. It just really started to put everything into perspective and allowed me to better understand some of the things I was going through and that I see other people going through.

And so I thought, what better way to carry that message forward than to just share it on an episode? And so that’s what we’re going to do today. We’re going to talk about the stages of grief.

Now, some of you may be familiar or have heard about the stages of grief—the five stages of grief, or seven stages of grief, or however many stages of grief you’ve heard of. And if you have, awesome! Hopefully, we’ll share some more insight as it relates to gambling on this one. But if you don’t, here’s kind of a background on where the stages of grief came from.

I’m taking a lot of this from Healthline. So Healthline.com—I’ll link this up in the show notes if you want to go check that out yourself. But from Healthline, it says:

“In 1969, a Swiss-American psychiatrist named Elizabeth Kübler-Ross wrote in her book, On Death and Dying, that grief could be divided into five stages.”

And her observations came from years of working with terminally ill individuals. Her theory of grief became known as the Kübler-Ross model. And while it was originally devised for people who were ill, these stages of grief have been adapted for other experiences with loss, too. And so I think that’s where we’ll jump off and start to touch on.

Grief is something that we all go through. This is a universal benefit to being human, I suppose. Some of those things that you wish you’d never had to go through. But part of the human experience is to experience struggle, experience pain, and to experience the grief that comes with it.

So what Kübler-Ross started to identify were these five stages that she just kept seeing over and over. And again, it was pattern recognition, right? And she identified these stages of grief as being denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance.

Now, for today, we’re going to go to the updated one—the seven stages of grief—because I think it gives a little bit more insight. I think it’s a little bit more developed. And as Kübler-Ross mentioned, these were things that she noticed, and it was written based on terminally ill patients. So it was a very unique demographic, a specific person, that she observed and wrote about. But she even said that she never meant it for it to be like this framework, this linear framework from start to finish.

So let’s get that out of the way first, which is these stages of grief—they don’t go in this perfect linear pattern. So if you feel like you’re jumping around from time to time, that’s normal. I do the same thing. I jump from stage to stage, depending on the day or circumstance. So that’s something that we should definitely keep in mind and understand: that as we go through these, it’s not a matter of “Okay, I’m done with that stage, check it off the list, and move on to the next.”

Jamie: So let’s jump into the stages. And with each one, I’m going to read sort of the little brief description from Healthline, and then we’ll dive into it.

So the first one is shock and denial. So again, this is the updated one—shock and denial, number one. And it says:

“This is a state of disbelief and numb feelings.”

Disbelief. Numb feelings. Man, if you are anything like me, this one hits home. The shock and denial, and that whole disbelief and numb feelings—that was my entire existence as a gambler. The numbing effect of the gambling, of the addiction, just to where I didn’t feel anything at times. And that shock and denial, I think, is our body just trying to protect ourselves from ourselves.

But man, numb feelings—that one especially just kind of rings true. So that’s the first stage.

The second stage is pain and guilt. And Healthline says:

“You may feel that the loss is unbearable and that you’re making other people’s lives harder because of your feelings and needs.”

Again, this just sums everything up, right? I mean, first, you have that state of shock and disbelief, and then the pain and guilt that follow. It quickly follows after. It’s like once that numbness starts to wear off. And I think as I was going and gambling, I would go in a lot of ways just to experience more numbness, more escape, because the pain and guilt were adding up. And the only way I could handle that was to deny that it exists and just keep going back for more and more.

Pain and guilt are definitely ones that I relate to. So yeah, that one again hits home.

The third one in the updated seven stages of grief is anger and bargaining. And it says:

“You may lash out, telling God or a higher power that you’ll do anything they ask if they’ll only grant you relief from those feelings.”

Been there, done that, have the t-shirt—getting mad at things that weren’t even relevant to my gambling, right? I mean, I’d be mad at everybody and everything, all because of my actions. And at the same time, I mean, all the bargaining—I mean, bargaining with people to try and get more money: “Hey, I’ll change; I promise I won’t do it again.” Obviously, people reach out to a higher power or to other people in their lives and make these big promises, these big bargains, with a hope that this will be the end. But we stay in this cycle.

And that’s one thing I want to touch on. These first few stages definitely represent the cycle of gambling and addiction in general. It’s not linear—we just keep going, repeating this cycle, going around in this pattern.

Jamie: And then the next one in the seven stages of grief, the fourth one, is depression. Healthline says:

“This may be a period of isolation and loneliness, during which you process and reflect on the loss.”

And I know for me, the depression obviously set in. And it was kind of… I mean, that period of isolation and loneliness, like, all right, you go through that shock and denial, thinking, “Okay, all the money’s gone again. I did it again.” Then you have the pain and the guilt.

And then, for me, the depression was kind of like, as that numbness wore off, that’s where that depression came in. And as I said, you go back for more numbness, and you end up in shock and denial once again. And that’s… like I say, the cycle of gambling is really focused on keeping us in this cycle of these four stages of grief—shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger and bargaining, and then depression. It just keeps on going.

And it seems like each time that I went around this cycle, I needed more and more; I needed more numbness. And then the pain and the guilt increased, the bargaining increased, and the depression increased.

So these stages, again—these four—I’m sure you’ll start to see these in your own life and see how they definitely played into your gambling. But I think, again, what’s really helped me with all this is that it puts a framework or a language around it. And I always enjoy that. I enjoy doing that, or I appreciate it, and it helps when I can put language or a framework to something. To say, “Okay, hey, that’s what that is. I can call it out.”

For me, when I went back to gambling, I went back to numb those feelings because I was feeling depressed. And I think once we can identify these feelings, we can start to name them. And once we have that, I think the next step is obviously to do something about it. To say, “Okay, now we see what’s going on here.”

I like to compare it to anything—once you see a magic trick and how it’s performed, all of a sudden it loses its luster because you’re like, “Oh, I know exactly how that works.” And then, all of a sudden, you’re looking at the things that the magician is trying to get you to look away from, and you’re not confused by it anymore; you’re not surprised by it because you already know those things. You can name them, you can see them, you’re looking for them.

That’s why education is so important for me when it comes to gambling—to educate people on even these things, the stages of grief, to identify them and to understand how the games work. Because once you’ve done that, you’re like, “Oh, I know exactly how that works.” Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

So, as I said, these four stages, I kind of consider them the cycle, the repeating cycle—the hamster wheel of addiction.

Jamie: Then the last three stages start to help us break out of that cycle. These are the places where I think we especially begin to shift. The first four stages highlight what it’s like when we’re in active addiction. But once we stop, there are some other stages that are really important. So, the next one in the seven stages is the upward turn.

Healthline describes this stage like this:

“At this point, the stages of grief like anger and pain have died down, and you’re left in a more calm and relaxed state.”

Now, I think this upward turn really only comes when we start to take some action to match up our actions with our intentions to quit. These are the actions like coming clean to friends and family, going to GA meetings, or even just posting anonymously on a Reddit support group. We start to do things and change habits that get us outside of that hamster wheel, right? And then we start to see this upward turn. Things start to get a little bit better. They’re not perfect, but they’re better.

While these stages aren’t linear, and you can jump to any of them at any point, that’s something I definitely want to emphasize—you don’t have to go from one to the next in a strict order. At any point, we can choose and use our free will to say, “Okay, I see what this is. I’m going to go to this stage and start working toward that, doing the things that get me there.” But the upward turn is often the first sign, and those are the early actions of recovery.

Then the sixth stage in the seven stages of grief, as Healthline points out, is reconstruction and working through. Healthline describes it like this:

“You can begin to put the pieces of your life back together and carry forward.”

When I look back on my time since I stopped gambling, this stage of reconstruction and working through took me a while. It took me maybe a year or two, even close to three years, to fully reach this stage. That upward turn—that first step toward making things better—was really tough, and I’d fall back into feelings of depression or pain and guilt. I kept circling around those things. I didn’t fall back so far that I went back into my addiction, but I still felt those stages, and I kept going around that.

Maybe we have to unwind, right? I’m just thinking out loud here, but maybe that’s part of it—to go through them in the opposite direction, to unwind. But this reconstruction and working through, putting my life back together, it did take time. And that’s something I want to emphasize: none of this happened overnight. It’s been nearly 10 years.

As I’ve said before, my goal here is to help you speed up that process, to expose you to some of these things a little faster than I had on day one. Like the Allen Carr book—if you haven’t read Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Gambling, I really recommend it. If you want, you can go to aftergambling.com/support and click the link there; it gives a small piece of the purchase to support this podcast. But even if you don’t do that, go check out the book. There’s really no reason not to read it.

Jamie: So yeah, reading Allen Carr’s book was a huge moment for me. I didn’t read it until eight years into my journey, but it was monumental. It completely helped erase those last little shreds of lingering thoughts about gambling from my mind. It’s things like this that helped me put the pieces of my life back together—things that helped me move past a lot of the depression, the bargaining, the pain and guilt, the shock and denial.

So, this stage—reconstruction and working through—is about taking that time to put your life back together and carry on. And even though I said earlier that these stages aren’t linear, I think as we go through them, we start to say, “Hey, I’m seeing some progress.” When we can see progress, we feel more empowered. I think that’s why some people count their days or their years, because it helps them track their progress, right?

So, this framework—these seven stages—it gives us another tool to track our growth. Because it’s not just about days. I mean, someone could go 10 years without gambling, but if they don’t make any changes, if they don’t really dig in and find out why they gambled, then I think things can pop up in other areas of life. I’m glad I didn’t take that path; I’m glad I stayed curious and kept exploring. Because if we don’t understand the root, it can manifest itself in other ways.

So, to me, the seven stages of grief offer another way to measure progress. It’s just another tool we can use to see how far we’ve come and to set goals to move forward—goals to get to these different places where gambling doesn’t have this grip on us anymore, where we’re not still bargaining with it. We get to a point where we’re free from the whole process.

The last of the seven stages is acceptance and hope. Healthline describes it like this:

“This is a very gradual acceptance of the new way of life and a feeling of possibility for the future.”

This is the one that really hit me when I started looking at the seven stages, when someone brought it up to me. I realized I’m not really depressed anymore. The anger, the bargaining—all those early stages, that cycle—do I have flashes of it? Sure. But they’re small, they come in quickly, and they leave quickly. I’m not stuck in that cycle or spinning around that hamster wheel.

For me, starting this podcast was a big step toward acceptance. It was my way of saying, “This is what it is.” I didn’t need to be ashamed anymore, or embarrassed. It was my past, and by accepting it, I found hope. I found a new way of life, new levels of accountability—all of it. It summed up some of the changes I was feeling.

It was a little strange at first. I wasn’t angry at the gambling industry anymore. Sure, I still think there are things they should change, things they should improve. But I’ve let go of those emotions. I’m not in that anger stage anymore. And that shift was important.

Jamie: So yeah, I realized I had reached this place of acceptance, and with that came a real sense of responsibility and empowerment in my own life. I could think about gambling, I could even acknowledge that I could go and play poker, and nobody would know. But the thing is, I don’t want to. I remind myself that I choose not to. I’ve accepted that gambling doesn’t do me any good, and having that choice now is incredibly freeing. It’s given me a completely different outlook on the future.

And that’s really what I want for everyone listening. If you’re a former problem gambler or someone working toward recovery, my goal is for this season to inspire a future for you that’s bigger and brighter than anything you imagined, even brighter than the things you thought gambling could give you. I want you to experience that freedom.

So, as you reflect on these stages of grief, think about how far you’ve come. As you get further from gambling, you start to let go of the depression, the shock, the denial. And just know, that numbness takes time to wear off. It’s like a hangover that just lingers. For me, it took time to start really feeling things again, but I think that’s why a framework like this is so useful. It’s another way to track progress.

And this is especially important because I see people with day counters, and they’re great. Day counters are awesome. But sometimes, people have a long streak and then maybe just have one bad day, one tough moment where everything becomes too much. And maybe they slip up, but then they realize right away, “Nope, I don’t want this,” and they get back on track, fixing what caused that setback.

For those people, day counters are just one way to measure progress. And that’s why I think these seven stages offer a whole other framework for us to evaluate our journey. We can set goals to work through these stages, so we reach a place where gambling doesn’t have that hold on us anymore. We’re no longer in that bargaining or anger stage; we’re free.

So, I hope that’s something you can take away from this. I’ll link to the Healthline article in the show notes if you want to dive deeper into this. And as we move forward in the podcast, I’ll be sharing different resources, book suggestions, and other tools that have helped me. One book I want to recommend today is Mark Manson’s “Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope”. I’m sure some of you know his other book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck*—both of these are fantastic reads.

The thing I love about Everything is Fcked* is that it really drives home the idea that we choose our outlook on life. Everything that happens to us, all of it, can influence us, but at the end of the day, our perspective—how we see things—is within our own control. So, as you move through these stages of grief, that’s why I tied this book in. It’s powerful to read it alongside the seven stages because it reminds us that we can control how we interpret what we go through.

Jamie: So yeah, I really recommend checking out Mark Manson’s Everything is Fcked*. He’s an awesome author, and I’ll link to his blog and Twitter so you can follow him. He’s insightful, and his books have been influential for me. If you want to support the podcast and are planning to buy the book anyway, you can go to aftergambling.com/support. There’s an affiliate link there, so a small portion of the purchase goes to supporting the show without costing you anything extra.

And of course, don’t feel like you have to buy it. You can always get it at the library. I love using the library—free books are awesome, right? But if you’re interested, check out that book because it’s a great fit with these stages of grief and gives you a sense of hope in your journey.

That’s going to be it for today’s episode. Remember, I’m not a doctor, lawyer, or therapist—I don’t have any of those credentials. So, please, seek professional help. The information I provide is just for informational purposes, and you should always get advice from a qualified professional for your personal situation.

And like I’ve said before, there’s a lot of free treatment available through various state programs and government resources, so don’t hesitate to seek out that help. It’s so important and something I wish I had done sooner in my journey.

Alright, that’s going to be it for today. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you in the next episode.