Dealing with turmoil when you are trying to recover

I have to say that dealing with so much trauma when you are trying to recover yourself from the grips of addiction is fucking hard.  All I want to do is run to the casino so I can hide from this pain.  The pain of loss would be a lot easier to deal with if I could partake in my "hobby".  Its been tough, I feel the pull in a major way.  Luckily I know enough to know that I would feel 1000% worse if I were to do that.  I know that is one of the reasons I am here right now, and I just have to keep telling myself that I don't need to cause excess drama and I don't need to continually shoot myself in the foot.  When this is all said and done, I want to at least hold my head up high and know that I didn't grab my crutch again.

I love to gamble.  I love it when I do it, but I hate it when I am done.  I have figured out I am the same way in a relationship as I am in the casino.  I will keep investing in a bad machine just hoping it will finally pay out in a big way.  I just keep at it and I wont walk away.  I just can't walk away.  I love the feeling of being able to get lost.  When my mind is going three hundred miles per hour and I can't handle the thoughts anymore, the casino is the one place I can go that makes me forget everything stressful in my life.  That is the beast in me.  This would all be fine of course if I could just go and spend a couple of bucks and walk away, but like I said, I just can't walk away.  This is a theme in my life and maybe that is why gambling picked me instead of drugs or alcohol.  OMG...I just realized that not being able to walk away is really close to not being able to throw anything away, so lets hope I am not on the road to being a hoarder :)

Maybe that is why I am hurting so bad, because I am actually allowing myself to feel the pain.  I am not trying to hide it nor am I trying suppress it.  I am just feeling it, feeling it with every inch of my being.  I am feeling the walls close in on me and I am feeling the supreme loneliness.  I am feeling everything and maybe that is what I finally need to do.  I just need to feel.  No matter how much I hate it, I just need to sit back and allow myself to feel it.

I really do want to be better.  I want to be the best Toni I can be.  I want to smile without thinking about it and I want to laugh without forcing it.  I want see light at the end of the tunnel and I want to have faith that everything that happens to me is the best possible thing to happen.  I don't want to question the Universal laws and I just want to believe that this is all part of the bigger picture and will all be beneficial on my road to personal development.  I want to heal myself, emotionally and physically.  I want to be a success story instead of a cautionary tale.