An enormous obstacle to recovery is denial. One of the biggest gifts of early recovery is hearing the honesty and clear thinking of people who have overcome denial. They have already connected the dots between their compulsive gaming and the various problems in their lives. When we hear such honesty and relate to the problems shared, suddenly we too are enabled to make the connection between those problems and our gaming. In this way we are able to break down the wall of denial one brick at a time.

We can listen to others’ stories, do our best to identify rather than compare, share our own experiences with unmanageability, and talk it over with our sponsors. Some find it very helpful to write it down and see on paper an inventory of our unmanageability. Gradually we come to accept that our problem with gaming is very serious. We see how it affected every area of our lives, how little control we had, and how it gradually got worse and worse. We see how alluring and powerful games had become in our lives and how great our need to abstain from them.

We also experience a form of denial that is sometimes called “euphoric recall,” which is a distorted focus on good times and feelings we had when gaming and a blotting out of the problems, losses, and pain. We don’t need to deny that the good times and feelings existed, but we need to keep them in perspective. They were minor compared to the pain, frustration, bad times, and major ongoing damage done by compulsive gaming. We need to clearly perceive the progressive nature of addiction and how blind to it we had been.