Recovery Reflection

Presented By All Touch Case Sometimes the most important question isn’t what we call an activity. It’s what that activity is doing in our lives. Within the hobby, there can be a lot of discussion about where the line sits between collecting, entertainment, speculation, and gambling. Those conversations matter, and reasonable people can look at the same activity through different legal, clinical, industry, or lived-experience lenses. But for someone who is struggling, the terminology may

Presented By All Touch Case One of the hardest parts of asking for help can be deciding whether what we’re experiencing is actually serious enough to deserve it. Maybe we spent more than we intended. Maybe we’ve started hiding purchases from the people around us. Maybe breaks, auctions, releases, or marketplaces are taking up more of our attention than they used to. Maybe we’ve told ourselves we were going to slow down, only to find

Presented By All Touch Case And just like that, football season is upon us. For so many of us, there’s nothing quite like this time of year. Saturdays belong to college football, Sundays to the NFL, fantasy leagues are underway, group chats are buzzing again, and before we know it, there’s a game on almost every night of the week. For many people, that means something simple: football is back. For others, especially those of

Presented By All Touch Case Last week, I had the incredible honor of presenting at the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) Annual Conference in Nashville. Several days later, I’m still struggling to put the experience into words. It wasn’t simply another speaking engagement. It was one of those rare moments in life where you pause, look around, and realize just how far you’ve come. Eighteen months ago, I was still trying to rebuild my

Presented By All Touch Case For many people in recovery, there comes a point where gambling no longer feels like the biggest threat. Months pass. Years pass. We self-exclude. We stop visiting casinos. We avoid sportsbooks. We delete the apps. We begin rebuilding our lives. It may start to feel like the darkest chapter of our lives is finally in the rearview mirror. We convince ourselves that because we’ve stopped gambling, we’ve left everything that

Presented By All Touch Case In a lot of ways, recovery can be compared to baseball analytics. In baseball, even the greatest players in the world are expected to fail most of the time. In recovery, however, the margins are far less forgiving. A player who gets a hit three out of every ten at-bats is considered exceptional. A .300 batting average can earn you All-Star appearances, MVP votes, and potentially a plaque in Cooperstown.

Presented By All Touch Case Earlier this year, an individual signed up for our Weekly Peer Support Meetings. Like everyone else, they received a welcome email, were added to our weekly meeting invitations, and began receiving weekly reminders about upcoming support groups. Months went by. No responses. No meetings. No engagement. Then one evening my phone buzzed with a text message: “STOP”. Most organizations probably would’ve removed the number and moved on. Instead, I responded.

Presented By All Touch Case How many times did I tell myself I was done buying sports cards? More importantly, why did I keep going back even after promising myself I would stop? The deeper I fell into compulsive collecting, the easier it became to justify every purchase. It didn’t matter if I had money to spend or not. It didn’t matter if I had already told myself “this is the last one”. My brain

Presented By All Touch Case Earlier this year, we explored how intentional collecting can become a slippery slope when we aren’t fully honest with ourselves about what’s happening underneath the surface. We discussed triggers, dopamine cycles, rationalization, and how quickly boundaries can erode inside an environment specifically designed to weaken self-regulation. But there’s another layer to this discussion that may be even more important: How do people actually know which path is right for them

Presented By All Touch Case Pain, disappointment, uncertainty, frustration, loss, urges, regret – none of these things are avoidable parts of life. As much as we try to outrun them, numb them, distract ourselves from them, or control them, difficult emotions eventually catch up to all of us. A lot of suffering comes not just from the pain itself, but from exhausting ourselves fighting reality and refusing to accept what already exists. That’s where radical

Presented By All Touch Case A lot of people still hear the name “Collectors MD” and assume this work only applies to sports cards or collectibles. On the surface, that makes sense. That’s where the conversation started and the world many of us came from. But the deeper we’ve gotten into this work, the clearer it’s become that this was never just about cards. At its core, it’s about patterns. More specifically, it’s about environments

Presented By All Touch Case The first Gamblers Anonymous meeting I ever attended was in November of 2022. I walked in, sat down with a group of complete strangers, and for the first time in my life, I told the truth about what was really going on. It was intimidating, but also strangely therapeutic. I’ve always been a strong communicator, so I leaned into that. I told my story with conviction, with emotion, with detail.