Lemons to Lemonade: Turning Your Addictive Personality into a BIG POSITIVE!

☀️ Coach and Co-founder, Sal Guarino, shares how he transformed his habits, quirks, and tendencies from destructive patterns into a powerful foundation for a happy, gambling-free life.

I’ve always been a creature of habit: great with numbers, gifted with memory, and drawn to ritualistic behaviors. Not OCD exactly, but close enough. I can still remember being five years old, learning Monopoly and memorizing the entire board — rents, hotel costs, the works. Soon it was solitaire, poker, and chess. I even kept track of which relatives were coming to family gatherings, tallying them up and helping my mom with seating and food. Not quite Rain Man or Sheldon Cooper, but you get the picture. 😊

As you might guess, those same traits, while useful in many ways, also laid the groundwork for a gambling addiction that took root early. By six or seven, the signs were there. By my mid-teens, I was a full-fledged problem gambler: sports betting, poker, pitching coins, whatever my friends and I could conjure up to gamble on.

Fast forward through a few trips to hell and a very thankful U-turn many years ago, the last time I gambled. One question I faced was: What do I do with the strong tendencies that once fueled my addiction? Could I get rid of them? Suppress them?

What I discovered is that trying to wish away my nature was a losing and unnecessary battle. Instead, I had to redirect it. Recovery taught me that my quirks and skills could be channeled in positive directions and even bring me joy in the process.

Today, instead of tracking betting lines, I monitor recovery meetings in different cities and countries. Instead of memorizing stats, I key in on details about newcomers to recovery, helping me support them more personally. My rituals now include morning prayer, writing a daily gratitude message, communicating with my wife, checking in with friends, and exercising consistently.

In short, I’ve turned those maladaptive lemons into lemonade — or better yet, limoncello 😊 — sweetening life while staying true to who I am.

At The Recovery Partners, we help problem gamblers make that same pivot: channeling natural tendencies into rewarding, productive endeavors. You don’t need to become someone else to live a happy, gambling-free life. You just might need to reorganize and redirect yourself.