I used to watch a lot of video interviews with addicted gamblers. They told me how they went through treatment and one thing struck me. More precisely, this thing is quite natural in relation to addiction treatment, as I understood later, but I did not immediately understand the logic. We are talking about weaning from gaming. I thought that weaning from gaming would most likely only work in very advanced cases, when the player is at the bottom of a financial crisis or on the verge of suicide. Then weaning from gaming would most likely work well. But if this is not the case, then what is the benefit of weaning from gaming? Perhaps the logic is to create positive habits in a person. But, in my opinion, this does not allow us to identify the main reason for gaming and work on it. In my opinion, the real reason is that a person has a naive desire to get rich on gambling (, but he does not have even the slightest competence for this and it is more than likely that they will not appear. This is if we are talking about sports betting. If a person wants to get rich on casino games, such as roulette, and does not want to know anything about risk management and money management, then weaning from games is really necessary. And what do you think, does refusal to play (deprivation) contribute to recovery from addiction or is it useless?
Deprivation is a strange word to use. You would normally say someone is deprived of oxygen, or food or water. These are things that people need to continue living, people don't need gambling and go for their first 15+ years of life without it. A better word to use is abstaining, as in making an active decision not to spend money on this activity. For people to reach the point of quitting it usually requires hitting rock bottom and in many cases losing a lot of money in the process. It also requires the person to accept that all money spent so far is lost and will not be recovered in the same way it was spent. That is a hard reality to face for many people and they refuse to quit for that reason.