How to Deal With a Partner's Gaming Addiction

Gaming addiction is a fairly new issue, but it is on the rise. Adults addicted to gaming ruin their relationships, affects their job performance and even causes job loss. For young adults and children, it is said that gaming addiction stunts social and emotional development.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Professional Therapist

1. Learn the signs for addictive behavior associated with gaming. Aside from an increased amount of playing time, watch for things such as irritable behavior when they are not playing, increased isolation from friends and family and lying to hide the amount of time spent on the game.

2. Know what to do first. Communicate with your partner about your concern that he is spending too much time playing his video games.

3. Ask questions to get to the source of the addiction to gaming. There may be other reasons why she is playing like low self-esteem and depression.

4. Get support for yourself. Addiction is hard emotionally and mentally on both people involved. Go to the Online Gaming Addiction website or join the daily support forum for extra help and guidance. See additional resource section below.

5. Ask him to cut down on gaming. Start slowly with a comfortable goal and then work your way up to longer time periods. Drastic changes may lead to bitterness and resentment.

6. Remind her that "real world" is better than her "virtual world." Recall the fun times you shared in the past together. Let her know that you miss those times.

7. Get professional help together. A therapist can help you and your partner work out issues associate with gaming addiction in a manner that is healthy.

Tips & Warnings

• Be kind. Kind words and actions are heard more often than actions taken out of anger.
• Be patient. All addiction and recovery take time and patience.
• Don't scream, yell or accuse him of loving his game more than you. This will only drive him further into his addiction.
• Stay away from threats. It doesn't help. That means, don't threaten to leave or divorce her, throw away the game or the computer unless you really intend on doing so.
• Remember, addicts don't like being confronted with their addiction. If he threatens to harm you in any way, leave immediately.

Resources

• Helpful support for online gaming addiction is on olganonboard.org.
• Video game addiction and recovery support can be found on dailystrength.org.

[WowPaladin]

on 8/6/2009 Nice list of tips! Gaming addiction is really a growing concern, not only as an individual concern, but also a community concern for now. I would like to share also some tips on how to kick the habit of gaming without neglecting other important aspect of our life. Here's the link for your reference: http://www.sooperarticles.com/gaming-articles/kicking-habit-6253.html