Just found out about my boyfriend’s gambling

Hi everyone 

I found out this week that my boyfriend had been gambling, taking out loans to fund it and is now in significant debt. 

This has taken place over the last 9 months after a very turbulent and stressful time with his family. 

I knew he wasn’t handling things well as he just wasn’t speaking about it or dealing with it, but I had no idea this was how he was trying to cope. 

He told me out of necessity really, and had the standard reasons for not sharing sooner in terms of huge shame, fear for our relationship and wanting a plan in place before he told me. He was part of the way there having put Gamstop in place and sorted a DMP about a month ago. 

Since he told me he’s done everything right as far as I feel. He’s been open that this is his problem to fix, handed over full control of his finances, given me ensuring access to his credit file, installed Gamban, changed WiFi provider to one where we can ban gambling sites, put himself on every financial vulnerability register going etc. etc. He’s started counselling and has discussed all of this in great depth with me regularly , proactively (totally unlike him and a big driver in my opinion in why this even had an opportunity to take hold). We’ve discussed my future boundaries and red lines as we try and get through this together and he’s accepted them all. 

He’s been foolish in my opinion but I’m not angry. As I’m generally very cautious in life our finances were completely separate and he hasn’t touched any joint funds for our bills etc. 

I just feel weird that I’m not raging or feeling betrayed, I’m just sad and a bit scared. 

I fully believe in him that he’s capable of getting over this. He has some real poor ways of dealing with his feelings that I know from my own experience of CBT can be overcome. He seems determined and his initial counselling has left him feeling positive. 

I just don’t know really what to think. I know realistically we can only take one day at a time and neither of us know what the future holds but I’m just torn between feeling like I’m being too positive or being too negative removed link  

I know that people do get past this and recover and from what I’ve read he’s setting himself up the best way he can for success and so why not us, but also I’m just scared that this is the start of some of these ten year stories you read on here and I’m going to have to make the horrible decision to go at some point in the future. 

Appreciate I haven’t posed any questions here - I think that’s cause I don’t really know what I’m thinking to ask a coherent question - I’d just appreciate hearing other people’s experiences.