Day 21

Hi All

I have used this site a few times previously and had some short term success.

I am 46 and have gambled with bookmakers since I was 16, and before that on fruit machines. I have a relatively secure and well paid job and consider myself to be a fairly intelligent person apart from when it comes to gambling. When I gamble I become obsessed and in those moments nothing else matters. Like many others my losses over the years are likely to be into the hundered of thousands of pounds (that feels crazy when admitting that in writing).

Three weeks ago after more repeated heavy losses racking up more credit card debts I realised I was completely out of control and being extremely selfish to my family and well on the road to making myself ill. I have had many heavy repeated losses over the years but my response was always to try harder to win it back, this time I am thankful that something seemed to click and instead I decided it was time to admit defeat. Looking back I would frequently gamble on football matches with teams I have never heard of, not evening knowing what country they played in. Travelling to work and travelling home from work my head would be permanently fixated on my phone waiting for markets to be suspended in the hope that a goal had been scored !!

I have a lovely wife and two wonderful children aged ten and six and have so many things to be grateful for in life. We have our ups and downs like everyone else but that's just life. For some time we have been keen to do some house improvements and have been thinking of re-mortgaging to buy a small holiday home but my actions were putting us deeper and deeper into debt and making those family targets more and more unachievable.

I have had a number of urges to gamble over the last 3 weeks but so far I have resisted and whilst I know from experience that complacency can be very dangerous so far I feel much better about myself and I am spending much more time with my family and really enjoying it. I am so much more relaxed, no longer wound up and on pins all the time and have so much more patience with my children. I feel completely different after just three weeks and I am already starting to think about ways to improve my health and fitness which has sufferred badly over the years through eating far too much, I think as a way of punishing myself for losing so much money all of the time.

My wife and I have agreed on a target timeline for the house improvements and the re-mortgage for the holiday home and I that is providing a real focus for me. We have many debts to clear before that can become a reality. I have not told my wife about how out of control things had become and whilst many are likely to advise that I should, for now I intend to use this site as my support mechanism.

I have been reading posts on this forum most days and I find it really helps. On the day when I turned to this site again three weeks ago the best bit of advice that has worked so well for me was to change my broadband settings to prevent any device in the house accessing gambling related sites. Whilst I know that I have the ability to amend those settings it has put an extra level in place before opening up a gambling site and checking out the odds and getting my brain racing again with gambling thoughts.

It is very early days and there is likely to be lots more to share over the coming weeks and months if I can keep this going, but so far so good.

Have a good day everyone

46 and out.