Feeling awful

 

So not really sure how to start, what I will get from this or how I will feel when I post. I guess I am just going to write and be truthful to what I am thinking and how I feel. I am 36 years old and between 20 and 35 I lived abroad. I recently moved back to the UK due to covid and losing my job in spain. Home is a seaside town with lots of arcades and growing up as a child we always used to go. When I started working from 13 in a cafe, all my wages went on payday in the arcade. At 16 I had a monthly salaried job and again I just blew my wages. I had no other costs really so for that payday, the buzz of finishing work to go to the arcade taken over and it didn´t really matter if I lost it all as I always knew I had a roof over my head and food. At 18, I started getting credit cards and overdrafts etc and was just gambling everything. I eventually got into around 12000 pound of debt and contacted the national debt helpline who put me in touch with CCCS who arranged a payment plan with my creditors which was great but then I stopped paying this and in the end went bankrupt and moved overseas. I didn´t really gamble apart from when I went on cruise holidays and would lose maybe 2000 my first cruise and it gradually increased. Last month I went on a UK cruise and lost nearly 7000 pounds. I do have an OK paid job so it was money I had saved but then because I emptied my bank, I then took a 6000 pound loan to replace this. Last night I lost all that money I had taken through a loan. I feel completley s**t. It is really the first time I have gambled online and playing 20 pound a spin it went so fast. I now have nothing in my bank until payday and have a 6000 pound debt. As I write this, I am starting to feel teary. I am so angry with myself. I can resist from gambling often as fifty quid here, 100 quid there wouldn´t satisfy me. I need to start with a couple of thousand and place highers bets for the chance to win a decent amount. I have gone past the stage now of even say winning 500 quid doesn´t make me feel happy. I hate myself for doing this. I also have an alcohol problem, again, I can go 10 days without a drink but when I do drink, it is to the point of getting as drunks as possible and cannot remember much the next day. I really don´t know what to do about this as I just feel I am going to exhaust all lines of credit as I know what I am like and end up in extreme debt. My family would go mad if they knew I have lost well over 10000 pound in the last month (all the money I have). I don´t know what to do, who to talk too, can I be fixed? I think I would feel to ashamed talking verbally to anyone at the moment. Thanks for reading and apologies for the long message.