Hello - My Gambling and experience of Gamstop and Foreign Casinos

Hello everyone. I have been gambling for about 10 years and have had a major problem for about 8 years. In that time I have landed myself with a wrecked credit rating, monumentous debt (about £40k or more) and I have wasted about £100,000 or even more.  I am lucky in that I earn decent money but increasingly this has been gone within a day of receiving my salary each month and leading me to have to borrow to just get through the month.

It started when my husband left me and this was a huge shock - he left me for a famous footballer's wife and just a couple of weeks after that my Mum died suddenly, and my Auntie (who lived with my mother and looked after my two disabled sisters) died three days later on the day of her funeral.  All of this happened in the three weeks leading up to Christmas, with my Auntie dying in the early hours of Christmas Eve.

It was a terrible time and I was surprisingly pragmatic about it at the time as I had two children to care for, and two disabled sisters to find ongoing care for. I was also working full-time. 

It started when I won £3500 on the Grand National. My husband had traded our semi-detatched house for a huge house with a giant garden and paddock in the countryside and I felt so resentful. When I met him he had nothing, no job, no money, nothing. I helped him apply for jobs and worked to support him while he studied, helping by writing some of his essays etc. He ended up getting a job and then made his way through the ranks as I helped him with studying and applying for promotions. He was also a rugby player of some note, and when he wasn't working he was training and traveling all over the place for matches. During this time I had numerous miscarraiges and he was little support, as everything revolved round rugby. Then, just when we had got on our feet, had two kids and decent money coming in he left. I was truly devastated.

I think I began gambling to try and win some money to "compete" with his new partner and their new existence. At first I won and it was good, I only gambled sometimes and mostly broke even at worst. Then, things took a downturn as my health had issues and I was made redundant. I then began gambling more and more and chasing losses and now here I am.

I hate the way gambling has taken over my life. I'm lucky in that, if I don't gamble I can earn good money and things start to improve but it has become so terribly difficult to stay off gambling sites. I registered with Gamstop about three years ago, but since then I have been even worse because I am literally inundated with invitations from non-gamstop casinos and stupidly, I click on the links and then lose every time. It's nuts - I don't know why I do it but I can't seem to help myself. 

Last week I told my (now grown up) kids about this and they were really understanding, and I have now installed Gamban on all of my devices so that accesss to any casinos is not possible. I am lucky that I am self-employed so I can have it on my work computer also.

I truly believe that I have now hit rock bottom as I was paid last week and within 24 hours had gambled away every single penny. I have no capacity to borrow any money and I don't know how I am going to face the coming month until I get paid on 16 December. I had a counselling assessment session on Thursday and am waiting for the first actual counselling session, which will be in the next two weeks.

I feel terrible and so terribly worried but I do now think that I am determined to try and rebuild my life. I have read through some of your posts and experiences are all so familiar to me and I applaud all of you for trying to recover. 

I hope that I can get to know some of you and it is nice to be able to talk (even "virtually") to others who know what gambling addiction can do. 

Thank you if you read to the end without nodding off!!