Just don't know what to do.

Thankyou for your kind and thoughtful response. I will definitely be writing a reply soon but I just haven't had a chance to sit down and do it properly, but I wanted to at least let you know that i've certainly read it and definitely taken it all in.

loner4736 wrote:

Thankyou for your kind and thoughtful response. I will definitely be writing a reply soon but I just haven't had a chance to sit down and do it properly, but I wanted to at least let you know that i've certainly read it and definitely taken it all in.

Look Loner4738.

I dont want to sound harsh but Im talking to an addiction and not the real you. Let the real you out. I know you dont mean to talk that way because the real you is waiting to be free from this

There comes a moment when I realised I had not been thinking straight for years. The self analysis goes deep and you will start to realise just how much the addiction is controlling you.

I really thought I had been going insane with addiction and I see things far more clearly now

Im just trying to make you see how much you are in an addiction comfort zone. As an addict you need gambling in your life but its destroying you. Ive been there and I know how painful it is scrabbling about to sell phones and hoping its not returned because the money has already been spent. Its a complete loss of self respect and we have been there like you

Its a complete loss of dignity and surely you dont want any more of that. Its already taken your quality of life. When you rid gambling out of your life you will feel better. You have got to learn to live again by just associating gambling with pain. There is no shame in telling people you are unhappy....cant you mention it to your mum or is it a distant relationship?

Recovery takes work but its well worth it. It is a born again moment...tell people,,, talk to people...youve got to be doing better things...Go for a long walk....join the leisure centre...start an evening course like art for example.

I know money is tight but start looking at the pound that you have rather than the money you are going to lose.

Recovery takes some work but its not as hard as you are thinking. You cant go on the way you are.

You cant go on the way you are! You have to change it

Best wishes from all of us

I finally have a working broadband connection again, so I can actually write a decent reply.

I do think I used to be someone who thought they were a 'clever' gambler.

I'd sit in front of the roulette screen and look for 'patterns' - red/black/red/black or a string of reds or even if one of the sections had come up or not - various things like that. I do think that I felt I had some kind of insight into the game so that i could manage the session accordingly. I certainly understand now that I was basically kidding myself.

Nowadays, it feels different, and this is something I said to my counsellor a fortnight ago. To offer an analogy, it feels more like I'm climbing up on top of a high platform and beneath me the floor is covered in rocks, but in the middle of this pile of rocks is a large pillow. My gambling at the moment feels like i'm jumping off this platform and hoping I can land on the pillow. There's almost an acceptance that i'm probably going to land on my backside but I keep hoping i'll land on the pillow.

And sometimes I do. Sometimes i'll nail the pillow perfectly and get up and walk away. A lot of the time, i'll get up off the pillow and go back up to the top of the platform and jump off again hoping i can hit the pillow again and that's when I crash and burn on the rocks. It's the worst kind of approach I think because there's little to no appreciation of the outcome, just more of an acknowledgement that there's likely going to be a bad outcome but i'm still going to give a try and jump off that platform again.

My counsellor knows I've been gambling but he's fairly adamant that i'm using it to cover something else in my life which i'm not happy with and he's probably right, but I haven't yet figured out what that might be. There are plenty of possibilities, but I haven't quite put my finger on one that makes sense.

And you know the absurd thing ?. I've considered the idea of being put on an allowance, but I won't do it because, for me, that's a sure sign that gambling has beaten me. But then when you're curled up in a ball on your living room floor at 3am after a bad loss, I think it's pretty obvious that we've gone a long way past the stage of gambling having 'won' because it clearly beat me a long time ago.

But, saying all of that, the new year appears to have brought with it a new approach. I was browsing the web on new years eve and i found a quote, or a sentence from an article that said "You write your own story".and that stuck in my head to the point where I said to myself that, come january the 1st, i was going to write a different story.

We're only 4 days in to the new year and i've had a couple of situations where i've been given some money that i would almost certainly have worked out how to gamble last week but I haven't done it because i've kept reminding myself of what I read last sunday night.

It would be extremely foolish of me to see this as any kind of 'fix' because I know it's a very, very long way from that. I've also had a number of false starts over the years where i've tried to give up only to start again a week later, so I know that while I can feel good about things in the short term, that can also quickly change - even now, now that i'm back online after not having any internet access for a week, there's that niggle - that 'itch' - in the back of my mind about going back to Hill's website to try and jump off that platform again.

I'm not going to though because it's not part of my new story. and it's a story I really do want to keep writing.

It's interesting coming back to this a year down the line and reading through my posts to see how bad things were, and they were clearly bad.

To be honest, 2018 was probably even worse overall. I averaged getting a doorstep loan once a month to cover my losses, but I still continued to gamble. Whenever I had a significant enough win, I'd pay off the doorstep loan - until I needed another one.

I even got one midway through last year and gambled it almost immediately. It was for "only" a £100 pounds, but since I had a decent win with it, I actually returned it within the 10 day cooling off period so i paid no interest on it at all.

And then a week or so later, after having another big loss, I went right back and got another one out. For all of my problems, I'd actually managed to establish myself as a "customer of good standing", let's say, with Provident so I always had offers for more money and more loans.

And still I kept gambling.

A few days ago, I had reason to look through my paypal history for last year and the amount of money I turned over with w**********l was frightening - especially for someone on benefits. I haven't actually gone through it and added it up, but even glancing at it like that, it was clearly thousands of pounds.

And what did i have to show for it ?. Nothing.

I eventually even reach a tipping point as well when I realised I was no longer able to maintain my mobile phone contract and that I had no other choice but to abandon it. My two 'bad credit' credit cards went the same way as well - both abandoned.

At that point of time, I had four - yes four - doorstep loans on the go. Three with Provident and another one with someone else. I'd worked out that I would have £2 a day to live on and nothing else, and if I stuck to it, I could have the four loans paid off by Christmas 2018.

And still I gambled. Always for small amounts as well. Always convincing myself that I only needed "just £3" or "just £4" when I knew subconsciously that it would never be like that.

I got a letter from the DWP towards the end of last year advising me that my Work Capability Assessment was now due and I went in to a major meltdown as it likely meant that I would fail the assessment and have my benefits cut significantly until such point that I could appeal and, hopefully, have them restored.

It was the 'nuclear' scenario i'd feared and one that would probably lead to me no longer being able to hide things. I made the decision to self exclude from w**********l's website for 6 months, and went through with it but I still kept going into the shops.

I can't honestly tell you how I kept myself afloat and how I managed to keep most of my stuff out of pawnshops but somehow I did.

And then the strangest thing happened. Sometime in mid-october, I just stopped.

No big 'fanfare' or decision to turn my life around or anything like that - I just stopped.

And in a week or so's time, I'm going to be three months gamble free. Three months, which is unreal. No shops, no websites, no trying to justify myself winning "only £2" or similar. Apart from two £1 attempts at the Thunderball in the last three months, there's been nothing.

I'm not "cured" though, far from it. I still get the urges. I still keep wanting that big win to make life comfortable, but, at the moment, I'm not actively chasing it.

I'm learning that having extra money isn't a bad thing. With the price of food and drink nowadays, those extra pounds per day I can now have make all the difference. I'm also about a week away from paying off the third out of the four doorstep loans I have, and i'm about a month away from paying off the fourth and final one as well.

I'm also a month away from my w**********l's exclusion ending as well, which is going to be a big moment. At the moment, I feel I can handle it and I'm looking forward to the challenge of not actually going back.

I've had plenty of false starts in the past and i've had plenty of times where i've convinced myself that this time "feels different" so i'm not kidding myself at all, because i know how easy it is to fall back but, hopefully, i won't fall back - i'll keep striding forward 🙂