Hello everyone,
Thought i would come in an introduce myself. I'm joe 27 and addicted to gambling. I have been since i was about 16 years old and it has had disastorous effects on my life so far. At 18 i lost my entire student grant on gambling, I've stolen money from my parents to gamble and whenever i seem to be getting close to paying off all my debts I gamble and get them back again. I have lost tens of thousands of pounds in my life so far but what is more painful is all of the things i missed out on because i was busy gambling or had no money due to gambling.
My addiction is to online gambling & spread betting. I can have no cravings or interest in gambling at all for months on end and then suddenly out of nowhere it hits me and i succumb very easily.
I'm living with my girlfriend of 8 years and she found out one time that I had racked up gambling debts, took control of the money and everything was fine, for a period. Then I got charge of my money back and it went wrong again. This cycle of relapsing has happened so many times i worry I can't stop it, there is something intrinsically flawed in my personaility.
I want to tell her about it again but we were one month away from paying off all our debts (gamlbing and other) (which had taken 2 years) and now i've built them up again. I am a complete idiot.
I love her, but i feel that in order for her to be happy I should split up with her to protect her from my destructive nature. I worry that if i just tell her about it the same cycle will repeat and in six months time I will just be causing her more unhappiness and suffering.
I want to stop. Not just now but for the rest of my life. I can't waste the next 30 years of my life in the way i have the last 10.
Hi Joe, welcome to the Forum and well done for posting what you have here,
You are quite correct when you say it is a flaw in your personality; it is the same for you, me and everyone else here my friend.
Winning money gives you such a level of euphoria that you are desperate to repeat it (which invariably leads to losing). If you lose, you face soul-wrenching desperation to get it back again (which also invariably leads to losing, and then spending money you don't have). Others can walk away, win or lose - you can't, and that is because of this flaw, which relates to emotional vulnerability.
I gambled for twenty years before stopping around six years ago. Urges hit me every now and again for quite a while but the golden rule is that they always pass - if you hadn't acted upon them and kept your mind occupied for a few hours or so, they would have lessened to nothing, and tomorrow would undoubtedly be a different day.
What you can't do is allow yourself to "numb out" everything you have been through if you are tempted to gamble; you can't allow yourself to drift back into a world which you have tried so hard to get out of - you have an element of control at this point and a chance of turning back but once you start, you are lost, hurtling into oblivion stopping is almost impossible.
A lot of people make the same mistake my friend; they place blocking software on their PC, self-exclude from Casino's/Bookmakers or hand control of their finances over to someone else and see that as a cure, but the reality of the situation is that you haven't changed - these are only preventative measures - you still need to address them otherwise you will still continue to live inside this vicious circle, as you have at the moment.
You are left with no real choice but to tell her my friend, and you need to do so before she finds out herself. She is going to be hurt and confused as before, probably worse, so you need to offer her a positive, constructive way forward - explain you will hand over control again, tell her you have registered here, tell her you will go to GA and/or have counselling, tell her that you will promise to phone her each and every time you feel even remotely tempted to gamble.
And if you can't bring yourself to call her, at the point where you have some control as I said above, then you have to consider what kind of future you can offer her. You need to give her absolute honesty - she would rather know the very worst of what you are contemplating, rather than nothing at all and another situation like this.
If you can work on yourself, find help and some more resolve and discipline, then you have every chance of getting through this. If you give your girlfriend absolute honesty without exception, then you have every chance of keeping her.
If you don't, then you may well blight the rest of your life as you say. At 27 you are entitled to have some bumps in the road, and you have an extraordinary amount of time to take a different path and a different way of living - how would you feel in 30 years as you said? Posting here aged 57 and having little or nothing to work with and a lifetime of regret and misery? How would you feel aged 47, or 37?
These years fall through your fingers like sand my friend - I compromised a lot of my life, and there are others here who have compromised a lot more. It sounds condesceding to say "Don't do as I do", so I will say that you need to value this moment in your life my friend - you deserve to live, you deserve to be happy - gambling will only take your money, your time and the love and respect from everyone around you. You deserve a better fate my friend - you seem like a decent, intelligent person, but you must push yourself into achieving it.
JamesP
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