Well ive had a whirwind month this month. At the start of the month i was up to my eyeballs in payday loans and had very little money to survive till payday. I was rather depressed the payday loans were due to gambling on roulette the month before and my partner bailed me out to the tune of £2000 a couple months back. It just seemed like there was no light at the end of he tunnel.
Well this led me into my latest relapse. I deposited online on my phone (i have gamblock on my laptop) and miraculously turned my £100 deposit into £700. Well i was ecstatic i could pay off the payday loans that was a huge weight off my shoulders. I withdrew my winnings and did just that... but guess what? Was i satisfied... no.
Few nights later i deposited on a new site and quickly found myself £500 down and reapplying for the payday loans. I was almost in tears i took the dog for a walk and thought **** it one last £100 im in deep anyways. Well if there is a God he gave me another chance and somehow i managed to win back my losses. I withdrew and excluded from that site and felt relieved once more.
But no i couldn't stop while i was on a roll a day or two later yet another deposit of £50 on another site and too my sheer disbelief i managed to turn that into £700 and withdraw. I Was now payday loan free and had money to survive the month and even treat myself. Well did i treat myself...
No.. not unless you count yet another deposit on another site a treat. Well the roulette wheel was not kind and within an hour i was £750 down. Despair has set in yet again. I could feel that fog come over me but no one last £50 i told myself. Well within an hour after an incredible streak of luck that £50 had turned to £1000. Did i stop.... No. I kept going. Up and down the balance went i just felt numb inside i hated myself. Well i did it i got what i thought i wanted... After an hour of up and down i hit a streak of my numbers and BOOM my balance was £6000.
At this point i was on cloud 9... short lived of course i immediately withdrew the max £4000 back to my card and vowed not to gamble a penny more. Well with the withdraw pending and documentation asked for this was going to take a while all with a £2000 playable balance... you can see where this is going. Yep i started gambling it. Up and down it went from £2000 down to £300 and somehow back up to £3200. At this point im £7200 up and all my problems are solved do i stop? NO That £3200 is quickly lost in the space of 10mins.
Well now im truely in despair but i console myself i still have £4000 pending and the £3200 was never mine anyway. I imediately excluded from the site so i cant reverse the withrawal. A week later and i have the £4000 in the bank. I pay back my partner and have £2000 to fix my car, buy new tyres and generally do the things i need to but couldn't afford.
Well fast forward to last night and in the space of 3hrs i drained my account of every penny on roulette thats £1500 gone for nothing. Im sat here again in despair at what i am and what i have done. There is a lesson here i think we can all relate too... WE CANNOT WIN BECAUSE WE CANNOT STOP. I had the dream, i won back my losses or at least a good chunk. But here i am sat depressed replaying over and over in my head how i could have been so stupid. I can't defeat this im not strong enough how do i move on from this loss?
I can totally relate to this sort of behaviour, although admittedly with slightly lower stakes. (only slightly though).
That balance going up and down like a yoyo. You’re cursing your luck because you think the casino/roulette wheel can read your mind and know exactly what figure you’d leave with, therefore as you’re about to hit that figure, it gives you a run of bad numbers....
But it’s not a mind reader at all.
Yet I used to think it was delibrately teasing me in that regard.
The truth is, you’re right, nothing is ever good enough. We’re always thinking “what if...”.
You’ve done it before and you can do it again. Make 2018 your year.
Get yourself off to the best possible start by starting the new year 50 days gamble free.
Thank you Moorey, Its funny because your so right. When on the bad runs i was always taking it personally as if this inanimate object truely was deliberately landing on the numbers just next to mine or hitting my jackpot number as soon as i missed a bet or changed numbers.
The truth is its just a ball and a wheel and pot luck if you win. But like you said and i have proved above no win is good enough.
I need and want to stop, I don't want to feel this way ever again.
Davey
This is so my experience too!!! I cannot win because I cannot stop. I would play the slot machines in my local bingo hall lounge (I've banned myself from online slots which was my previous downfall). Earlier this week, already thousands of pounds in debt I withdraw my last few hundered pounds from my credit card to try to win and solve my money problems. I did end up winning (not enough to solve my problems but more than I'd put in) but didn't walk away, I kept going thinking I was on a roll. I wasn't obviously, I lost then withdrew what I had left in my current account. Lost that too.
Am now 2 days gamble free, have spoken to my parents again (who are incredibly supportive AGAIN) and am hopefully going to be getting some counselling through GamCare (I've not tried this before but hope it helps as I need to stop).
Keep going one day at a time DaveyJ!
Hi Davey
Your story just rang so true.
Several times after losing big amounts of money I would pray to a God I don't believe in that I could just have my money back and miracously I did get it back. Only problem is I would never keep it. If I lost £2000, I would get that £2000 back and then want to get to £2500, then it would go down to £1750 and I would say if I ever get it back to £2000 I will cash out but I never would. Then I would gradually start losing until it got to £1500 and I would promise myself I would cash out but never would, then my limit would be £1000, then £500 and then, well hardly worth cashing out.
I now know it would never matter how much I won, I would always carry on until I lost it all. It is always, just try and win a little bit more and eventually the odds get you and it is all gone and you get that sickening feeling of despair and, in my case, a deafening silence. I don't want that feeling anymore.
There is no positive to any of this so let's just stop
Hi Davey,
Just stopping by to let you know your not alone either
Hope you have a gamble free day today. Let me know how your doing.
SF
Hi DaveyJ - thanks for sharing - and I'm sure it's a sad and very familiar tale to many of us here.
It's a reminder to the pattern I follow - that disatisfaction with whatever amount I won, if it's a loss all I want is to break even, if I break even, then all I want is that little bit more - and it loops and loops and loops as the money dwindles and dwindles.
It was only after the money's gone that common sense seems to return along with the true value of money. It really is a poisonous vicious circle.
I wish you the very best with your recovery. Moving on from this loss is hard - but moving on from all the future losses that haven't happened yet, will be much harder. I hope you get some good support and strategies put into place to start tackling this.
You've had some very good advice on your previous threads. What are you going to do to break the cycle?
This realy hits a homerun for everyday gambling behaviour. What if I said that the money (all of it) has absolutely no relevance to your life. It is simply the fuel that keps that wheel turning. The payday loans need to be taken so that you can go and win some more so you can go and pay it back and the lend it again and again and again. Its repetitive behaviour wich has no relevance except that we need to redo it over and over. OCD obsessive compulsion dissorder. Obsessive Cleanliness. Cleaning your hands untill they are almost bleeding as the fear of bacteria forces you to repeat those actions. Fear of spiders wich of course is a joke to some, but others feel a genuine fear of all these small and big creatures. It is suprisingly enough on the same thread in your mind as your gambling illness. The nead to repeat things comes from how we think about things. For ex if you are driving a car and you are going from one place to another. Your mind will show 1. Where you are going from and 2 where you are going to. What happens inbetween those destinations are almost impossible for you to remember in greater detail because many of us think in pictures (but not everyone).
Gambling is a bit of the same. We are in auto pilot mode most of the time. We visualise things in our brain such as. Pay day loans. Rent money everything else that may be relevant to your everyday life and what you need to do to fix it and make it better, because we are awsome in fixing things. We fix things them all the time. Then in our mind we see our favourite games and think let´s do this and fix it and repay all the loans and other problems we have. Then we go into auto pilot untill we are finished with the roller coaster ride we have regardless if it is positive or negative rush we wake up again (come out of autopilot) once we have reached our destinations. Either in panik state or in euphoria and beleive me when I say the euphoria part is just more fuel to the procedure again as mentioned above.
I know this because I have repeated myself for many years. And the sad part about what happens after a while is that all the feelings angst and regrett along with your impuls controll and sences of real danger starts to burn away till you become quite numb in your repetitiveness.
So somehow and somewhere we need to start to train brain on how to reavalue the situation we are in. First and most important is to understand that winning money is the lie that keeps it interesting for you to continue. If you can find a way to kill that light in your control pannel you would have got somewhere. I personaly have stopped paying all my loans. I have heaps of them.
Reason? I now cant use that part as an excuse to play and pay to continue to play. Did you know that most investors on online gambling are banks and kredit companies? So they fix your payday loans on one your side so they can collect your money in Malta again. And its all legal to do so. It is all quite disgusting. Best of luck in your recovery.
Hi Davey sounds like my story also I went through the same winning but not being able to enjoy it at all as I couldn't even get the money out. What's the point in gambling at all. Forget about the money I have I just can't be bothered to waste any more of my life on this I don't want to still kicking myself when I'm 40
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