Living with my biggest mistake

Well, a big congratulations on getting to 300 days and beyond!

I keep saying this, but your support to me has been one of the greatest helps I've ever received in my life and the way you've tackled this addiction has been inspirational.

Have a brilliant time on holiday with your family. I get what your saying about the empty nest. My son leaves for university this September - with a month or so still to go I'm feeling the empty nest looming. For me, it's a weird feeling ... an odd mix of love, pride and sadness with a touch of mopiness added.

Take care and well done for the unflinching strength you've shown over the last 10 months.

Back to zero days GF.

I have well and truly fallen of the wagon over the last month or so. I was just about coming up to a year GF and everything seemed to be ok.

All the words meant nothing, I was just too weak when I was feeling a bit down.

Started with a small online gamble – Gamstop is a good start but there are ways round it. Not going to say how because I don’t want to give anyone else any ideas. Over the last month I have been up and down financially with obviously more downs than ups and then over the last 24 hours managed to lose £2500 virtually overnight just because I was unable to stop pressing a button on my tablet. I set myself the usual targets/limits for winning and losing but as a CG I just ignored them when things did not go my way. I might as well have just set the game on auto with £2500 running because whatever happen I did not stop gambling until I ran out of available funds. Been gambling most of the nights for the past week until 3.00/4.00 in the morning and then getting up a couple of hours later.

£5000 loan in place to deal with it which I will be paying off over the next five years which makes it manageable. Wife knows nothing and despite all the patronising advise I have given others I won’t be telling her as I would rather live life as a cheating lying husband with my wife than without her. Please don’t anyone suggest I should tell her and she might forgive me again as she made it 100% clear that would not happen if I gambled again. Yes, this makes me a bad person and something I will have to live with.

Already gone through the crying and wanting to top myself phase surprisingly quickly and moved into the covering my tracks and working out how to deal with the financial issues and put the additional blocks in place to prevent this happening again. I don’t like this person I become when I gamble.

Only really writing this as a bit of a warning to others as my previous posts would have left the thread as a good news story of someone who cracked the problem and moved on. Sadly it has not worked out that way.

Good luck everyone.

Just re-read a few of my last posts - what a load of rubbish I wrote.

Evening muststop I read your diary all the way through and coming towards the end I realised as you do reading enough of these things that there was not enough real estate left for there not to have been a break/relapse and even then I was annoyed the slip materialsed. I am no expert on this game have relapsed many times and like you consider myself to be a structured, competent human being with a good job and a good wage who most people who knew me would describe as grouded (I would like to think anyway). But this thng that grips is unreal and so hard to explain to anyone but a fellow gamber and very rarely do we even try, I am in the midst of my latest attempt to beat this thing I am 80 days in and honestly putting that against 23 years of feeding this demon its a tiny amount of time and no wonder I still get thoughts and desires to just scr*w it and lets just go back to something more comfortable and exciting. I am a gambling addict just like you my poison is sports betting and I love the thrill of winning but I continue to chase that thrill and I can never get enough of it and so invariably I lose all the money I have chasing the thrill/ the dream who knows, what I do know is that I like you have dependables on me and a wife who thinks I have already cracked this. I have a similar amount of debt to you and given that I have a pretty well paid job I should be in the black and sitting pretty but this is not the case. Anyway your story resonated and annoyed me in equal measure becuase I feel I sometimes pay lip service to this recovery diary stuff and being a better man, your not on your own keep getting up and remember the anger and disapointment you feel right now becuase it fades and you end up getting sucked back into this maze with no exit.

Dear Muststop123,

I am sorry to hear of your relapse, but glad that you have remained on the forums and are trying to address it. If you need further advice and help on how to set stronger blocks in place and work through potential additional strategies to support your remaining gamble-free please contact and Advisor on either our HelpLine 0808 8020 133 or netline. For a few people, relapse is part of their overall journey towards re-covery and the most important part of events such as these is to take the learning from it and strenghten strategies to help support maintenance of gamble-free periods.

Warm regards

Leigh

Forum Admin

Hey bud, I am sorry to hear about the relapse. I still think as I said early days in your diary, you have done fantastic to go so long after your initial gambling. I feel for you man, one day at a time. Dust yourself off and start to slowly move forward again. You know we are here for you. Scott

Hi Muststop123 - I feel for you buddy. I'm so sorry to read about your relapse. Your first attempt got you to a year. You have a strength of spirit.

I relapsed about a week ago at a casino - I haven't even had the guts to mention it in my diary or reset my days. We're all in this together and we can keep fighting.

For what it's worth, I agree with what you said about not sharing it with your wife. I don't think this one relapse is worth ruining your marriage. You aren't out of control yet - this is one relapse in 12 months. I know this flies in the face of all good advice and doesn't mean much coming from a gambler, but all things weighed up, you've proved yourself capable of a huge amount of self-control.

You're not a bad person. Just get as much help as you can.

Thank you all for the kind words of support. They mean a lot.

Still feeling a bit empty and shocked about the whole experience. I sincerely believed I had the strength of character to beat this. I never thought to myself that it was some impossible struggle that I could not overcome.

Difficult at the moment but determined to take whatever positives I can from this and learn from it. Obviously blocks need to be tightened (the Paypal account needs to go however inconvienent that will be) and now understand more about likely triggers.

Feel like a bit of a fraud because so much of what I wrote previously seems to have been a load of cow poo.

I don’t think what you were saying was cow poo, I think we have something inside us that wants a way to gamble and as we go through this we become complacent about the days not gambling and what we post resembles lip service. And then the opportunity arises and whatever justification we give ourselves we just jump at the chance and have almost dissociated with the pain and anger from the start. Those are just my thoughts on my journey and may be way off for you.

You are no fraud and it wasn't cow poo. Or if it was, it was magic cow poo because pretty much every single post of yours strengthened and inspired me to quit gambling.

Gambling is just such a tough nut to crack. Even though I'm still prone to relapse, I feel as if I'm in a much stronger place down to the support you gave me over the months.

I wish I could throw some of my own magic cow poo in your direction to make things better. I can imagine it feels like you were blindsided by the relapse and it's scary to know that you managed to get around the gamstop blocks. That knowledge would scare the life out of me. Hopefully there's a way you can block the unblocking somehow.

Also, maybe now that you know you're susceptible to relapse, it might help give you an additional and essential layer of protection that will keep you firmly on guard when faced with the same triggers in the future. Not very inspiring, I know but I think relapsing does help to reveal just how powerful the addiction is.

You also once suggested to me that I shouldn't be too hard on myself after a relapse and your honest advice really did help. Gambling is such a sordid affair and we can be brutal with ourselves after a relapse. This must be such a stressful time for you, it'll help if you're kind to yourself.

Take care

Equinox

Hi Muststop123.

So sorry to hear about the relapse. You were slightly ahead of me when I joined last year and were the first to respond to my initial thread. I have never posted too much for various reasons and I never felt able to offer much advice to others on here in the way that you have done. However, I have always remembered the stories of people when I first joined and followed their posts the most. You have been an inspiration to many, as Equinox says, and many others such as me who perhaps don't post too much - you may be unaware of this. You are clearly a good man who loves his family and you've tried your best to help others. I was really shocked to hear of your relapse as you seemed so certain and sure of beating this addiction in a way that few others are. Please don't take this the wrong way, it is a compliment. I am sure the relapse hurts like hell but please use it to put the additional fire in your belly to never let your guard down again. You've shown so much fight, dignity and resolve in the past so don't feel like a fraud regarding your advice for one relapse. I'm one year GF as of tomorrow but still 10s of thousands in debt. However, I know I won't be adding to it as I'm truly done with gambling. You were one of the people who made it crystal clear to me the danger I was in. I also understand the position you are in regards to your wife. I am still managing debts without telling my wife. I know this goes agaist all advice on here but there is more than one way to skin a cat. The shear fear of letting loved ones down again was my final trigger to put gambling in the past. Your recent mistake is just that, a mistake, but if it gives you the resolve to make it stick then a few grand in the grand scheme of life is well worthwhile. I can see how worried you are about your wife finding out so use this as your final wake up call - nothing is worth losing your family over and most certainly not gambling.
Obviously if you go back to gambling then you absolutely must tell your wife but I honestly believe you've shown over the last year that you have the strength to beat this but perhaps needed one final error of judgement to prove it. Dust yourself off and start again - you've done it before and can do it again. Good luck.

Two weeks down since my relapse and initial raw pain subsiding.

The emotions were fairly different from the first time when I felt mostly despair and humiliation that I could have been so stupid to get sucked into this. This time I was more angry with myself that I could have repeated the same actions again.

I understand why I did it however weak the reasons might be. Mixture of post-holiday blues, boredom at work and possibly biggest impact was my selfish feelings over my son going off to university – the empty nest feelings hit pretty hard. I continue to astound myself just how easily I let normal life stuff affect me and give me an “excuse” to gamble. Gambling again provided that initial high that any drug provides when you are winning. I still believe that once you develop a gambling problem it is like your brain has been re-wired and you just cannot ever gamble responsibly again. I have no experience of it but imagine it might be the same for an alcohol addict who can’t have even one drink as it will probably lead to a complete meldown.

The old habits came in pretty quickly and regularly staying up until 3.00/4.00am gambling online, getting into work late because I could not stop spinning wheels before I went to work in the morning and then going out for a long lunch so I could sit in my car gambling again became the norm for a couple of weeks. The number of hours I was gambling each day was ridiculous and I was slightly surprised how I was managing to deal with such little sleep and on the face of it still function reasonably.

The gap I found to get around Gamstop has been plugged and the Paypal account has gone because it has always been the source of “hidden” money. Going to be a bit inconvenient when a friend tries to pay me for something, but I will deal with that when it occurs.

Obviously I wish I had not done this but hopefully I have learned more about my problem and how to deal with it as a result.

Keep up the battle everyone and don’t ever let your guard down.

Good to hear from you buddy, I joined roughly when you did and remember your diary very well. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and move forward with that loophole blocked. A relapse feels bad for sure, terribly bad. But try not too get too wrapped up in it. You did awesome to last as many days as you did. I was always amazed at how well you did prior to this and still am now. Your words are not cow poo at all, we can all utter great stuff and still not always follow it ourselves, that’s life. Scott

Hey muststop

Like the others, I am also sorry to hear about the relapse and hope you're getting the better of your emotions in the aftermath.

I just wanted to say I admire your reslience and perspective re relapsing, learning what you can from this unfortunate circumstance and identifying the precursors leading up to it so you can be mindful of triggers moving forward. Takes guts and pragmatism to manage the situation in the way you have. I tip my hat to you.

What I admire most is your selflessness in reminding people like me not to ever let the guard down. You show great valour in being able to step outside yourself in a moment of crisis and still think of others. I respect you immensely for that.

Like Scott said - dust yourself off and go again... Your frank, raw and honest account of relapse has certainly hit a nerve with me... I've been struggling today after a run of good days and positive mindset... If its any consellation whatsoever your account of relapse was like a punch in the face for me and has set me back where I needed to be mindset wise. Again, whilst my heart goes out to you re what happened... I respect you for laying it out for others to heed.

I hope the fog lifts and you can resume a gamble free life laden with happiness, contentment and fulfillment. Good luck sir.

Hi Muststop123 - I'm just dropping in your diary, hoping that things have got a bit better for you.

I struggle to offer any sort of workable advice these days, but I just want you to know that I'm thinking of you. This may be an assumption on my part, but I see a lot of parallels with our gambling habits and lives - and that, along with the ongoing support you offered me, means I will always owe a huge amount of gratitude to you.

If you read this, please don't feel any need to offer a reply if you're taking a time out from your diary.

My very best wishes

Equinox