Hi Stevie
Sorry its taken me so long to reply, there’s been a lot happening in the last few days as you can imagine. I was up till 5am on Monday morning, having pretty much cleaned out my account (£900); in answer to your question, I think it scared me enough to reach out on the forum for the first time. Having relapsed so many times over the years, I had pretty much run out of ideas of how I was going stop not only this time, but for good.
I may not be accurate in my own evaluation but I think my gambling problem arose, ironically, out of money worries coupled with more than my fair share of greed, and an unhealthy envy of other people’s lifestyle. Sometimes I gambled out of boredom, but mostly it was a form of escapism (from high levels of work related stress) and stupidly, in defiance to my wife and daughter when we became a bit disfunctional as a family.
My gambling had become pretty bad recently and I tried to convince myself that after a near miraculous comeback on a bookie roulette machine (I had won just over £3k), I was going to go out on a high, even to the extent I asked the cashier girl to ban me whilst I was up – it wasn’t her fault but because of all the crap you need to do for self exclusion, that never happened and within a week that money went back into their machines…and that turned into setting up an online account etc, leading up to the self-pity and self-loathing that always comes after losing big.
The good news is that in an effort to support you, I haven’t felt the need so much to bet since, it’s probably the first day since December that I didn’t go into the bookies! So despite being skint, I do feel grateful to have dropped by your post and hope you can draw encouragement from my posts too.
I’m falling asleep as I type so stay strong and I’ll catch up with you later.
TF