Anonymous story
When I was a young boy I would have the odd gamble, nothing major but my mum and dad would place bets and the such like and it was never seen as a big deal, which of course it probably wasn’t at the time because it wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I started taking the gambling a little more seriously.
About 15 or 16 years ago my family and I moved to a little village just outside of Great Yarmouth and being quite a secluded area it was quite journey to the nearest bookmakers. This being the case, I went in search of an alternative and through an internet search engine I stumbled upon a few well known betting sites.
Before long I was paying off credit cards with bank loans and paying bank loans with more credit cards. At one point I had around 13 credit cards and my wife was none the wiser because of all my secrecy and deceit. I would pay for the weekly shopping on a credit card, hide the computer screen and make excuses for being on the internet so my wife didn’t ever suspect a thing.
The adrenalin rush from the odd occasion I won was enough to encourage me to carry on, but any win would ultimately be followed with an abundance of losses and so I would forever be chasing my money. I realised that I couldn’t continue the way I was with mounting debts and spiralling lies but the need for a gambling hit was still just outweighing the guilty conscience. My problem was that it wasn’t like I was handling over wads of bank notes. The diminishing figures on the computer screen didn’t make me feel like I was actually spending any money at all.
I put a ‘dead cert’ bet on a horse to the value of £4,000 and lost it all, which saw my total loses hit more than £130,000. Then in 2001 my wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had to go through a hysterectomy, which was when my life was really put in to perspective and the guilt really kicked.
We had to downsize our home from a house to a bungalow and get a mortgage for £120,000 to cover my losses. I also spent five years with gamblers anonymous to free myself from my addictive behaviour and I started to feel more in control again.
I thought I could cope on my own but unfortunately the temptation was too much and I slipped back in to old habits. This time my wife and children started to notice differences in my behaviour such as increased amounts of secrecy and also how distant I seemed when they were speaking with me, which meant I could nip the problem in the bud quickly.
I was introduced to Chris Haylock, a GamCare counsellor for NORCAS, who helped me back on my road to recovery and helped me to realise that when the urge to relapse rears its head I have someone to contact and who knows how to help. My wife also took away all my credit cards and I started to fill the void, which was usually filled with hours in front of a screen, with my two greenhouses and my garden.
We came very close to losing everything and in today’s economy we may not have even been granted the mortgage that seriously helped our financial situation at the time. My wife’s life insurance paid out £80,000 following her diagnosis and with savings we had enough to pay everything off.
Luckily I retired to a good pension from the fire service and we can now start to save towards holidays and also give a bit of financial aid to our children. It’s easy to see how my gambling escalated and the stress and financial burdens it had on me as an individual, but until I came out the other side I didn’t think of how my gambling affected my wife and family as a whole.