Severe Gambling Problem

LegacyUser

Hello,

I have had this problem for at least a year, I lived in London for a year and it really effected me. I was always short and had to rely on my girl friend to cover me.

She was heart broken when I told her after months of lies.

I promised I would not gamble again.

Alas, I have moved back to Ireland with her and again, the problem has started.

I am broke each week and find myself lying to her quite often when she asks about my money situation.

We are saving for a 3 month trip abroad, and find it extremely hard to keep on lying.

I know, that on this occasion if I come clean I will lose her.

I feel I cant be trusted, I fantasize about dying, but dont think I would go through with it

I feel so ashamed, but I can lose her.

GA has proved useless

Any advise?

LegacyUser

Whatever else you do about the rest of the problem, tell your girlfriend now. She probably already knows you're lying, but if she hasn't figured it out, she deserves to know. If you lose her, you're just gonna have to deal with that because you can't keep her under false pretences and you can't let her get into joint debt or have her savings and/or trip taken away from her. Tell her now and you'll have started to deal with at least one part of your problem.

MrWalsh

Why has GA proved useless - care to elaborate?

HelgaWard

You need to stop gambling. You say GA is useless, did you go to a meeting as often as possible or did you just go once? You know you have a problem, it won't go away without some serious hard work on your behalf and actually changing things.

How do you get paid, if it comes directly into your bank account, can you arrange for a certain amount to be transferred out straight away to an account you can't touch, so you will have the savings for your trip? Or if you really don't trust yourself, why don't you get all your wages paid into your girlfriends account, then get her to give you an agreed amount per day/week/month, that you use to live on. I know it would mean you'd have to admit the extent of your issue to your girlfriend, but it sounds like you need to do that. Stop lying, stop gambling, stop feeling sorry for yourself, do something to prevent yourself gambling. If you online gamble, get rid of your smartphone and just get a brick with buttons to make calls and texts on. Remove anything that facilitates you gambling from your life.

Best of luck, it is a really awful addiction. Maybe read some autobiographies of people who have successfully beaten their gambling addiction - Keith Gillespie is one I can think of. This might be useful http://www.irishcentral.com/sports/-top-irish-footballer-admits-to-gambling-addiction-that-almost-ruined-his-life-208110181-237590801.html

Faustino

Hi. I can speak from experience about this having lost almost everything over the last few years because of this.

Even after coming to an understanding about why I did what I did, and knowing that what I was doing only leads to more heartache, I still gamble almost every chance I get. Horses mostly or greyhounds.

I've won big sometimes. Literally turning a few euro into a grand over a few hours. I guess this is the draw. But those times are few and far between and the high soon subsides and the wad of cash feels dirty, tainted.

The path you are on will surely lead to losing everything at some point. The truth will always out.

GA did nothing for me either, in fact it only made me believe I was better off than these people so I continued on doing what I was doing.

My suggestion to you is to draw a line from this point on.

Are you working or on welfare? Either way my advice is to hand your girlfriend 90% of your money when you have it. Tell her that you can't trust yourself to manage your own money and that you think she would be better off in charge of the lot. She's stuck with you this far, she'll buy into it.

Whatever you're down at the moment, don't try and claw it back next week. It won't work and ask yourself is another walk home in shame worth it? I've done it often enough.. you know what I'm talking about..

When that stress is taken away and your life gets back to normal you'll find things to fill the gap, more healthy for the soul things.. eventually you won't even think about betting.

Perhaps I'm one to talk as I'm still acting the eejit but I had these options to me and I messed it all up.

Please don't let it get to the stage. When you admit you have no control over the problem the only logical thing is to hand control to someone else.

There's no place for pride here..

whatismyname

Is it mainly online you have a problem, offline too?

If offline, have you tried a gambling blocking software like Betfiler? That way,, you can't even get on to gambling websites.

Won't complete solve the issue if you have an offline problem too, but I guess the harder you make it to access gambling sites, the better.