Contributions

Gambling started when I was 13 or 14. It was just me and a mate, peers from my school. We liked playing poker. We played cards together when we were around his or mine. We just said, “Let’s play online poker.” We didn’t really understand the overall logic of the game online or anything like that. We were just kids and we thought we were just having fun and that kind of thing.

Gambling Experiences

I remember sitting in my chair and it was just, what do I do now? There is no getting out, getting away with this. There’s no hiding this. This is really bad. At that point, I thought I’m just going to jump out of the window. I’m just going to jump out of the window before anybody can even see it. Before anybody can even see what I’ve done. I was too ashamed, too embarrassed, too guilty, everything. It was just everything was finished really in my head. It was that’s it.

Stigma

I’d gamble on my phone, or if I was in a bath, I’d gamble. She was in a bath, I’d sit on the sofa and gamble. I was doing it all behind her back, getting away with it. She can’t see my bank account etc. I started doing that, and that kind of it lured me back in a little bit. I was still more for the drink, still just wanted the drink, wanted the drink, wanted the drink. That pattern carried on with the drink until I ended up in rehab. I ended up in rehab because of my drink but really it all started with my gambling and the gambling when my gambling was taken away from me, or I thought it was taken away from me through Gamstop I didn’t realize that that’s when my addict just attacked the drink. It had to have something. “Right, sod you. If you’re not going to give me gambling, I’m just going to go really hard on the drink.”

Charlie
Harm

Then because I was going into rehab, I thought, “Shit, I can’t do anything.” I sat there and I went onto basically all the gambling sites I could get onto and just started spending every penny I had because in my mind I was never going to be able to do this again because rehab was going to cure me. I spent all the money I had, I smoked all the weed that I had in the house. I didn’t drink anything. That was the one thing I didn’t do. I just gambled and smoked weed. It was like, “I need to get it done because I can’t do this in a month’s time”. Went to rehab and because of COVID, we had our phones in rehab. Normally we wouldn’t have had our phones, but they gave us our phones. I was like, “Happy days, I can just sit in rehab and gamble.” So I did. I sat in the Priory, gambling. I was putting football bets on, I was going on slots, I was going on whatever I wanted really because we could just sit with our phones. For the first week, 10 days, that’s what I done. I just gambled my way through rehab, I just thought, “Just sit here and gamble everyday,” I go to the therapy sessions, do my bit, get involved a little bit and then I can just come chill up here. I can just gamble and nobody knows what I’m doing. They’re not going to think I’m going to be gambling in rehab. Are they? So I’ll just carry on doing it. I was just sitting there gambling away in rehab. The weird thing was I was gambling in rehab, but my gambling, we very rare spoke about my gambling. Actually in rehab, it was all about the alcohol. The 12 steps which I understand and I fully get that. I fully understand that they’ve got a limited amount of time. They’ve got four or five people sitting in front of them. One’s an alcoholic, one’s a poly addict, well, two are poly addicts, one was a cocaine, so I get that it’s difficult to sit and treat me more for my gambling than my alcohol or more for my alcohol than my gambling because they’ve got a limited amount of time to get as much information into us, and to try and help us as much before they throw you back out in the real world.

Charlie
Recovery

Gambling, I find, is the hardest one to get the brain round and work with. As I said earlier on, I talk about it all the time, I chat about it. When it’s alcohol-driven, I can understand it, but the gambling drive, I don’t always get it. Sometimes I can see it coming or feel it coming, but it creeps up. Like if the sun pops out today, I know that I’m probably going to want to have a drink, but the gambling might pop up because I stubbed my toe randomly and now suddenly I have this rage and drive to go and gamble. It creeps up so suddenly, the gambling, and I’m learning to see cues for it and understand it, but I just find gambling, it hides away deeper than the other addictions, it pops its head up at more random times than the other addictions. Then when it does pop its head up, it makes you feel straight away embarrassed, ashamed, guilty, even though you’re only thinking about it, you feel like you’re doing something horribly wrong. Whereas if I was to, I would feel horribly if I went and had a drink, but if I think about having a drink, I then talk to myself, get that thought out of my head and move on. Whereas if I think about gambling, I’ve got to try and deal with feeling awful, feeling terrible, feeling guilty, all of that. Just that’s just from the thought of gambling. That’s where I find gambling is so hard for people to, in general, talk about and try and understand. I think understanding it is so, so difficult.

Charlie
Stigma

I think all other drugs, all other addictions, they can kill you when you don’t want to be killed, but gambling makes you want to kill yourself when you didn’t even know you wanted to kill yourself. It just creeps up and annihilates everything. Alcohol, for me personally, if I was to relapse today, which I won’t, if I was, I would go and get beer and I would drink that beer fairly quickly because I drink like a fish. I’m not going to be able to spend £24,000 on alcohol. It’s just not possible. Drugs, even drugs, £24,000, I’m not sure if you spend that. I’m not too sure I’m waking up tomorrow, but gambling, I could do 24 grand in a couple of hours, an hour. I think that’s what makes it so dangerous.

If someone cuts me up and I even have a flicker of anger in me or a flicker– straight away, there’s something wrong, something’s not right. There’s something in my brain today that is ready to fight, that whole fight-flight stuff. I’m ready to fight today, which means I’m likely to relapse today. Being able to pick up on something like that, for me, I feel now can save me. That can save my life, just that little moment of noticing stops where I am, makes me realise what’s going on. Whereas before, I never noticed those cues, and they were cues before, they were cues and they were signs that something’s not right with you today.

Recovery

I believe there should be some kind of team for addicts and addiction. I believe if an addict rings someone and says, I need this help and I need it now, that maybe within 12 hours or 24 hours they’ve got that help. Whether that’s someone that comes out to visit them and even sits to them in their home and talks to them and then discusses whether they need to go to the hospital, whether they need to go, whether there is a special area they can go, something like that needs to happen because that window is so small. If we don’t catch addicts in that window, then they’re either going to fall straight back into addiction or they’re going to commit suicide. That’s another big area I think needs to be looked at. Just how quickly can we help an addict when they need that help. I think, again with most other things, if I fall over and break my leg, I can ring for an ambulance and they come and get me, take me to a hospital and fix me up. Like I said, if you are elderly or if you are disabled and as it should be, you can get help, and that can come very quickly. Why is it different for someone who’s an addict who rings up a helpline and just wants help or they’re going to kill themselves, yet they go, basically we’ve got to put you in the process. We all know that process can take months and months. Unfortunately, addicts don’t have months and months. That’s just not how it works. I think we need to be able to pick it up earlier when someone say cries for help and with addiction, with gambling addiction, I think the cry for help always comes almost when it’s too late.

Charlie
Change

I just think if more people talk about the whole process, it will help people. It’s an ongoing thing. Recovery’s forever. If I lived till I’m 40, then I’ve got nine years of recovery, and if I lived till I’m 80, then I’ve got 39 years of recovery. Recovery is forever. I think need to understand that a bit more that recovery can take time and go a lot of different ways throughout it. There will be hard times, there will be better times, but it is forever.

Change
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