Welcome to this site, I hope you find it as rewarding as I have found it to be. Good that you are taking a stand and taking action to recover and focus on your family. Also great you are feeling positive. It really is a positive thing to stop gambling and move forward with a new way of life. We need to remember that no matter the awful stuff in our past, the glass is not half empty, it is more than half full! We have our whole lives ahead of us, and we are resilient, resourceful, and can do amazing things if we set our minds to it.
I read your post on I_Maverick’s thread and I agree with you that it is a travesty how governments are turning more and more to gambling to fund operations. It is also happening in the USA. What is even worse, gambling disproportionately affects the poor and middle class. Guess who buys the most lottery tickets? Guess which gambling game has the worst odds? Gambling should be illegal, but we all know that is not going to happen. We are likely to continue to see more rather than less, and that is disappointing. But I shouldn’t bring politics into this, it really is beside the point anyway.
The point is we need to stop gambling, and we need to do whatever it takes to stay away from gambling in order to have a better life. If they blast us with adverts, then I guess we should shut off the television and radio and walk the dog or work on the garden, or volunteer, or whatever other fun productive things we can think of! Best of luck to you and keep posting!