Hey Ray, I totally get it. What you just described I have gone through many times I could not give you a rough estimate. All I can say is that you are not you when you gamble. You can tell yourself whatever before you start, have absolute 100% conviction that you will stop after winning/losing $X, but when you’re in the heat of the moment, your rational brain switches off and the addiction takes the driver’s seat. The addiction is one greedy bastard. If you win you want to win more. If you lose, you MUST win it back, and immediately. We all know that 90% of the time this leads to financial ruin. The actual problem is the 10% of the time we do get extremely lucky and win all our losses back. It ensures that the next time we’re in a similar situation where we’re just down a little/moderate amount, we’ll selectively look back at these rare moments and think “Oh, I’ve gotten it back before by chasing, I can do it again.” Yes sometimes you’ll get lucky and retrieve your losses multiple times, you count your lucky stars and feel relieved, like you are the luckiest person in the world. But what do we do? Definitely not what a sensible person would do (never play again). We go ahead and decided to play with fire again. The addiction is not to win, but to play. Whether we’re losing or winning, we just want to play more. The casino has unlimited money, we only have our savings/maximum credit limits. No matter how much we swing up or down, if we keep playing, we’ll hit rock bottom. Unfortunately, almost every compulsive gambler stops when they do hit rock bottom. It’s impossibly hard to stop and have a clear head until you lose it all. We’re like that aren’t we…it’s either all or nothing. Nope, I rather win back my 20k then call it quits at 15k. I’ll risk have $0 or even going into debt to make sure I get back all my losses. It’s insane when you look back on it, but that was us in the moment of craze, we are not ourselves.
Like you, I’m generally considered quite an intelligent/financially astute individual by most of my friends and work colleagues, and they’d hardly believe me if I told them of the struggles I’ve had with this horrible gambling addiction. For me personally, I have not confided with my parents or my close friends/work mates – especially my parents, as they’ve done so much for me in my life (and helped me with many financial things like with my study fees and helping with the deposit of my house – all this from saving every penny and living ridiculously frugal themselves) – I could not bear the thought of letting them down in such a way. I do not want them to worry about me like this. The only person I did confide to was my significant other, during the peak of my gambling addiction in May last year. It was possibly the hardest moment of my life, and I really did not know what was going to happen, but I got through it, and thankfully she gave me another chance and supported me in my quest for recovery. I think it was definitely a burden off my shoulder to have someone close to me know about my struggles, to know that I’m not dealing with it completely alone.
All I can say now is, you’ve got to make a judgement call. To disclose or not is a tough question and really depends on your own state of mind and your relationships with those close to you. For me personally, it is a mental battle that’s taken over a year and I’m finally starting to feel like I’m slowly getting the upper hand. I did this mostly without much support from my relatives/friends/partner. However it may be different for you. Just remember that if things are not working out well, if you experience any relapses. Don’t give up. Learn from your experience. Learn what the trigger was and think about how you can proactively avoid it next time. The more you learn about yourself and how your mind deals with gambling, it easier it will be for you to be able to “control” your addiction. Remember, there is no cure for a gambling addiction, there’s only the ability to suppress, and ultimately control it when it does strike.