Читать книгу The Problem Was Me - Thomas Ph.D. Gagliano - Страница 10

Gambling appeared to be the solution to all my problems and became my drug of choice. Gambling helped me forget how I felt. Big losses entitled me to special treatment from the bookies. Even when I won, I knew deep inside that it was only a matter of time before I would lose the money. I even told the bookie to hold my winnings knowing he was going to get it back anyway. The reality was, I was not betting to win, but rather to lose. My compulsion created a need to keep increasing the amount of my bets until eventually I would lose everything. As I gambled more, I was losing substantial amounts of money. While I was making a fortune in my business, I was losing two fortunes to gambling. I remember the day I had to give the bookie $20,000. He met me in his brand new Lincoln Continental and gave me a special number to place my bets where the line would never be busy. I remember saying to myself, I just bought him that car and took the money from my own family.

Throughout my addiction, I tried to convince myself that I was a better man than my father. After all, he was an absentee father who was driven by his own selfish obsessions. In reality, I was no better. My mind was always drifting away to the teams I gambled on. Consumed with self-hatred and guilt, I finally told my wife how much money I lost gambling. I owned a few businesses and was able to pay my debts out of one of them without her knowing. Eventually, I depleted our savings account and my wife discovered our bank book. She took the kids, went to stay with her parents, and told me to get help. My son was three years old, and my daughter was a year old. Although my wife had every right to do what she did, I felt abandoned, just like I did as a child. I didn’t deserve to be abandoned as a child, but now that I was an adult I had no one to blame but myself.

Initially, I didn’t really want to get help for my gambling problem. It was not until later that I finally made an appointment with a therapist. I was trying to control my addiction, but, as with all addictions, I did not have the power to battle it on my own. About two months later the pain of my destructive actions started to outweigh the joy of gambling. I never wanted to see my family walking out the door again. I made the decision to get help, and I needed a plan of action. This new way of thinking came to influence how I would live the rest of my life. The problem was, the warden did not want his voice ignored.

My therapist made it clear that if I did not stop gambling, I would not find happiness. The warden’s voice was stronger than the therapist’s voice, so I tried gambling one more time. This time I thought that I could control it. I promised myself that I would only bet on football games, because that is what I had the most success with. By the time the season ended, I had slipped into my past behavior and began betting on basketball games, too, even though I had no success betting on basketball. It occurred to me that I wasn’t controlling my addiction, but rather my addiction was controlling me.