DH just dropped a bombshell!!!!!!!

[muppetshere]

My life is bliss, i mean it - or so i thought!!!!!!!!!!!

DH and I have a strong relationship, we have 2 wonderful children 4.10 yrs and 0.6 months. DH has a very good job earning alot of money. I work part time teaching (whn not on mat leave). We have a lovely home and live comfortably.

3 years ago i got inheritance of in excess of 60K. After doing a couple of home improvements we saved the rest and added to it with monthly saving etc so we have a nice pot of saving now for our future.

MY DH and I used to enjoy a night out together at the casino on roulette. Very sociable and no harm. When i was pregnant DH came home after a night out saying he'd been in a few times on his own been winning alot of money but had gone in and lost £300 this particular night. I was mortified as was he that he'd been sneaking in after work. We were able to take the hit and he immediately excluded himself from the casino.

Fast forward 10 months. Yesterday he told me he needed help. Since starting his new job (Feb) he has been sneaking in to a new one. Said he's been in 6 times. 5 times he has won (50,60,70 pounds a time) Friday he went in drunk after a night out with old colleagues and lost £1000. He is devastated and i am too. We are going to have to go into savings to stop us going overdrawn. It isn't about the money we aren't in debt, have comfortable savings etc but i am so annoyed he could do this to us, to his children.

He is normally so careful with money in everyday life...overpaying on mortgage, budgets for everything, never gets overdrawn but this F***g roulette has got a grip of my dear DH and i don't know what to do.

I want to scream and shout and knock ten bells out of him for the lack of respect for me and his children but i know he needs help and part of me is relieved that he has at least come clean before he could do any real financial damage to us.

He has rang GA last night and is going to go to some meetings to help him.

Its a long post but i need to vent somewhere. Am i being soft for not screaming, shouting hitting him, kicking him ou or would some or you dop the same as me and support your DP/DH through this mess?

I am so scared that my life is going to come crashing down around me. He is a wonderful father, husband and provider so WHY has this got him!

Good luck with it all

sorry for posting like Cod!!

COD??????? Sorry posie not very good at this or used to posting

Cod is an infamous poster, of olde, who constantly peppered her posts with typos!

you should put your savings in your name for the time being.

Your DH sounds as if he has had a shock about being an addict, so much so that he is trying to keep it in check. Fantastic that he excluded himself from the casino. Fantastic that he can't get his hands on cash without your signature etc. You are both going the right way, and your relationship on this sounds very strong. You are doing the right thing.

I would just add that all addicts can be devious in feeding their addiction, so please don't let your guard down - now, or in years to come.

It does sound like he is taking all the right steps.

I wanted to comment about your loss - 15 years ago, my fiancé and his then wife had a baby boy who was stillborn.

He still talks about him, and cries about him, and visits the grave, even now after all this time. He hs told me that he has always felt that other people thought a man "shouldn't" feel the same way as a woman does over a stillbirth, after all, it was the woman who carried the baby.

But I can tell you he was cut up about it, and still is.

He and his wife got into a lot of debt at the time partly because of their loss, buying nice things that couldn't afford helped briefly.

So maybe you both need to go to counselling together - this does sound like a sort of comfort thing.

Hi muppetshere,

I felt compelled to reply to your post as there were so many similarities to my own situation.

Not to scare you or anything but my DH has just come out of a 28 day rehab programme for his gambling. It started in a very similar way to your situation, he too confessed to his gambling. I didn't realise how serious it was. We had a major blip at Christmas time, he went to GA, had an assessment and began seeting a therapist weekly. Unfortuntately, he had not yet hit his rock bottom point and he went on a massive binge (spending his entire monthly wage in one afternoon). This was his call for help and he agreed to go to rehab (which was paid for by his family thankfully as I am not sure we would have got through this without it!!!)

It was basically established that he is a comfort gambler - he does it to escape the "real world", his problems. Through rehab he has realised that it has been a big build up of different things that have occured in his past - nothing that would strike you as serious i.e abuse or anything but more to do with his family relationships, his role and place within his family, he had a major accident in his late teens that was quite traumatic but never worked through emotionally, his job basically went tits up with the recession, we became parents and the responsibility he felt was huge....so a big mixture of all of these things became too much, so he gambled instead of talking things through. The rehab was a full on addiction treatment programme, we are currently doing aftercare and GA meetings - which I am sure will play some part in our lives forever.

We are not over it but I do bloody hope to god that the worst is over. What I learnt is that I am strong enough that if he does it again then we are finished. The hardest part for me was understanding the grip of addiction, it is such a destructive cycle, it is not logical therefore us as non-addicts find it hard to accept why or how it can happen i.e if he gambles, we have no food. They know that but do it anyway. That is part of the destructive addictive cycle.

It sounds like your husband is well on the way to a full blown gambling addiction. If you feel it is related to the loss you both experienced then you need to address it NOW.

Whilst I think that GA and GamCare offer wonderful services it was not enough for my DH. It did not go deep enough for him to address the issues. He needed the space to address past issues and to learn strategies for the future. I was a bit sceptical at first but the DH I fell in love with came back to me last weekend, we are still in the early days but the change has been magnificent. I nevery realised how far I had become entrenched in the addiction. I think we are slowly building up the trust again, I am cautiously optimistic but have safeguards in place.

If I were you I would put safeguards in place in relation to your money. You need to have a serious conversation with your husband and look at different options of therapy, maybe including grief and loss?????

I hope this makes sense! I can't tell you whether it has worked for us but
the changes feel positive thus far, we know we have a long way to go but we are working hard at making it work.

I know it's scary that this is happening with your DH, but it is actually so so valuable to have a DH who is willing to share this with you, ask for help, be honest etc. Don't punish him for his honesty - your response to this will set the tone for him being able to share with you for the rest of your lives (not saying you have punished him btw). Just relationships strong enough to stand up to this kind of obstacle are worth gold.

Just to update. DH just rang me and is at GA now. He has rang me during a break. He said he is really pleased he has gone. Don't know many details but i'm just hoping now that the £1000 he lost on Friday will be his last ever bet.

Finallydone, Thankyou so much for your reply-it means so much. I do think my DH has issues surrounding the loss of our baby that he is yet to admit. The whole grief and grieving has been around me and we rarely talk about our precious little boy unless i say things to keep his memory alive. Everyone asked about me and rallied around to get me through it but DH was so concerned about getting me and our eldest son through it that i feel he neglected his own grief. I have cried many times since we cremated our little boy but i have never seen DH cry since we laid him to rest.

When i think back to the times he has been it has always been when he has been stressed so maybe you are right. I just hope the friday night £1000 was his bottom point.

Can i ask were there any signs of your DH hitting that rock bottom afternoon binging session.

I am wary not to completely take all that makes my H off him because notoriously he is the financial expert. He is far better at dealing with our finances than i ever could be and we have more savings than i could ever have saved. It is what he does best which is why this is just so shocking.

I told his mother so she can support us too.

Its just all one big mess. I sit here in complete shock that my DH is at GA. I still don't feel he is an gambling addict but i know that he is or was on a very fast and slippery slope to becoming one.

Hi - glad he is taking all this seriously and dealing with the gambling.

I am very sorry about the loss of your precious boy. And I do think that you DH would benefit from some grief counselling.

My parents lost a baby when I was four and there was no support then. Dad just had to get on with it. He even had to physically bury her himself . He was an angry man for years. We lived in a very tense household all wary of the next explosion. He started talking about the baby one night to my sister and her DH about 13 or 14 years ago and after that he had various dreams about her. He seemed to let her go that way gradually in a way that he perhaps never had when she actually died. He is so much calmer now. We had a chat about it a while ago and I pointed out the dreams and the fact that he is more open about it all and how he seems calmer. He agreed that it was probably a big part of it and he said "in those days there was no support of grief counselling and looking back I really needed it".

So try and get DH to go for some counselling.

Muppetshere, you dont have to take on full financial control if your feel that this is not totally necessary. I didnt but i did and still do keep a very close eye on the finances. Like your DH, my own is actually much better than me at controlling policies and financial issues, and also i felt he was going through enough besides stripping him of this as well. My only concern though with your situataion is that most addicts have to go through a rock bottom before they finally stop relapsing. Your DH has lost £1000, which isnt enough to put ye in serious trouble. it was only when my own DH was nearly fired from his job and we owed too much that he fully faced his demons.

Now im not saying that he will relapse, but i am saying that you shouldnt ever let your guard down with the finances. Unfortunately neither you or I will ever fully trust them financially again, no matter how far down the path of recovery that they are.

I totally agree to not taking over full control of the finances. I was very reluctant to do this (still am because I am rubbish with money too!!) but in the end I saw that it was too much for him to take on at this moment in time. What I mean by safeguards is that you have to have open communication about money. If you don't already make sure you go through all of your accounts together on a regular basis so that you would notice any irregularities.

Part of my DH's problems were that he was so good at covering up stress,worry and anxiety....bottling things up until exploding point, but his expoding point was to check out of real life for an afternoon at the bookies. I didn't notice leading up to that afternoon, I was so shocked when he called to confess.

Hopefully your DH has reached out for help and will now begin to make positive changes and get support, just be careful. I felt very reassured when DH started going to Gamcare counselling after the Christmas blip. I think I was a bit naive and didn't want to believe he was an "addict" or compulsive gambler. There probably were signs but I think I was so entrenched in it and he was so good at hiding things that I started to get really paranoid and wondered if it was me that was going crazy!! It had been an elephant in the room in our marriage for a long time, very subtly, slowly building up. So subtle that we both failed to really act on it until it got very serious.
Even though we are in a bit of a financial pickle I think it really was the emotional part that was the most important thing to get sorted out.

Have you talked to your DH about the loss of your baby? Do you think he thinks there could be a connection between unresolved grief and what he is doing now?

I hope all goes well for you!!!

We have spoke about whether there is a link but he says its just a coincidence and that he was already enjoying the roulette before DS2 died. I am still convinced that losing our little boy, coupled with starting a new job and recently having DD have all been factors. Only time will tell i suppose. He said last night that he feels a weight has been lifted and that a sense of relief over the last few days. What sure what he really means by all this but i'm taking it as a postive sign that this awful period in our marriage is over and we can get backk to the happier times as we have been through so much since losing DS2 in 2008.

He is taking it seriously and i'm happy about that but its hard in some ways because when he came home from the meeting on Tuesday i felt their was so much of him that didn't belong there. Many of these poor people had lost everything, 2 had tried to take their lifes and many were bankrupt and lost jobs etc. I know that if he hadn't fessed up on Saturday that this is the path we could have been going down in a few months/years time. Suppose i am just feeling extremely grateful that he could come to me and that he did.

I pray that this is the end but who knows. I am sure this urge to attend a casino wil return one day and its how he deals with it. I have convinced him to get his football season ticket back next year and to take DS1 as he ironically gave it up when we had DS1 to save money but i just feel he needs it and DS1 loves going too so may be some nice father son time.

Muppetshere,
im amazed at how well you are handling this. He didnt get to the depths of some others but given time he would have and he absolutely belongs at those meetings, his addiction is the same as anyone else's there.You'll probably begin to realise that this affected you all more than you realise now too.
The football ticket is the perfect thing to do now, he needs to replace gambling with some other interest.
I too was glad that DH eventually felt able to open up to me- its a testemant to you and me
it wont be plain sailing for a while, but provided he sticks with this the only way is up.
Please try to get to a weekly GamAnon meetings yourself. You need to prioritise your own recovery too. Also make sure you dont always put yourself last, treat yourself and be good to yourself as well. I remember the day DH was diagnosed an alcoholic i went out in my new UGGS and got my hair done. Wasnt going to solve any problems but damn it certainly helped.
Promise me you'll go to Gam Anon- its only there that you'll get proper help and support.
xxx

Moanyhole, i do feel like i'm handling this well but i don't think it has fully hit me tbh.

He went to another GA meeting on friday and said the meetings are a good thing and that he is glad he went. He said that for 3 years roulette has occupied alot of his mind. He said many a time he has wanted to go after i've gone to bed (but hasn't) and that he feels a sense of relief now its all in the open and he is attending the meetings. I am confident that we can beat this but i know we have a long road ahead and some of my trust in him needs repairing.

The GamAnon isn't something i am able to go to at the moment as my DD is only 6 months old and is being breastfed so getting out of the house is near impossible until after 8pm. However if things get on top of me i will certainly look into it, thanks x

i have rang the building society and he cannot withdraw it without me present to sign. We both have to be there so i tink that is safe enough. We have reduced the OD facility to £1000 from £5000 and i have his debit card.