GAMBLING ADDICT - I don't want to forget all my bad memories because they help stop me from wrecking my life again

Henry McInnes/Sunday Mail

By Clare Johnston

Gambling addict: I don't want to forget all my bad memories because they help stop me from wrecking my life again

DAD-OF-TWO Colin almost ruined his life through gambling. Here he bravely tells his story.

COLIN, from Edinburgh, squandered £150,000 gambling. At the height of his addiction he was blowing hundreds of pounds as his wife lay seriously ill in hospital. Now he has turned his life around for his wife and children’s sakes.

Of all his regrets, not answering the call from hospital staff trying to tell him his wife’s life was in danger is one of Colin’s greatest.

He couldn’t pick up because he was out gambling – something he’d ­promised himself only the day before, holding his newborn son, that he would stop for good.

But Colin couldn’t stop.

Now 34, the dad of two from ­Edinburgh carries a long list of regrets that he has no intention of forgetting.

Those painful memories are the very thing stopping him from giving in to the addiction that started when he was just 17 and has cost him £150,000.

The high-flying executive admits there was no clear reason for him starting to gamble but once he did, it quickly consumed him.

He said: “I had a middle-class upbringing, I had no exposure to gambling or anything like that as I was growing up. I fell into it.

“I used to go to a local bowling club and gamble on machines and gradually I wanted more.

“I went to university and just carried on.

“I did most damage on fixed odds betting terminals, also known as roulette machines, in bookmakers and also online.

“I wanted to stop from a very early age, I knew it was affecting my life hugely from my 20s.

“I’ve never had a problem with anything. I’m successful at work.

“I‘ve never had anything I wasn’t able to overcome, except this. This is the one thing I could not overcome.”

At each of the key moments of his life, Colin, dad to an eight-year-old son and four-old-daughter, ­swore he would quit gambling, but its magnetic force proved too strong.

“I promised myself at various points in my life I would stop,” he said.

“When I got engaged, when I got married, when my wife became ­pregnant with our first child.

“I remember shutting the door with my son outside, just putting CBeebies on a loop so I could gamble online.

“I also remember holding him in one arm and with the other pressing a button on the computer and gambling all the money we’d saved up.

“It’s important to have that memory close because it’s something I don’t want to go back to. After my son’s birth I promised when I held him in my arms that I wouldn’t gamble but I was back the next day.

“The excuse was to earn money to finish the kitchen we were renovating.”

His secret gambling was to lead to one of his deepest regrets – being absent when his wife suffered ­complications on the maternity ward.

He recalled: “We went at 11 in the evening, I left late the following day and I came back the day after to find that she’d bled and had other issues.

“She’d basically nearly died and they couldn’t get hold of me. I was gambling. That’s a memory I’ll never forget.

“My child was sitting in the cot beside her and she couldn’t reach him because she had all these tubes in her.

“She had our child screaming beside her and she couldn’t deal with it. I could have been there.”

Colin has worked from the age of 16, supporting himself through university with a supermarket job. And though he went on to become a high earner in the corporate sector with wages of £60,000, he has run up ­staggering debts.

“I was earning from an early age but I gambled all of it and built up debts.

“I would say it’s approaching about £150,000 that I gambled away.

“The net deficit is around that amount. I’m still paying off those debts.”

But while Colin regrets the amount of money lost, it was the lies and secrets that are the real legacy of his gambling.

“The amount of lying and deceit is the biggest thing for me,” he said.

“Lying to my wife became easy and I lied about everything – ­remortgaging the house, all sorts. I kept control of all the finances so she had no idea.”

Colin eventually became too tangled in his own web of lies. Eight years ago, around the time his son was born, he was forced to tell his wife some of what was going on.

A year later he attended his first Gamblers Anonymous (GA) meeting.

He said: “I arrived at the bookmakers one evening and I parked the car on a red line thinking, ‘I’ve got £10, I’ll gamble it and come straight out’.

“Seven hours later I’d lost thousands and my car had been towed away.

“I had no choice but to say something, but that was a year before GA.

“I told my wife 30 per cent of what was going on. I got the car back and told myself I was too good for GA.

“A year later I had become sick and tired of being sick and tired. I couldn’t take it any more.

“The pressure when you’re balancing finances, lying constantly, hiding things and trying to hold down a job while spending hours gambling, while pretending to be a father put too much strain on me.

“I got my friend to take me to my first GA meeting. There were only six people.

“Since then those six people have become 70.”

Colin avoided gambling for nearly three years after joining GA, but went back to it “in a frenzy” for six months.

He has been in control of his ­addiction for four years now.

He said: “What I don’t want to say is that it wasn’t my fault. For me, it’s not an illness – there is no excuse.

“Saying ‘it’s an addiction, I couldn’t help it’ is a cop-out in my opinion.

“I had an opportunity not to gamble and I chose not to take it.”

Colin still attends GA meetings once a week and knows his addiction will never be too far behind him.

“Complacency can set in. We [GA] talk about taking each day as it comes.

“It can come back and once you’re addicted, that’s you.

“It’s a desperate search for a mental rush, releasing the same chemicals in your brain as heroin.

“It dulls the sense of responsibility and heightens the sense of pleasure.”

Each Father’s Day is a chance to reflect on how far he’s come.

And, as Colin pays off his financial debts, he’s all too aware of the larger one he owes his family.

“When you gamble you are not only emotionally damaging your family by not being there and lying, you’re ­physically taking away the possibilities and the life they could have.

“I don’t know where I would be now but for GA.

“My wife always supported me, even when I went back [to gambling] and I couldn’t really ask for more.”