Gamblers Anonymous

Peter's Story
Peter : 16th May 2004

I was born and raised in a house next to a racecourse. My father and uncles were involved in the business and I grew up with a tremendous love of the game. I was about eight years old when I had a sixpenny bet and from then on, throughout my schooldays, I bet when I could. I still loved races whether I bet or not but when I got a chance I had a bet.

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Racing in those days was on Saturday only. At school and I played sport so I didn't get too many Saturdays off. I continued to play a lot of sport after I left school and so Saturdays off were still fairly rare. I really haven't any idea precisely when I became totally addicted, when I passed the thin red line. I think in those early days that my gambling was under control. It may have been just because the circumstances were such that I couldn't gamble. Betting opportunities were limited and I don't recall too much strife in those years.

By my mid twenties there certainly were times when I borrowed from my father, but I never said the money was to pay gambling debts. They were the first times I remember lying to my father, giving stories to get the money. I think somewhere in my early to mid twenties I must have been addicted. Certainly, there were problems when I married because, I had responsibilities for the first time. I tried to live as I had always lived, to punt whenever I felt like punting, which was most of the time now. I was faced with all of the obligations of a young married man. Our family came quickly and, with paying off a house and all the other things, I was soon in strife and I started to lie regularly.

I would swear I had paid the bill when the phone or gas was cut off. I'd race around madly the following day borrowing money and, somehow, get the bill paid and say it had been paid all the time. Small lies like that got bigger. I became a cheat and a con man. I don't think I was a liar, cheat or con man before I was a compulsive gambler but I quickly developed all these traits and they got worse. I also developed a habit of borrowing, betting and losing in that order. There were some wins, of course, and I for one always remember the big wins and the exciting wins but don't remember half of the big losses. But like any compulsive gambler I was a consistent loser.

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During my thirties and forties there was full employment and my profession was in demand and I was able to move up the ladder, job wise. My income kept increasing but all this really meant was that I was able to borrow more, bet more and then lose more. I am still amazed at how much money I was able to borrow in those years.

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That was really how my life went on from then until I turned sixty. That borrowing, betting, losing was a continual pattern that led to all sorts of stress. What had been a great pleasure became a matter of desperation. Home life was traumatic and getting worse because there was no security. If it had not been for my wife our family would have broken up many times over the years.

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I never recognised the addiction and yet the evidence was there all the time. There was a time when I had a coronary heart attack. I was on the way to the TAB to put money into my betting account when I passed out. I was taken to hospital and put in intensive care for three or four days. One morning I was taken from intensive care to a general ward. I noticed a newspaper on a bed. Of course, I went straight to the horses. There was a horse I would have liked to be able to have bet on but I was stuck in hospital. Later when no-one was around I put on clothes over my pyjamas. I went to the phone downstairs, rang a cab, went to a TAB nearby and deposited the money. I went back to the ward, got undressed and into bed. I was then able to phone through my bets. And it never occurred to me that there was anything unusual about what I was doing.

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I never recognised either that it was the action of gambling that I was addicted to. If you had asked me I would have said that I was addicted to winning. I was always in such desperate strife that winning seemed a matter of survival. I thought I needed to win. Occasionally I won the money I needed. If I was gambling to win the money I would have stopped after the win but I rarely did. I now realise that the minute that I had a bet, winning and losing became incidental. It wouldn't matter if I went to a racecourse with two good things (and sometimes I got good information). I always seemed to have a bet on race one as an interest. The next thing I'd be over to the interstate rings, wherever they were on. Once I'd had that first bet I had to be in action. It was the action to which I was addicted. It was as though once I was in action all the stress of living disappeared and I was in my own little world. The gambling might have caused all the stress but it was the only answer I had to it.

I was due to retire at the age of sixty. I was in a particularly good job with a very big lump sum when I retired. I could have taken a pension but I chose a lump sum. In the last few years before I retired I was able to borrow against this. When retired I was able to pay off all debts, including the house. There was still a substantial sum left, enough for my wife and I to have lived quite comfortably for the rest of our lives. We went overseas for six months.

When we returned I remember thinking to myself that in the past I had been under great stress, I'd been chasing money, there were debts. But now I was without a debt in the world for the first time for nearly forty years. What's more there was money in the bank. There was no longer any stress and now surely I could bet normally. I was convinced that I could. I was going to follow the rules. I wouldn't bet on maiden handicaps or mud tracks or all those sort of things. I would limit my bets.

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I withdrew a large sum, put it into a TAB betting account and off I went. The rules were followed and I was keeping a record of all my bets. But I opened a second little book called 'special bets' to cover all the other racing systems that let me down and, inevitably of course, I lost the money. We went overseas again and we weren't back very long before I'd withdrawn, bit by bit, every penny that we had, and I'd blown the lot.

I was really looking at the bottom of the barrel. I'd spent many a time in desperation and trauma over the years. And I had thought about suicide before. But now I could no longer cope at all. My wife did not know what had happened. I hadn't told her and we would be chatting at home as though we still had the money. We were going to do this and do that. It became too much for me to cope with. I decided that the only answer I had was suicide. The alternative was to tell to my wife but I couldn't disappoint her yet again. It was much easier to commit suicide.

I didn't want it to look like suicide. I planned to jump under a train and make it look like an accident. It was no sudden thing. I spent time studying trains, working out the best way to do it. Finally the night came when I dropped a bit of fruit on the platform and waited for the next train to come in. I pretended to skid on the fruit and jumped in front of the train. Three carriages went over me and by some miracle I survived with a few scratches and a badly fractured leg.

So there I was at home in plaster. My wife still knew nothing about it and I was still thinking of suicide. I had telephone numbers in my wallet for poisons advisory areas. I was going to tell them I was about to weed the garden and had young grandchildren. Which weedkillers should I avoid?

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I opened my wallet and in there was a card that a GA member had given me. He gave it to me because he knew that I was in the law game and he thought that some of my contacts might be of use to GA. The card had been there for several months, it's a wonder it didn't get chucked out. I would never have been able to ring GA or anything impersonal like that. But I was able to ring someone I had met several times who lived in the same suburb.

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He came down to see me and he handled things, for me, in the right way. He listened and took it quietly. He was gentle. He made suggestions and, in due course, I went with him to a meeting. That was about three years ago. That was the turning point of my life. When I got there I was a mess physically, my leg in plaster and so on. Mentally, I was a mess. My nerves were shot. When I spoke my jaw locked. I couldn't open my mouth properly. I'd lost all sense of spiritual or ethical values and, with that, I had lost self-respect. In fact, I had become a mass of self-hate.

I think the easiest way I can sum up what happened in the years that followed, and it didn't happen quickly, is that the members in the fellowship were able to share with me. Everybody in GA has been broken by gambling. And the members were able to share with me their individual experiences, their individual brokenness. I became able, through them, to recognise my own brokenness. Not only that, but later to accept it. That was the first step in an acceptance of myself that I'd never experienced before I came to GA. With that acceptance, with the help of the fellowship, life gradually improved.

I now have a terrific relationship with my wife, with all my kids. Old friendships have been restored. I have found new friendships in GA. Nowadays, I wake up actually looking forward to the day. That was something I never experienced in my gambling years.

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