New gamblers group offers hope of a real payoff

“I didn’t have a car, I didn’t have a pair of shoes, I didn’t have a pair of jeans of my own, nothing.” Gary’s recalling leaving Cuan Mhuire treatment centre in County Galway after three months’ treatment for his gambling addiction. Given a lift to the city, he would wait two hours for a bus ride home to Monaghan Town.
“I shook like a leaf and I ran into a church, I was afraid that I would take magic feet and walk into a bookie’s. I used to tell my counsellor that my next bet is a cyanide tablet because I could not afford to go back to the life I had led.
“Even though I was in the early stages of recovery, the pain of the past and the fear I was going to go back and do it all again was incredible.”
Gary was 40 when he quit seven years ago. It seems hardly credible, but he was just 14 when he first received treatment for gambling. As a child he had been seduced by the pulsing lights and dull hypnotic soundtrack of fruit and poker machines.
“The flashing lights and sound just smashes into you,” he says. “You become numb to it then.”
Supping a coffee, Gary is relaxed in the Celt’s kitchen ruminating over his past. A former law student he’s articulate, intense and charming. Clearly he hasn’t fallen victim of the ‘wet brain’ he suspects can affect chronic compulsive gamblers, in much the same way as a long-term alcoholics. Of course he flunked his studies - if gambling alone wasn’t responsible, it was a factor. In the course of his torrid, quarter-century obsession it claimed everything, all his possessions, and hurt everyone who cared about him.
For Gary, gambling was a slow, progressive illness with incremental defeats; impossible to gain a vantage point from which to gauge the aggregate damage. His behaviour actually saw him diagnosed as bipolar nine years ago.
“I was going to the doctor with asthma and be in terrific form - I might have been on a winning streak for a day or two. Then I’d be depressed, I’d want to kill myself, life was horrendous, I wanted to die. Then I’d be on the phone [to the doctor] saying, ‘I’m only messing, I’m okay, I’m okay’.”
The rush of endorphins released from a big win, clashed with the disappointment of the inevitable big losses.
“You are on edge - the emotion is mad and your heart is going crazy. So if you do that for 25 years - every day - you are creating a serious psychological problem and you don’t know it.”
Ultimately, he was hollowed out.
“The last seven years, I was just a dead man walking,” he says, evoking the heroin zombies creased over Dublin’s pavement. “You are a glass imitation of yourself. You don’t see hope, you don’t see hope.”
Perversely, the compulsive gambler can only experience hope as a mirage. This illusory hope exacerbates the problem when gripping a docket.
“If you are a drug addict or have a drink problem, or whatever it is, you don’t believe that by having a drink you are going to solve the problem - you are just going to numb the pain. Gambling is the only one that puts a carrot in front of you, and tells ultimately the solution for everything bad in your life is right here - to get a big win. I would say nine out of ten people who are in Gamblers Anonymous have had that big win, but it is never enough. It can never be enough.”
Asked to recall his biggest wins, Gary explains that you can’t measure it purely on the financial size of pay-off.
“I’ve seen me win €15-16,000 in one day, and it wasn’t as good as the day I won €70 when I was completely and totally on my arse. So which was the better one?”
“I’ve seen me win €11,800 online one day and borrowed money to go for a pint that night - just wipe-out.”

Owed €47,000
Money is obviously a factor, often prompting gamblers to approach a support group.
Despite having been in recovery for seven years, Gary has only recently overcome the financial repercussions of his habit.
“I owed €47,000 and I finished paying it off last month,” he says in a tone that doesn’t suggest pride in the achievement.
“A lot of people come into Gamblers Anonymous on the basis that they are financially done, but after a while they realise emotionally, spiritually, mentally, physically they are f**ked. It’s the financial side that brings you firstly to Cuan Mhuire, we do our best to advise you that the money has nothing to do with it, which is a hard thing to sell to someone who is 50, 60, €70,000 in debt and with no hope. But once they get over the idea that money won’t solve all their problems, they can grow up.
“You become emotionally stunted at the age you get your addiction, so if you become addicted at the age of 14, by the age of 40, you are still a 14-year-old.”
That emotional immaturity left him blind to the hurt he inflicted on his loved ones.
“When someone is gambling all it does is distort the mind - you come back home after losing wages, the first thing you are going to do is lie to your partner. You are going to be sitting on edge because your mind is fried about ‘how am I going to get out of this?’ All they have to do is say one thing and you are gone. Because you must turn the tables all the time on the other person. Because if you didn’t, you’d have to look at your own life. That comes as a huge shock to people when they have to start facing up [to their problem] - that can be one of the barriers to recovery.”

Pain inflicted on loved ones
Much more costly for Gary than the €47,000, is a debt he can never repay - the pain he inflicted on his daughter.
“My daughter is 20; I was missing the first 12 years of her life. That’s the same with everybody [GA members] - it’s the time we don’t spend with the people that matter.
“What normal human being would leave their child sitting outside in a car in sweltering heat while standing in a bookies’ for four hours? Or dragging them into the bookies with them. The other daft notion is wanting other people to be better off, where you are going to win money and pay everybody else; everyone will be happy. But because you are in a bubble that you have created yourself, you are actually not aware that they are far happier than you are - and you are the messed up one. It’s mad.”
He declares his gambling existence a “fantasy world”.
“You are oblivious to everything. You are oblivious to everybody else’s pain.”
His then partner also suffered.
“She was on the verge of a breakdown, but when she was leaving I was wondering ‘What’s going on? What’s wrong?’ You don’t know - you do and you don’t.”
Once Gamblers Anonymous is established in Cavan, they intend to form a branch of GamAnon, a support group for the loved ones of gamblers, who often are victims of the addiction.

Rock bottom
After a few moments’ consideration Gary recalls his low ebb. It was a warm day in the bookies and he noticed his mother pass by the window.
“I could see she was crying and I didn’t understand what was going on. She looked at me with her eyes and she was just distraught. ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’
“She had just been to my flat, but the flat that I was in was a kind of half-way flat for mental patients and I had broken into it and was using it - I had nowhere to live. There were no carpets, no nothing, the floor had been abandoned by these psychiatric patients - they didn’t even stay in it.
“I didn’t even know there was anything wrong - I was living there. The saying people build castles in the sky - well compulsive gamblers move in. I had moved into this castle.”
In the non-judgemental and confidential surroundings of GA, it emerges that the vast majority of gamblers have had to resort to crimes of desperation to fund the next wager; break-ins, muggings. Gary laughingly refers to the motto of Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons - ‘Corruptus in Extremis’.
“If I hadn’t have went to [a charity for] compulsive gamblers, I could have went to compulsive liars, compulsive thieves, compulsive everything.”

‘I would do anything to gamble’
Gary admits to being up in court “maybe 60-70 times”.
“When I was gambling I couldn’t have a pint - I’d wreck the place. Whether it was anger or resentment - everyone’s a bastard. And you are competing with the whole world you could judge everybody, you had an opinion on every single person, but you didn’t have one on yourself, because the worst thing you could do is reflect inwardly and figure out who you were.
“I would do anything to gamble, anything. Anything. There was nothing sacrosanct to me when it came to gambling.”
He continues: “One guy said to me one time: ‘The only thing I didn’t do to gamble was kill anybody, and that’s because I was never offered enough money’. It brings you to that.”
That’s where gambling brings you, GA can help guide you back. The GA meetings in Ballybay have expanded to two days, Sunday and Tuesdays, with approximately 25 to 30 people regularly attending. They know there is a need for GA in Cavan because some regularly make the journey over to Cuan Mhuire House; that and the “explosion” of the problem nationally due to the prevalence of online betting. Gary is thankful that this form only emerged as he was prising himself off the addiction.
Whether someone has a problem may not be cut and dry. Gary gives the example he came across recently of a well-dressed woman paying for her shopping at a service station.
“She had bread and milk and other general items and she asked for three scratch cards, it came to €21.80 or something - she only had €20 with her, and she left back the bread.
“Now that lady would have no belief she has a gambling problem, and maybe she doesn’t, but if you are going back without the bread for the table, is that not a small problem? That scratch card was a greater need for her than getting a loaf of bread.”
For those who are unsure whether they have a gambling problem, there is a simple 20-question test you can do online within a minute, which can be a helpful guide. It may be the wake-up call some gamblers need to approach GA.
“Nobody will judge you,” Gary assures. “It is totally anonymous.”
At GA they use the same 12-step programme as Alcoholics Anonymous. In this way they can show there is hope for compulsive gamblers. Not the hope of a pay-day but authentic hope.
“That’s all there is: hope. When I left that treatment [centre], they told me the only thing I was taking with me was hope. That’s all you take away.”