Hi Hope
I wrote most of my reply to you yesterday but I didn’t post it as I wanted to give it more thought which has given me the chance to read Nomore’s post. I want to say how much I agree with her that no matter who we are, the issue is the same. When confronted with the addiction to gamble, it makes no difference whether we are parent, spouse or child, if we allow the addiction to control our lives then we do not help the CG or ourselves.
I know I appear cynical but if a CG wants money and his bank card is bent, he will be straight on to the bank to get what is rightfully his money – that is provided there is any money left in the account.
I hear in your posts a gentle, loving mother, struggling to come to terms with the boy she raised and loved from birth being unhappy – and who is finding it impossible to hold back from giving that son that which she believes he needs to live and go to work. Board and lodging doesn’t seem unreasonable for a mother to give her son – but to a gambler the money saved from not paying that board and lodging and the little amount of £2.20 a day saved, from not having to find a train fare, is money to gamble and it is that gamble which keeps the gamble-brain active.
Your son does need help but I suspect he isn’t blind, I think his eyes are wide open to the fact that provided he is fed, housed and can get to and from work he can earn his gambling money. Please do not thing I don’t understand how you feel but it seems to me that while you can’t bear the thought of him being without a job your son is more than willing to bear it – what I suspect ‘he’ can’t bear is the thought of not being able to gamble.
I know I sound like a broken record when I say that my CG told me that as long as I enabled him he didn’t see the point in facing his demons. Your son knows that facing those demons is tough; he knows he will have a painfully difficult time while he fights his addiction so he will want to avoid it for as long as he can. What he is not thinking about is the future where the demons are beaten and the suffering and misery is a thing of the past – he can’t see that with his gamble befuddled brain – but you can.
Nomore is saying that in her experience her CG relapsed again and again but he also tried and tried again until, having lost all enablement he succeeded. She is able to write as I do; that she knows the addiction to gamble can be controlled. As a wife, Nomore’s outcome was different from mine and will surely be different from yours but her issue was the same. The beauty about this forum and Gamanon groups is the ability to hear more than one voice saying the same thing in slightly different ways, which hopefully helps to bring clarity to the confusion that the addiction to gamble relies upon.
Please keep posting – you are in my thoughts
Velvet
