[marlex]

Hello everyone, I have been into gambling in one way or another for a big part of my life and I have recently came to accept that this is an addiction, a problem and that it has to stop immediately. As I’m sure it is the case for most of the people dealing with something like this – the realization came after a huge loss, the biggest one I ever faced in fact. And as in most cases again, the amount kept growing in an attempt to recoup the losses. I have stopped gambling in any way or form for the past month and I feel very confident in myself that this is it. I went through seriously rough periods through this month and I’m still going through those from time to time looking back to what I have done but I believe that’s normal. It is not easy to let go and just keep moving forward and away from your actions – especially when you haven’t confronted the consequences yet from your environment. The biggest issue I have is that the money I lost wasn’t mine to lose – it was my father’s and the amount is a little over 30.000 euros. To give you a little bit of a background – my family used to be very wealthy many years ago. After the big crisis hit Greece (my home country), my family lost all of its money and we were left with a huge debt to the bank and 3 real estate assets. My family managed to sell off 2 of the real estate assets and pay off a very big part of the bank debt we had. From then onwards we have been really struggling with money but about 3-4 months ago, my father managed to sell the last piece of real estate we had so fortunately a big chunk of cash come to the family. Since I was the only member of the family without any serious debt to my name (so not a bank target), my father decided to deposit a big amount to my bank account where it would be “safe” and the debtors couldn’t touch it. If he deposited it to his or my mother’s account, then the bank would take it immediately. Now, a couple of months forward, I managed to gamble away 30.000 euros from that money. I have a steady and growing business that I make pretty good money off of and I am confident that in some time I will be able to pay off this debt to my father to the last cent and thensome. The only problem I am facing at the moment is that I haven’t told them what happened and we are coming very close to them realizing on their own. It will shake the ground under their feet if I tell them. I fear that I will ruin my whole family. I’m thinking that they may split up as since the money problems started, my parents haven’t been at the best of terms between them. My father has a lot of anger issues, especially when related to money, and my mother cannot stand that all the time so they fight a lot. My father also has a heart condition so I am concerned about his health as well if I tell them. The truth of the matter is that I cannot reimburse the money fast enough so that they don’t find out so if I am being honest to myself, there is no way out of this. I think that I am just delaying the inevitable and I am not sure what to do here. Any advice will be deeply appreciated. I would do anything to get that money back to my bank account so that noone (except me) can ever find out. My first attempt to do that was (obviously)…. gambling but I realized that that’s the worst way to go about this and as soon as I realized that I stopped. I didn’t lose all the money from my bank account which to me shows that I did actually realize that I have a problem and stopped as soon as that happened. I am not trying to be soft to myself but I really that I have overcome my gambling problem. If you feel like I’m wrong of course I am all ears. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

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