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The girl, who started playing at age 20, is already on her feet and agreed to tell us about her addiction to gambling.
It started with innocent gambling machines
“I started with friends and went to the machines. And I was immediately hooked. If sometimes other friends wanted it, I needed it every day for a week or two. It all happened really fast for me,” says Mary.
According to Maria, she later found out about the possibility of gambling online from a friend who worked at a betting shop, so after a while she opened an account on one of the gambling websites.
“I started playing 10 years ago, when there was still not so much publicity, when it was not even popular to gamble virtually. That is what I heard from a friend and connected. I started with betting, I participated in sports betting, but there was everything: machines, poker and roulette. In fact, it didn’t matter what to play, the most important thing was to play, ”says María.
The girl says that she started the virtual game because she was embarrassed to visit physical places.
“At first, sometimes it would go to the physical places near the machines, but over time it disappeared. I didn’t need it and it wasn’t nice to visit because the genre is different. Most men visit these places. Then I felt bad there. For me it was more comfortable to close when nobody was seeing me, nobody listened to me when I was not appearing among those people. The more I realized that if I go to physical places often, people will realize that something is wrong with me. They were basically virtual games designed to hide, ”says María.
The game took a lifetime
Mary says that at first she used to gamble in her spare time. But it wasn’t long before studying faded into the background, and at work, he spent more time playing games than doing direct tasks.
“It just came to our knowledge then. I also started to play at work. Over time, it took up an increasing part of my life. Everything started to take a back seat and the game came to the fore. to the fact that after half a year I basically stopped working and not studying, I only played from morning to night and stopped only when I ran out of money and needed to look for it ”, says the girl.
Mary says that at work she had to work with considerable sums of money, so eventually she began to take care of the money.
“It just came to our attention then. A colleague knew I was gambling, so I lost my job, I couldn’t be trusted because there was a lot of money around me,” says Marija.
Losing a job: credits and theft of loved ones
Maria says that after losing her job, she still tried to make money gambling – initially she limited herself to loans, credit cards, and quick loans, but soon the financial services companies stopped lending to her. Then the girl began to borrow from her loved ones, and when she had nothing left to borrow, she took out loans on behalf of her loved ones. As the girl says, during all that time, she also took everything out of the house to sell.
“In total, I lost half a million litas during the entire playing period,” says Marija.
According to the girl, in doing so, she ruined all the relationships she had: her loved ones drifted away and began to avoid her.
“I no longer had a relationship with anyone, everyone avoided me. Grandparents even moved and I didn’t know where they lived. They hid their address so that I would not come and do nothing again. The only person I had a relationship with was my mom. However, she is also addicted to alcohol and has been consuming it all the time. It was a very familiar connection with her: I came to spend the night and, if I still had something to eat, I would eat. I can say that I ruined the relationship with everyone: from the closest to the distant relatives and friends. There was not a single person with whom the relationship had been maintained, ”recalls the young woman.
Big losses, suicide attempt and psychiatric hospital
According to Mary, these games lasted a couple of years. The girl says that during those years she lost everything: she was trapped in large debts, she lost her job, her loved ones turned their backs on her. It’s true that Mary admits that at the time she didn’t understand the connection between gambling and loss.
“It just came to our knowledge then. Because I felt an emptiness, I realized the debts that I was following, I understood which path I was taking. But I didn’t realize that the problem was in the game.
The only problem seemed to be debt and the fact that I was doing bad things to my loved ones and everyone was turning their back on me because I was cheating, I was stealing, I still needed money. And when the slightest perception that something was wrong came, I started betting even more. So I tried to escape those thoughts. Then, in 2012, I tried to kill myself and ended up in a mental hospital, ”says Marija.
The girl says she spent three weeks in a medical facility and then released her on the condition that she begin attending a Minnesota recovery program at an addiction center.
Although Mary has successfully recovered from the game, the girl still admits that the addiction does not go away and is with her for life. The girl says she has had to go down twice since 2012, when she began to recover, in 2014 and 2018.
“When I regressed, I realized that I was addicted and that I was not going anywhere and not going anywhere, that I was always with me, and that I had to live a little differently from other people: that I had to attend groups, he had to watch me.
When I recovered my health after the first relapse, everything was there: I looked at myself, I attended groups, but when I got better, when I felt better psychologically, when I felt less anxious, guilty, when I felt more financially stable, then I grew apart gradually from groups, self-observation, I left the psychologist and began to live independently. And then there was a fall, ”says the girl.
Still paying debts
Mary says that even though it’s been a long time since she started gambling, she still has debts to pay off.
“The process is complicated because not only natural persons, but also legal persons have suffered from me. This is most of the responsibility that goes against individuals, I feel very guilty. I couldn’t file bankruptcy because I had a lot of crimes.
When all the courts were up and running, throughout the process I relied on the fact that I didn’t want to make a profit. My goal was not to fool those people and take their money. I’m addicted, exposed to disease, so I behaved well. Because every time I took that money, I sincerely believed that I would win immediately and give it all back and give even more, ”says the girl.
He earned the trust of his loved ones and graduated
Eight years after the start of her recovery, the girl can rejoice not only in living a stable life and paying debts, but Mary has also managed to complete her interrupted studies. According to the girl, she also managed to regain the trust of her loved ones, which she lost during the years of addiction.
“To this day, when it comes to the people closest to us, they have all come back. I mean mom, dad, grandparents and brother. But brother also plays. And to this day, too, the I play. As I mentioned, Mom was always close, but contact with grandparents and Dad only came five years later. To this day, the relationship is really normal. Sometimes I get reprimanded, but it happens in certain situations, usually If I talk to a brother about how he should behave, he starts to blame me. But in general I feel his trust, I feel that they love me, accept me, value me, “concludes Marija.
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