Writing this book was not easy. I started writing it many years ago and more than once I had to put the draft in the drawer and give myself time. It is not easy to write something highly personal that evokes moments of darkness and pain. As a compulsive gambler I created chaos and havoc around me. I had to face and overcome shame and guilt.
When I finally woke up 22 years ago from the nightmare of gambling, I decided, with the help, assistance and love of so many people, to embark on a path that would allow me to start living again and re-appropriate my past. At that moment I clearly saw the desolation, the destruction, the emptiness around me. It was extremely hard to resist the temptation to get me back into the dark but reassuring hole I was getting out of. At first the pain and difficulty, then finally a normal life.
However, there remained a great deal of discomfort: it was important to try to make sense of those thirty and more years of life, seemingly meaningless, lived as a gambler. It was suggested to me that my past could be "recycled" and reused to build something good.
Slowly, that belief began to take root in me, the belief that it would be of great use to finalize my energies and my personal experience in an activity aimed at assisting former gamblers and their families. I resumed studying to deepen the concept of addiction and its mechanisms, to better understand and learn more about some dynamics of the disease. By working with and helping other compulsive gamblers and their families I learned a lot and at the same time they help me stay away from gambling and grow.
Then life decided to present me with a different personal challenge. It forced me to realize how incomplete and, in a sense, superficial my perception of the emotional damage I created was. It made me discover that another close member of my family whom I love profoundly had the same problem I had. He too was sick with gambling and other related issues. I had perceived certain changes in him. I kept observing him and monitoring his behavior. After a short while I became sure that something familiar was going on. I saw the clear signs of the disease. I had a long conversation with him and my suspicion was confirmed. But at the beginning I had to face his denial and resistance.
Now I was forced to face and live and go through the same emotions I had previously generated in others: pain, frustration, anger just to mention some. But this time things went differently. I had been there I knew exactly what he was going through. I could “read” his behavior, feel his pain, understand his contradictions. But most important, due to my experience I knew what would work and what would not work in trying to help him come out of hell. I realized that my direct personal experience and what I learned from it was an essential element in helping minimize the damage he would do to himself and to us, his family. The emotional and practical tools I acquired through my experience gave me the chance of helping him overcome the disease and salvage his marriage and his family.
It was then that I decided to write this book. As I said, many times I put the manuscript in the drawer hoping to forget about it. Yet I felt deeply the need not to abandon the project. I know that I started writing this book just to help those people who are least cared for when dealing with the tragedy of pathological gambling, to its unknown victims: the gambler's family.
They are the ones who pay the highest price and very little has been done and is done to help them. The constant questions of family members who do not know what to do and seek help, their anguish and despair, but above all the sense of baffling helplessness for the lack of tools to know, understand and deal with the problem convinced me of how much a book like this was necessary.
As I said, It was not easy to write it, but it was even more difficult to decide to publish it as it is now, because this book... it is not over. Maybe it never will be. In my constant interaction with gamblers and family members of gamblers I discover and learn every day something new, new dimensions of pain and subtler manifestations of the power of hope. Every success and any temporary regression of the families with whom I am or I come into contact force me to reconsider the validity of the statements, the accuracy of the analyses, the correctness of intuitions. And I would like to change words, rewrite a paragraph. But I was told that every day of delay in making it available would have taken away someone's chance to become aware in time of his condition.
I wondered more than once whether my procrastination was due only to my desire to produce a more complete work or whether it was the consequence of the deep fears that occasionally resurfaced. More than once I have wondered whether the help this book can give to the gamblers' family members (and consequently the gamblers) was enough to justify the danger of the judgment and criticism to which my family and I could be exposed in making public this certainly unflattering aspect of my past, of my private life. With the support of my family I have come to the conclusion that it is worth it.
No matter how low we gamblers have gone because of gambling, there is always the possibility of rising and redeeming ourselves from the past, and despite the damage and pain caused, the family can come out strengthened and more united than before. Fears, shame, guilt can be overcome. Trust can be regained. The bonds of love can be strengthened. It is not an easy path, but it is possible. .
