What I’ve Learned as a Female Gambling Addict
“My first memory of gambling was popping into the local bookies on Grand National day aged 18 to lay an each-way bet for me and my mum…It was a man’s world, but I still recall the buzz of placing a potential winner and the desire to come back to collect my winnings after the race. It was like the die was cast.”
Cat Cochrane by Zainib Ahmed
By Cat Cochrane | Photo by Zainib Ahmed
There’s a line by former footballer and recovering addict Paul Merson in the documentary,
Paul Merson: Football, Gambling and Me, where he explains that despite past addictions to alcohol and cocaine, “by far the most destructive and the only one I’m struggling with today is gambling.”
I can identify with that.
At 19, I had an addiction to amphetamines, and have leaned heavily on alcohol at various stages of my life. I kicked the speed in time, out of both necessity and lack of access and I’m at a point where I can leave alcohol just as much as I can take it. It's my gambling addiction that’s had me tightest in its grip.
My first memory of gambling was popping into the local bookies on Grand National day aged 18 to lay an each-way bet for me and my mum. There was no way she’d ever step into the male domain of a ‘turf accountants’. In those days smoking was allowed in bookie shops and they certainly didn’t provide a female toilet. It was a man’s world, but I still recall the buzz of placing a potential winner and the desire to come back to collect my winnings after the race. It was like the die was cast.
I travelled and worked around the world during my 20s in a carefree, nomadic spirit that made settling back in Glasgow by the time I turned 30 so much harder. My first flat was in Govanhill and I was constantly itching for action. One of the things I latched onto was dipping in and out of a bookies on Allison Street, at first to play the Irish Lottery and then to lay bets on horses and football.
By the time online betting arrived, I was more settled in Glasgow, had a steady job and enough disposable income to choose what to fritter it on. I can’t quite remember how online gambling platforms found me or if I sought them out, but either way, I wanted a piece of all they had to offer. I signed up for an online account with the intention of laying a bet or two on the following weekend’s football matches, all from the comfort of my sofa. The layout of the site even in the early days was bedazzling; the sounds, the colours…the free offers.
Before long I’d ditched sports bets for the immediacy of roulette. Over a few years I created strategies of how to play the game in my favour, but the bottom line is ‘the house always wins.’ Roulette, like many casino games, is designed to lead players into a false sense of having the upper hand. One night I laid half a month’s wages on red after the wheel had spun in nine blacks in a row. It landed on black. I should have walked away from the whole thing there and then, but I’d well and truly crossed that invisible line into compulsive gambling.
There is a quote from George Orwell’s novel 1984 that reads ‘…football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.’ Looking back, this is how it was for me in the years leading up to the pandemic. As though walking about in a trance, I was being numbed by one thing and slowly addicted to another.
During Covid, my gambling behaviour accelerated totally out of control. Compulsive gambling requires time, access and money and I found myself in the perfect storm of having all of these – or the first two anyway, as the money I had from work and savings dwindled away.
I gambled in isolation and would tell my partner tall stories avoiding the real reasons I was sitting up all night on the sofa spinning my life away. It all came to a head in September 2021 when I had to come clean about my addiction.
Within a week I walked into my first Gamblers Anonymous meeting. Here I was in another male dominated space, thinking ‘where are all the women?’ I knew for a fact I wasn’t the only female gambling addict in the East End of Glasgow.
After eight months of attending Gamblers Anonymous, I was still gambling and I hit my rock bottom when I lost £600 in ten minutes in a city centre casino at 11am on a weekday.
That night I googled treatment centres for gambling addiction through a flood of shame and tears. Within a couple of months I was on a six-week residential rehab course in Birmingham (the only one for women across the UK). Weirdly I absolutely loved the experience and soaked up every ounce of advice from the therapist team alongside the wisdom of the other ladies, there for the same reasons as myself.
I’ve been in recovery for nearly three years since rehab and the only way I can stay away from a bet is by filling my willpower bank through support groups and being creative and staying healthy.
Today I try to look at gambling as a toxic relationship that I never want to go back to. Would I let a person treat me the way gambling has? I’ll keep asking myself that question for the rest of my life…and hope the answer is eternally NO.