I need Dr Phil - Part one....

**  I started writing this post two weeks ago....but it was all too hard, so I'm trying again today....

c/o sodahead.com

Not for me....well, I guess it is in a round about way for me.  I was watching yet another amazing Intervention on Dr Phil today, and I stood there crying and feeling the torture this poor family was going through, watching their family member literally killing themselves in front of their own eyes.  And there was nothing they could do about it.  Enter: Dr Phil.

Addiction is a nasty, evil and soul-killing thing.  It drains people, drains the people around them.  And unfortunately, too many members of my family have been afflicted with this evil, and I'm just about at my wit's end...

It all started with my Dad (well, I'm guessing his Dad, or his Dad's Dad, or someone prior to my Dad started it all?), who discovered the "joys" of gambling many many years ago.  Gambling pretty much ruined his life, not to mention his family's lives, which I guess in turn, means mine?  I don't see my life that way, i.e. ruined, but it was certainly altered.

Gambling led my family from a humungous house on the Gold Coast, a successful family plumbing business and what I would have considered, a pretty regular and happy family life, to smaller homes and businesses and a fairly dysfunctional family life.  Until we eventually had to sell everything and rent a house from a family friend.  The inevitable happened, and my parents divorced and we then lived in a caravan park for a couple of years.  This all happened in a matter of approximately seven years.  So it was a pretty swift fall from grace.  Some relief came in the form of my Step Dad and his job offer in Melbourne, so off we went.  But the damage had already been done, and I did not see or hear from my Father for the following 13 years.  I am however, pleased to say, he re-entered my life eight years ago, and we have a pretty good relationship.  I accept that he had/has a disease, and he is now a reasonably elderly man - so bygones are now bygones.

To say I have "issues" with and around gambling, would be a huge understatement!  I made it perfectly clear to my darling husband not long after we met, that the one thing that would be a deal-breaker, was gambling.  He and I now have an agreement that he is "allowed" (typing that sounds SO wrong) to gamble Melbourne Cup Day.  And it's a bit of family entertainment - the kids pick horses and put a dollar on them.  Win, win.

Needless to say - this first addiction was the first of many to emerge in my family, and I believe was the catalyst to all that would eventuate.....