Overcoming Gambling: A Guide for Problem and Compulsive Gamblers

'If you want to give up gambling, then buying this book will be the best money that you ever spend.' - Paul Buck, recovered compulsive gambler, Founder and CEO of Epic Risk Management

Addiction to gambling and its consequences can be devastating - and can affect anyone, from any age or background.

This book is designed to help you - or a loved one - stop gambling forever. It will help you, or them, to recognize the phases of problem gambling, and to understand the release that happens when you create, and hit, rock bottom. As you come to learn more about this illness, you'll learn how to deal with the urges and start the path back towards dignity and self-respect. You'll also understand, once and for all, the futility of gambling and the cruel facts about this cruel industry.

Himself a recovered compulsive gambler, Phil Mawer has created an effective therapy that has helped countless people break out of their gambling prison and start enjoying life again - and his book will help you, too.

I wrote this book to help others get through this devastating gambling addiction and reclaim their life back. Successive governments in the UK are actively encouraging the gambling industry to flourish without even having the fundamentals of proper control in place. More and more young people are growing up thinking that gambling is "normal" and risk free. NOTHING could be further from the truth as I found out to my considerable cost. I don't blame anyone other than myself for the addiction I contracted but that is not so say that the industry didn't gladly assist in my downfall.

A gambling addiction is a nasty, hidden misunderstood illness. Most people will brush it of as selfish immature behaviour which, on the surface, is all it is. If you are in that camp, then please take a pause and think why would an intelligent, well educated, successful businessman, from a loving secure upbringing and with a successful career, throw everything away and destroy his life? For me it wasn't chasing an adrenalin rush; I got that in my job working in some of the "wildest" and most dangerous places on earth. It wasn't the money; I had more than I needed and could buy pretty much whatever I wanted. It wasn't boredom or loneliness. So why? I'll never know and for me it isn't important as that was the past.

My book concentrates on the now and the future. How you stop NOW and how you stay stopped in future. Working closely with my wife we continually look at the problem, and indeed the solutions, from both sides of the fence i.e. from the compulsive gambler's side and from the partner/spouse's side. That way we achieve a balanced approach. We look at the problem and solution from the partner's side not simply to better help the compulsive gambler but to better help the partner. Often we switch the focus away from the compulsive gambler and on to the partner as that is what the compulsive gambler needs to do. All the time they were gambling it was "me, me, me". Coming out of gambling has to be different.

I sincerely hope you will get a lot from this book what ever your involvement in problem and compulsive gambling is.

Life is good gamble free
Stay strong

Phil