Macauley’s story
My relationship with gambling started much earlier than I realised. Some of my earliest memories involve playing fruit machines at caravan parks, but there’s another memory that has always stayed with me: being a young child sitting behind the advertising boards in a betting shop with a sausage roll while the adults around me gambled.
At that age, I obviously wasn’t thinking about gambling addiction, odds, losses or the harm gambling could cause. It was simply somewhere I was used to being. Looking back now, gambling had become familiar to me long before I was old enough to understand what it could become.
As I got older, that familiarity became participation. By 16, I was using fake ID to get into betting shops and doing football coupons on a Saturday. I loved it. There was something exciting about doing something I knew I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I was underage, it felt grown-up, people around me thought it was cool, and gambling certainly didn’t feel dangerous.
At the same time, rugby was a huge part of my life. I had a professional rugby scholarship between the ages of 16 and 18 and was an aspiring professional player. I had opportunities in front of me and a direction I thought my life was going in. What I couldn’t see at the time was how quickly gambling was becoming more important than everything else.
Progression
When gambling became more important than everything else
What began as something exciting gradually became something that dictated more and more of my life. Between the ages of 16 and 23, I had and lost more than ten jobs. I was repeatedly getting sacked because, ultimately, gambling was more important to me than turning up for work, keeping a job or building a career.
It affected my rugby ambitions, my university education, my friendships, my family and my finances. Eventually, it affected almost every part of who I was. I lost all of my childhood friendships and went from being a teenager with genuine opportunities ahead of me to somebody in my early twenties with very little employment stability, hardly any references and no real idea what sort of future I had left.
Financially, I accumulated more than £100,000 in personal debt. But even that number doesn’t properly explain what gambling took from me. The damage to my relationships, opportunities, mental health and the people around me was far greater. Eventually, my mental health deteriorated to the point where gambling contributed to self-harm.
Asking for help
I knew something was wrong before I reached rock bottom
One of the biggest reasons prevention matters so much to me today is that I actually knew something was wrong while I was still young. At 18, I recognised that my relationship with gambling had become a serious problem and I tried to ask for help.
But I was young and I hadn’t yet lost everything. I hadn’t accumulated the level of debt that would come later, every relationship hadn’t disappeared and my life hadn’t completely fallen apart. I came away from that early attempt at getting help questioning whether my problem was really serious enough. Part of me began to think that perhaps I had overreacted and that I simply needed to learn how to control my gambling.
I couldn’t.
The years that followed became considerably more destructive, and that experience has stayed with me ever since. I often wonder what might have happened if, at 16, 17 or 18, I had met somebody relatable with lived experience of gambling addiction who could have shown me honestly where this could lead.
I needed somebody who could explain that I wasn’t too young for gambling to become a problem, that I didn’t need to have lost everything before I deserved help, and that struggling to control my gambling didn’t make me an idiot. More than anything, I needed to understand that I wasn’t alone and that there were people who genuinely wanted to help me.
Would one conversation have changed everything? Nobody can know that, and I would never pretend that one session can prevent every person from experiencing gambling harm. But I might have understood what was happening to me much earlier, and I might have reached out for the right help before gambling took so much.
Rock bottom
The consequences were no longer only about me
Eventually, gambling left me almost completely isolated. Most of the people I had grown up with were gone. I had stolen from one of my brothers and had been cut off by another. I was in an enormous amount of debt and felt like I had destroyed almost every opportunity I had ever been given.
By that point, I felt like I had very few people left in my life apart from my partner and my mum. I had reached a place where I couldn’t see much of a future for myself.
Then I found out I had a child on the way.
That changed the way I looked at everything because the consequences were no longer only about me. I had to think about the kind of dad I was going to be and the kind of environment I was going to bring a child into. I knew I couldn’t continue allowing gambling, debt, lies and instability to dictate my life and then allow those consequences to become my child’s consequences too.
I had reached rock bottom, and I knew something had to change.
Recovery
Recovery meant rebuilding
Recovery for me has never simply been about counting the number of days since a bet. It has been about rebuilding everything gambling damaged.
I’ve had to rebuild broken relationships and regain trust. I’ve worked extremely hard to deal with the financial consequences of my gambling and become debt-free. I’ve had to create stability where there was once chaos and learn how to live in a world where gambling advertising and promotion can sometimes feel almost impossible to avoid.
Most importantly, I’ve had to build a future from a position where I once genuinely didn’t believe I had one.
Today my life looks completely different. I’m a dad. I’m a business owner. I’ve rebuilt relationships and become debt-free. I’ve also had opportunities to use my lived experience professionally, delivering gambling harm education within some of the biggest education organisations in the country.
At my lowest point, I would never have believed any of that was possible.
That’s also why you won’t find a last-bet date or a running recovery counter on this website. If somebody is struggling to make it through one day, I don’t want them looking at somebody years further down the road and thinking, “I could never do that.”
I would rather talk about what recovery can make possible. Relationships can be rebuilt. Debt can be overcome. Trust can return. Stability can come back. You can find purpose again. A future that once felt completely impossible can gradually become your reality.
You don’t have to rebuild everything today. You just need to know that things can be rebuilt.
Purpose
When lived experience became a purpose
As my own recovery progressed, I found myself spending more time supporting other people struggling with gambling. That began to change the way I looked at my own experiences. I became interested not only in helping somebody after they had reached rock bottom, but in understanding why so many people seemed to be getting there before meaningful conversations and support reached them.
I started looking more closely at gambling harm education, prevention and support, particularly around Plymouth and the wider South West. I wanted to understand the sector properly, so I began approaching organisations already doing this work and offering my time voluntarily so that I could learn.
In early 2025, that eventually led to an opportunity through Against the Odds and Aaron Abbott and gave me the chance to begin delivering lived-experience gambling harm education professionally.
That work gave me something I hadn’t expected. I started waking up each day feeling like I was worth something. For years, gambling had made me feel like I had very little to offer anybody. Suddenly, some of the worst experiences of my life could be used to connect with another person and potentially make a difference.
I could walk into a room and speak honestly about gambling — not because I had read about addiction in a textbook, but because I had lived through it, experienced the consequences and then experienced what it takes to rebuild afterwards.
The Prevention Project
Why I founded The Prevention Project
The more work I did, the stronger one thought became: we need to reach people earlier.
Earlier than the lost job. Earlier than the overwhelming debt. Earlier than the destroyed relationships. Earlier than self-harm. Earlier than somebody reaching a point where they believe they have nothing left.
I wanted to use everything I had learned through gambling addiction, recovery, supporting others and professional lived-experience delivery to create something rooted here in the South West. I had seen what I felt was a need for more gambling harm education, more relatable lived-experience conversations and clearer routes towards support in the communities around me.
That became The Prevention Project.
I didn’t create it to walk into classrooms and bang an anti-gambling drum. I’m not there to tell every young person that they should never gamble, and I won’t pretend that one hour with me can guarantee somebody never experiences gambling harm.
I want to start conversations that I wish somebody had started with me.
I want young people to understand how something that begins as fun can gradually change. I want them to recognise the warning signs earlier. I want schools, colleges, sport and organisations to feel better equipped to understand gambling harm and respond when somebody needs them. And if somebody sitting quietly in one of my sessions is already struggling, I want them to leave knowing that asking for help is possible.
Sometimes success might be a disclosure or somebody reaching out afterwards. Sometimes it might simply be two friends talking about the session later. And sometimes it might be a young person walking to the bus after school, still thinking about something they heard earlier that day.
That matters to me.
What I wish somebody had told me
I’d want him to know that somebody genuinely wanted to help him
If I could sit down with the teenage version of myself now, I wouldn’t tell him he was stupid. I wouldn’t shame him for gambling, and I wouldn’t simply tell him to stop.
I’d tell him that he wasn’t alone. I’d tell him that struggling to control gambling didn’t make him an idiot or a failure. I’d tell him that other people were experiencing the same thing and that there was nothing to be ashamed of.
And most importantly, I’d want him to know that somebody genuinely wanted to help him.
That message sits at the heart of The Prevention Project.
My experience is personal, but the purpose of sharing it isn’t to make my story the centre of everything we do. It’s to use what happened to create understanding for somebody else, to start conversations earlier and, hopefully, to help someone recognise gambling harm before it takes what it took from me.
I can’t change what happened before.
But I can use it to change what happens next.
The experience is personal. The purpose is prevention.
Whether you’re a school, a sports club, an organisation, or someone who needs to talk — start with a conversation.
Book a conversation