4

Out of control

Raised in Sydney’s south by a bipolar single mother who was a heavy drug-user, Doug’s childhood and adolescent years were difficult, marked by an absence of affection. It often fell to him to care for his younger siblings. At home, he felt, as he puts it, ‘like I was always walking on eggshells’.

Despite his difficult home life, Doug had no behavioural problems, and performed well in school. Academia, however, wasn’t for him, and at the end of year eleven, he left school and moved to Sydney’s western suburbs to begin a carpentry apprenticeship. At the same time, he enlisted in the army reserves.

After completing his apprenticeship in December 1997, Doug established his own carpentry business. The early period was difficult, but over the next two years the business grew steadily.

Doug suffered a setback in his career when he was involved in a major accident in 2000 that left him with whiplash and nerve damage in his neck and lower back. Forced to take several weeks of medical leave from work, he found his days spent alone at home boring. So, one day, after lunch at his local pub, he sat down in front of a poker machine. It seemed as good a way as any to busy himself, and a great deal better than watching daytime television.

It was the first time in Doug’s life that he had played a poker machine. Only moments after feeding in $10, he won $700. He walked home, elated. ‘It felt like my stars had aligned,’ he says. Doug returned to the pub the very next day and played the same machine. This time, however, he wasn’t so lucky. He lost most of what he had won the day before. He felt cheated, ripped off. ‘I thought, Why the fuck can’t I win this time?’

Doug gambled regularly for the remainder of his recovery period — not daily, but once or twice a week. It was, he explains, ‘just something to do’. But once he had recovered and re-established a normal routine, poker machines faded from his life. Carpentry satisfied him immensely. He was meticulous in his craft, a self-described ‘perfectionist’, focused not on speed but on quality. He loved the independence of being his own boss at such a young age. Loved the fact that his business was growing. Loved the physicality of manual labour.

Doug gambled on rare occasions after he had recovered from the car crash and returned to work. But it was nothing like earlier times. He never played alone — only with friends when they were out at the pub together and someone suggested having a quick flutter — and would never spend more than $20. ‘I was very controlled and very mindful of my money back then,’ Doug says. ‘I had no reason why I should play the pokies regularly, and I certainly didn’t have any desire, because they didn’t give me any significant pleasure. They were artificial. They didn’t fulfil a need.’

Doug’s business prospered in the early years of the new millennium as he secured lucrative contracts for multiple jobs in the city. Tired of commuting such a long distance every day, and with the finances available, he moved to Sydney’s eastern suburbs in 2005.

Several years later, however, Doug began to crave a career change. He was good at carpentry, but it no longer challenged or excited him. He looked to the army for a fresh start and, in early 2014, became a full-time soldier. ‘I liked the [army] life,’ he explains. ‘It was more structured, more disciplined, and more balanced. There was more physical activity and more time to rest and relax. In a way, it was also more stable financially. The income was less than carpentry, but it was more regular. I thought, This is my life — this is what I’m going to do forever now.’

Doug found love around the same time. He and Jane were friends already, but they now realised there was something more between them. Not long after they started dating, she moved in with him.

Doug’s positive momentum, however, came to an abrupt halt shortly after joining the army full-time. At work, he was routinely harassed by one of his superiors. He would overload Doug with work, set unreasonable deadlines, interfere with his desk when it was unattended, refuse to offer help or guidance, refuse requests for leave, and, most humiliatingly, shower him with abuse in front of colleagues. ‘Your work’s shit!’ he would shout at Doug. ‘Fix your time management! Stop disobeying commands, you worthless piece of shit!’

Doug took all this ‘on the chin’, suppressing his angst. He was determined not to react, and set about proving to the superior, his colleagues, and himself that he was as capable, skilled, and hardworking a soldier as any. ‘I got so afraid about even taking a piss or shit that I’d work through the discomfort,’ Doug says. He would work overtime to complete tasks set by the superior, and even took on extra jobs he himself had noticed needed completing. But the harassment did not abate and, eventually, Doug started falling apart. He became depressed, full of self-loathing.

‘And that’s how it all started,’ Doug says.

Doug started going to a club close to the army base after work. It was his ‘decompression chamber’. At first, he just went for a beer, but then started to pair his drinking with gambling. ‘I was just looking for that immediate short-term relief. And, at the time, it felt good to play the pokies. It was relaxing. I could zone out.’ One early favourite game was the boxing-themed Prize Fight. Although he hasn’t played it in years, he still remembers it well. ‘When three bells line up, you get the feature that starts with, “DING! DING! DING! DING!”, like the sound at the start of a boxing match. That sound, it just gets in your head. I played that machine so many times.’

Doug’s visits to the club after work became more frequent and longer in duration. Soon he was there nearly every day for many hours, often returning home to find Jane already asleep. Solo visits to pubs nearby his home on the weekend to gamble also became standard. Like an incoming tide, the loss of control crept up on him imperceptibly. ‘I didn’t know it was happening. I read those little labels on the machines about gambling becoming addictive and thought, That’s not me. I’m okay. But, obviously, looking back now, I wasn’t.’

Doug entered a destructive feedback loop. The more he gambled, the more depressed he became, and the more he craved the relief that only playing poker machines could now provide. His depression was fuelled even more by the continued harassment at work. On bad nights when he gambled, if he was lucky, he’d be kicked out by security because the venue was closing while he still had some money left. If he was unlucky, he would leave only when his wallet had been drained. These were the worst moments. ‘I’d step out of that dark room, into the fresh air, and it was like being hit. I’d often walk all the way home in a rage. Sometimes the anger would last an hour, other times two days, other times a week.’

By mid-2014, Doug was at breaking point. Most days after work, he would drink and gamble heavily. His losses increased, as did his tolerance, so that only the biggest wins gave him the rush he craved. At home he was exhausted, irritable, and suffering from insomnia. Jane tried to help, but Doug shut her out. His gambling was so severe at this time that pay cheques would often vanish only hours after he received them. His savings were depleted rapidly. He was able to hide all this from Jane until the eviction notices began arriving because of unpaid rent and the gas and electricity were cut off due to unpaid bills. He often had no money to buy groceries, forcing him to smuggle out packaged-ration food from work. ‘It was shocking how much money from the necessities of life I redirected to feed this addiction. I was out of control.’

In September 2014, Doug admitted himself to the St Vincent’s Gambling Treatment Clinic on a recommendation from another psychologist he was seeing. It was a deeply shameful and embarrassing decision to make. No longer could he deny to himself — as he done for many months — that he did have a serious problem with gambling and that he needed professional help.

Prior to his first session, Doug’s counsellor had him complete an online survey to gather basic details about the extent of his gambling. Doug recorded that his urges to gamble were ‘intense’, occurring between daily and weekly, and that his weekly gambling expenditure accounted for an average of at least 50 per cent of his income.

Early on in counselling, Doug was informed about the design of poker machines and the psychological and neurological reasons for why he had so much trouble quitting. He learnt about ‘time on device’, the return-to-player percentage, near misses, losses disguised as wins, operant and classical conditioning, and the potency of unpredicted rewards. His reaction was a mix of shock, sadness, and fury. ‘It made me feel ripped off and manipulated,’ he tells me. ‘They took advantage of my human vulnerabilities. I wanted to pick up a sledgehammer and go and smash a machine when I heard about all of it.’

By early 2015, Doug was already benefiting from counselling. He was less angry and ashamed of himself, and while he still thought about gambling every day, his relapses were getting less frequent and less severe. He once refrained from gambling for 15 days — a feat he had not achieved since he had started gambling at the club after work. He also started keeping a diary, spent more time with Jane, and started playing the guitar. He started moving into, as he says, a more ‘virtuous cycle’.

But in June 2015, Doug’s recovery was wrecked by a complete mental breakdown. The breakdown had been building for some time, he says, but was finally set off one day at work following a heated argument with his superior. Doug was threatened with disciplinary action. After it ended, he was ‘paralysed with anxiety’. In the following days, he was placed on extended medical leave from work.

His relationship with Jane was severely strained after this; on several occasions, she nearly left him. Unsurprisingly, in such a fragile mental state, Doug relapsed. ‘I felt so low about life and myself,’ he tells me. ‘I’ve never had suicidal tendencies, but I certainly understood then how people do it. When you’re that fucking low and you keep losing your money in the pokies — it’s just a negative cycle to fucking nowhere. I had no hope about anything — for the future, for my work.’

Doug underwent extensive counselling — at St Vincent’s and elsewhere — for the remainder of the year. Attempts to return to full-time army service were too stressful and were ultimately unsuccessful; the offending superior was still serving, despite Doug’s repeated complaints to other higher-ranked officers. But Doug managed to regain control of his gambling again and to patch up the many rips in his relationship with Jane. He also took on part-time work as a truck driver while he decided whether he would continue trying to return to the army — ideally, at a new base — or resign.

By the new year, Doug was in a ‘very a positive state’. His future in the army was still uncertain, but he and Jane were doing well, he felt he had mostly recovered from the mental breakdown six months earlier, and the urges to gamble were fading.

But addiction is an unpredictable beast. Even when it seems dead, it may just be sleeping, ready to wake at any moment. As it did for Doug in early 2016, shortly after he won the grand jackpot of over $6,000 at Maloney’s Hotel.

Doug’s story isn’t an uncommon one.

In 1996, Debbie moved from her hometown of Port Pirie in South Australia to Adelaide, with a man she had fallen in love with and her two sons from a previous relationship. Very quickly, however, things started to deteriorate. A couple of months after the move, her partner left her, and her eldest son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and began harming himself. It was, Debbie says, a ‘torrid time’ — made worse by a lack of support from those close to her. ‘My family didn’t understand anything I was going through, so I felt completely alone.’

Debbie opted to stay in Adelaide instead of moving back to Port Pirie. ‘Psychologically, I had moved on from the country, and I wanted to make things work here,’ she explains.

At first, gambling seemed to help Debbie’s situation. Employed as a full-time nurse in an aged-care home, she would go to her local pub to play the pokies once or twice a week after work for an hour or two. It was her one chance to relax and escape the stresses of her life at home. ‘I found a lot of solace in playing the pokies,’ she says. ‘They were mind-numbing, mesmerising. I didn’t have to think about anything when I was playing them. I could block out the world.’ The prospect of winning money, she adds, had little attraction for her. ‘It wasn’t about winning, because I was smart enough to know that I wasn’t ever going to win in the long run. It was about escaping.’

What made the machines so mesmerising, Debbie explains, was their repetitiveness and monotony. The music also added to their hypnotic quality — ‘it was like someone singing a lullaby’ — as did the artwork and animations. ‘If those machines were black and white and silent, no one would play them, because there would be no appeal whatsoever. There would be no appeal, no stimulation.’

Within the first year from when she started gambling, the amount of time and money Debbie spent on poker machines increased dramatically. They had gone from being an ‘escape’ to a ‘whole way of life’.

‘I would’ve gone every day if I could’ve,’ she explains. ‘But I couldn’t. So I would go whenever I had the chance. I would leave for work half an hour or an hour early to gamble before starting. Or I’d put some money in on my way to the shops, just for a quick fix. Or I’d call in sick for work, and spend a whole day gambling.’ She struggled to sleep because of the urges, and on some mornings would be completely fixated on poker machines. ‘I’d wake up and think straight away about when I could play. My body would be aflutter. You know when you get that excitement when you’re going to a show you’re really looking forward to? That’s what I’d feel.’

Debbie says that as soon she arrived in the carpark of a venue she would begin to be ‘lost in the pokie world’. Sometimes she would arrive before the venue had even opened, which frustrated her greatly. ‘It would really bug me when a venue was meant to open at 9.00am, but its doors were still closed at three minutes past. I’d get really antsy; that was time that I could’ve been playing. And that’s really sad, but that’s just the nature of the beast.’

Debbie would always begin a session with a set amount of $100 or $200, adamant that she would leave the moment she reached her limit. Rarely did this happen. ‘More often than not, I’d lose all of what I set aside,’ she says. ‘Then I’d take more money out from the ATM and spend all of that.’ In the heat of the moment, she did not consider the consequences of this, nor notice the signs advising her to ‘take a break’ or to ‘gamble responsibly’. She was ‘oblivious to the real world’. That immediately changed, however, when she stepped outside and the real world ‘hit me in the face’. ‘I’d have no money and no self-esteem. I felt so revolting, so angry, and somehow I had to figure out a way to carry on with life outside the pokie room.’

Debbie’s social life suffered greatly because of her gambling addiction. She excluded herself from activities with friends — sometimes because she was paranoid that her gambling might be exposed, other times because she wanted to gamble instead of socialising. Worse still was the toll that her gambling took on her home life. As a single mother, she was barely able to provide the basics for her two sons — let alone the extra support her eldest son needed because of his mental health. ‘We were lucky to have food on the table sometimes, because I’d spent it all. It was hard. I felt like such a shitty parent, because I couldn’t give my children what they needed. I could never provide for them in a monetary or emotional way like other people could.’

Debbie knew that poker machines were the reason for the many problems she faced. This, however, didn’t reduce her obsession with them. As she says, ‘It was like a one-way love affair. Everything else was secondary.’

One night in 2000, Debbie attempted suicide. ‘I took a whole bunch of pills, and tried to end it all. I couldn’t cope.’ She survived, and spent three months in hospital recovering. Up to then, she had successfully hidden her addiction from her family, despite regularly borrowing money from them, but was now forced to come clean. Doing so didn’t help. ‘When I told my sister about my addiction, it was as if I was an alien,’ Debbie explains. ‘She couldn’t understand that it was an addiction that had taken over my whole body and my whole life, and that every living minute I would think about the pokies in some way, shape, or form.’

Even after her suicide attempt, Debbie continued gambling. But an incident in 2015 was the catalyst for her quitting for good. ‘I’d been playing the pokies one morning and lost every last cent,’ she explains. ‘At work in the afternoon, all I could think about was what I’d done and how I could make up for it. I was still thinking about it when I was driving home. I wasn’t concentrating and, as I turned a corner, I nearly clipped a man on a pushbike. I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. I could’ve killed him, because all I was thinking about was poker machines.’

As soon as she arrived home, Debbie phoned the gambling helpline, and spoke for several hours. ‘I poured everything out,’ she explains. She took the counsellor’s advice, and immediately signed up for professional treatment at a local gambling-counselling clinic. ‘I still feel sick about how close I came to killing that cyclist. I kept thinking to myself before that, You need to stop. You need to get help. It’s out of hand. But sometimes you need a big event like that to make you stop. That was my turning point.’

Nowadays, Debbie works as a receptionist at an Adelaide hospital. She is still receiving professional treatment, and while cravings sometimes spontaneously appear, she has managed to ignore them. She says she is ‘finding life is really worth living at the moment’, but is still ‘up to my eyeballs in debt’, and is deeply troubled by ‘having nothing to show for all these years of working’.

Another thing troubles Debbie: while she understands the basics of how poker machines work, and that they are built to keep players gambling, she does not fully comprehend how she became so heavily addicted. ‘If I could go back 20 years, I’d bash myself on the head for being so stupid,’ she says. ‘I let my life fall in the toilet. And I still really don’t know why or how it happened.’

Unlike Debbie, Luke isn’t bewildered by what happened to him. He believes that poker machines lead players into a ‘false sense that you have control when realistically you’ve altered your brain chemistry so that you don’t necessarily have free will anymore. Your brain is starving for that stimulation. People get stimulated by drugs, and that gives them that particular buzz. Other people do healthy things like go running, which gives them the particular buzz they seek. And then there’s poker machines. They’re well researched, well built, and well designed. They’re perfect apparatuses for a particular behavioural addiction. And that was me. That was my drug of choice.’

As a child growing up on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Luke ‘absolutely hated’ gambling. ‘It trashed my family,’ he says. After his mother passed away when he was eight years old, he witnessed his father becoming addicted to poker machines. With his two siblings, Luke would often wait for hours in the back of the family car outside one of the local pubs for his father to re-emerge. ‘It would go either one of two ways — he’d be stoked, loaded with cash, or it’d be really bad and there’d be no money for the rest of the fortnight.’

Luke has worked since he was eleven, when he took his first job as a paperboy. Living in Melbourne in his early twenties, he dreamed of a career either in emergency services or the defence force. As luck would have it, an opportunity arose to join the navy as a helicopter technician at the Nowra base, just south of Sydney. But there was one problem: he had recently married, and his wife, Emma, was midway through university and unable to leave Victoria. They decided to do long-distance.

After work, Luke would relax at one of Nowra’s pubs or clubs — all of which had poker machines. Despite memories of his father, Luke started playing them with his mates. He won big one of the first times he played, walking away with over $200 after betting only $10. ‘That was the heroin point,’ he explains. ‘Most problem gamblers have a heroin point on poker machines, one moment they remember vividly. But no matter how many times you push the button, no matter how many times you win, it will never be as good as the first. But you keep on yearning for it.’

After a while, Luke started gambling alone. He became obsessed with the sensation of winning — a sensation, he says, that is incomparable to anything else he has experienced. ‘Your heart pumps faster. You’re absolutely zoned in. You’re in a cocoon, and the noise is directed at you and you only. You get the tick ti tick ti tick ti tick when the reels bounce over, and then the bells go off, and it’s like smack.’

He was posted to the Middle East for service and, naturally, his gambling ceased while there. But when he returned he was ‘cashed up’, and moved to Sydney for work. Emma was still unable to join him, but the two began planning for the future. Luke set aside $20,000 to buy a property with her in Nowra.

Living in Potts Point, he was surrounded by pubs with poker machines. At many of them, he was treated like, as he puts it, a ‘VIP’. ‘I’d come in, sit down, and about five minutes later would have a beer sitting next to me. And I was ready to roll. Some nights, I’d stay until closing time — three, four in the morning — and I’d just feed money into the machines.’ The feeling of emerging into the world having lost everything, he says, was like an anxiety attack. ‘It’s a wave of loss and grief that washes over you, and you’ve got no control over it. You’ve got no money left or the venue is closed, so you can’t even try to win it back. You’re kicking yourself for it, but then you’d go back the next day or the next week and do the same thing, chasing after that rush.’

Luke stopped seeing many friends, and the savings he set aside for the property in Nowra dwindled. ‘I forgot about everything else — I just wanted to have a slap.’ Debts swelled, and on one occasion, he blew his entire tax return — $6,000 — in one sitting. ‘I got home, phoned my wife in absolute agony. “How do I stop this happening?” I said to her.’

Eventually, the two did move to Nowra together. But Luke didn’t stop gambling — he simply became better at concealing it from Emma. After a while, however, he was unable to conceal it anymore.

He is still pained by one particular event in December 2012. He was at an end-of-year function at a pub in Nowra with work colleagues. After it ended, he stuck around to have what he thought would be a quick slap.

At 2.00pm, Emma rang, asking him to pick up Panadol on the way home because one of their kids was sick. Of course, he told her — he’d be home within the hour. At 3.00pm, he was still gambling, as he was at 4.00pm when he received another call from Emma, asking where he was. Two hours later, and still not home, Luke’s phone rang again. ‘She was shouting at me — “Where the hell are you!? Your kid’s sick! The chemist is shut! Don’t bother coming home!” That absolutely annihilated the trust I had with her in one go.’ After this, Luke was an ‘absolute wreck. And I know Emma was, too.’

Having undergone extensive treatment, Luke is now in a ‘very healthy space — mentally and physically’. His marriage has recovered and his urges are ‘very well managed’, thanks to several strategies he has developed to minimise the risk of gambling. He doesn’t carry large sums of cash with him, and Emma now has full visibility over his finances, allowing her to see whether there are any significant and unusual transactions. But Luke says he knows he is still ‘addicted’ to poker machines. ‘I deliberately avoid going anywhere near a pub or a club because I know that if I put twenty into the pokies, I’ll put in everything that’s in my wallet and maybe more. So I just avoid those places as much as I can.’

Luke says he is saddened by his addiction, but is no longer ashamed by it. ‘It’s a part of me that I’ve grown to accept. And now that I’ve come to terms with it, I know my risks, and that’s the first step in anyone’s journey to change.’

Michelle has never played poker machines. She has worked as a financial planner for most of her adult life, carefully managing other people’s money as well as her own. She earns a healthy salary, and has always been a frugal spender and a diligent saver. Poker machines aren’t just stupid to her — ‘they’re boring as bat shit’.

Despite this, poker machines have still wrought havoc on Michelle’s life.

She met Charles one Friday afternoon in 2002 while having drinks with friends at a pub in the Sydney CBD. She had only recently left a long-term relationship, and wasn’t planning on entering another. But Charles was charming, down-to-earth, and handsome. She felt a spark, and followed her heart.

Her and Charles started dating. When having a drink out together, he would sometimes play poker machines, but Michelle wasn’t alarmed by this. She thought he was like other people she knew who gambled just for a bit of fun. One Saturday, however, soon after they had begun seeing each other, Michelle picked him up from a pub close to where he had been working. He was despondent, and when Michelle asked what was wrong, he confessed he had gambled his whole day’s pay on poker machines. Michelle was shocked, but did not think it was too serious. She thought, she says, it was a ‘one-off’.

The two eventually bought a house together in the western suburbs of Sydney, and had two sons. It was then that Michelle noticed more serious and regular warning signs. Strange withdrawals from the bank account they shared, many of them from their local pub, started appearing. Over time, they became larger and more frequent. Michelle grew worried. ‘He wasn’t coming home with presents and he wasn’t buying shit, which made me wonder. I’d ask him, “What’d you do with the money?” And he would get shitty with me.’ Wanting to keep the peace, she wouldn’t press the issue. ‘I said to myself that maybe I’m a bit of a tight-arse, and fair enough if he wants to spend fifty or twenty bucks here and there.’

Then, one day, an envelope with a ‘Virgin Credit’ letterhead arrived in the mail. It was addressed to Charles, but, thinking it was junk mail, as they did not, to her knowledge, have a bank account with Virgin, Michelle opened it. ‘You have exceeded your credit limit,’ it read. Michelle realised it wasn’t junk mail. She confronted Charles, who confessed that he had been secretly gambling, had set up his own bank account, and was in $30,000 debt.

‘When he came out and said all that, I was a mess,’ Michelle says. But she was relieved when Charles agreed to get professional help. ‘I thought, That’s so good — he’s finally seen the light. He seemed genuinely relieved that it was all out in the open; that he had this problem with poker machines.’

Charles seemed to have recovered after several months of counselling. But then he relapsed. Michelle found out, not from him telling her, but after noticing that $1,000 had been withdrawn from their joint account over the span of a few hours one day at their local pub. Her trust was shattered. ‘I knew relapses were very common, but when it happened it was very hard.’

Following this, Michelle took control of all of her and Charles’ finances, and paid him an allowance as a way to manage the risk of him gambling. After a few months, when again he seemed back in control, they agreed this was no longer needed. But Charles relapsed again, blowing over $1,000 in one night. Michelle’s sympathy and compassion for the person she calls ‘the love of my life’ still did not wane. ‘I wasn’t going to just walk away and say, “See ya later, you’ve had a relapse.” I mean, we’ve got two kids together, and this is a person I know that’s riddled with problems who is obviously trying to fix that.’

Michelle took full control of their finances again, reinstating the allowance system. But despite her attempts to help, Charles deteriorated further. He became bitter and angry, and their relationship became severely strained.

One day in 2014, Charles demanded that Michelle give him an extra $50 — for petrol, he explained. When she refused, he stormed out of the house. Michelle rang for help from Charles’ mother, who told her that earlier that morning Charles had also rung her, asking for $50 — for a group lunch, he had said. ‘He rang his mother, who’s on Centrelink, told her to go to the next suburb to transfer $50 to his bank account, when his pay was due to hit the account the next day.’ Michelle was distraught upon discovering this, but when Charles returned home that day, she remained calm. ‘I told him, “I just want honesty. I’m here for you. I understand you have a serious problem.” And then he shouted back, “I don’t have a problem! You need help! You need a psychiatrist!”.

Michelle left Charles that night. Four years later, they remain separated. She is now renting, and has entered into a shared-custody agreement. The hardest times for her are Monday and Tuesday nights, and every second weekend — those times that she doesn’t have the kids. They know their father has a gambling addiction, because Michelle explained it to them after the separation. When they asked what a poker machine was, she told them it was a machine that people put money in, hoping it will pay money out. ‘It’s quite weird when you explain it to a kid. It sounds so stupid, which it is.’

Michelle hoped that, by separating, Charles would take steps to address his addiction and that they might be able to save their relationship. But friends have told her he is still gambling. Going by the fact that he is regularly late in paying child support, and sometimes doesn’t pay it at all, Michelle suspects he still has a serious problem.

But she isn’t angry or hateful towards Charles. Even now, she worries deeply that debt collectors are chasing him and that he may take his own life. She is also deeply curious about his addiction. ‘I hate the fact that I don’t know what goes through his mind. As much as I try to get on with my life, till the day I die I’ll be trying to figure out his life.’ As she says this, tears well in her eyes and her whole jaw quivers. Her bottom lip almost folds in on itself, as if to contain the deafening scream that’s been building inside for several years. But she quickly steadies herself, and then apologises for becoming emotional.

Regular counselling sessions are helping Michelle move on. She knows that committing to the separation, as hard as it is, is the only option for her and her children’s long-term wellbeing. ‘From a financial perspective, forgetting the emotional side, I can’t have a loan, a debt, an asset in joint names with someone who’ll turn around and say, “Oops, sorry.” I feel like a bitch. But it’s for his sake as well. I just wish that we could all go home and celebrate the kids’ birthdays and have dinner together. But I know that will never happen.’