Gambling addiction therapy

What has changed

Gambling used to require a shop, an opening time and a walk. Now it lives in your pocket, accepts money instantly, never closes, and is designed by people who study exactly how to keep you there.

The consequences are structural, not moral. In-play betting means a decision every few seconds instead of every few minutes. Free-bet offers arrive precisely when you have stopped. Losses are abstract numbers rather than notes leaving your hand. And the whole thing happens on the same device you use for everything else, at two in the morning, in a house full of sleeping people.

Chasing

The single most damaging feature of gambling, and the one that separates it from almost every other addiction, is the belief that the problem contains its own solution.

You are down eight hundred pounds. Every instinct says the answer is to win eight hundred pounds back. So the very thing that caused the loss becomes, urgently, the only route out of it. No alcoholic ever believed one more drink would undo the last three years of drinking. Gamblers believe the equivalent every day, and the belief is seductive precisely because occasionally it is true.

Chasing is where a manageable problem becomes a catastrophic one, usually inside a few weeks.

Signs it has taken hold

• You gamble more when you lose, not less.
• You have lied about how much, or how recently.
• You have borrowed, moved money between accounts, or used a credit card.
• The stakes have crept up because smaller ones stopped registering.
• You feel most alive when a bet is running, and flat the rest of the time.
• You have self-excluded and then found a way around it.
• Your partner does not have the full picture.

How we work on it

1. Make the money real. Adding up the actual, honest total is frequently the hardest hour of the work and frequently the most decisive.
2. Build friction. GAMSTOP self-exclusion, the gambling block your bank almost certainly offers, blocking software, and moving control of money. This is not the therapy, but it buys the therapy time to work.
3. Understand the chase. Seeing it as a mechanism rather than a judgement is what allows you to interrupt it.
4. Ride out urges. Gambling urges are exceptionally sharp and exceptionally short. That is good news for urge-surfing work.
5. Address the flatness. Nearly everyone who stops describes life going grey. That is real, temporary, and needs to be planned for — it is the point at which most people relapse.
6. Handle debt and disclosure. Not financial advice, but the decisions about who to tell and when are therapeutic questions with real consequences.
7. Rebuild round values. What the money and the hours were for.

Suicide risk — said plainly

Gambling carries a higher association with suicidal thinking than other addictions, largely because of debt, secrecy and the speed at which a life can come apart. If you have been having thoughts of ending your life, please tell someone today — Samaritans on 116 123, free, any hour. It is a common thought in this situation and it can be talked about.