My father was a gambler. He did not see his behavior as reckless. He had many highs and as many lows. I felt every one.
His gambling took different forms. He defied legal advice and, when I was thirteen, lost everything. We abruptly moved across the country to live with my older sister and her husband. She had endured similar rocky times alongside my brother when they were young. I’m hesitant to say that what I lived through was worse, but I know this much is true: Dad’s recklessness had progressed alongside his denial.
My father covered up his shame of loss through brooding and sadness, and my mother expressed hers through neediness and unrelenting anger, including anger at me. They had a combustible relationship after we moved, and the intensity barely diminished for decades, right up until the day he died.
Dad was both a hard worker and dreamer, a valuable combination in work and life, but it was his propensity toward the belief that he would beat the odds and “overcome” no matter what he did that led to trouble. Distorted thinking and illusion of control—these traits apply to most addictions. But gambling is the meth of money problems—and unfortunate is the one who dips their toe in and is sucked in up to their neck. In fact, even the family treatment approach departs from most other addictions in one key area: detachment from resources. It is advised that, once a partner finds out about the gambling debts, they separate the finances when possible, and that the nonaddicted spouse take complete control of the money—debit cards, credit cards, paychecks—before they, too, are swallowed up in the downward spiral of debt and can’t stop it. The velocity of loss adds to the treacherous nature of this particular addiction.
In recent years, gambling has gotten a glamorous makeover. Today it’s known as gaming. Video game-like apps allow for seamless phone wagers and joining bets with others. It all looks so easy, so normal, and so fun. For a great history of this slow, methodical rebranding, see Danny Funt’s Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling.
Jody Bechtold, LCSW, ICGC-II, BACC, is a gambling addiction expert and co-author of The Gambling Disorder Treatment Handbook: A Guide for Mental Health Professionals. In a course I recently completed for my clinical license renewal, I saw my experience validated in her book and felt a more mature sadness for the pressure my father felt and for his helplessness.
Bechtold writes about frequent mood swings that the gambler/gamer exhibits, including irritability, restlessness, or agitation. These often occur, she notes, when individuals attempt to cut down or stop gambling. I have seen this also occur when money is lost in significant amounts or when appreciation for gains is not met with the same enthusiasm the individual feels.
Another characteristic I’ve noticed in people who gamble—or game—is how they distance themselves from loved ones, suddenly leaving the room to be alone, perhaps to check on scores or investments, to see what their wager is doing, and if they’ve won or lost. My father would spend a lot of time on the phone or away, taking long drives presumably for work—but who really knows?
In 2021, researchers wrote in The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health “that the experience of gambling behavior in itself is a dynamic experience of events in time series, where gamblers anchor on the most recent event—typically a small loss or rare win.” They note that “this is a highly adaptive, but erroneous, decision-making mechanism, where anchoring on the most recent event alters the psychological representations of substantial and accumulated loss in the past to a representation of negligible loss. In other words, people feel better while they gamble.”
In the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, researchers note that even if a long string of losses prevails before a win, the gambler will see their value. “With this restructuring, even games of (objectively) negative expected value, such as those at casinos, may be subjectively positive. The steeper the delay discounting, the greater the subjective value of the gamble (over normal ranges of discounting steepness). Frequent gamblers, who value gambles highly, would thus be expected to discount delayed rewards more steeply than would nongamblers.”
Both studies validate my understanding that, even when my father was losing, he believed he could eventually be winning. This was not based on reality—that we were nearly homeless, for example—but on the “bet,” hope, and authentic desire that he would do better; that he would win. It’s sad, really, how this lightened his mood, but only very temporarily. He had no real agency in the matter, so feeling good was in correlation to the win.
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We live in a society with free will and capitalism with porous guardrails. I sometimes wonder if my father were alive now, what he would do with a cell phone and the apps on it that provide a direct line to the promise of a winner’s high.
Fate intervened. He died at 74 on an upward trend. Cell phones at the time were a rarity. And his balance sheet was in the positive.
I don’t know what would have happened had he lived longer.
