How affected others become aware that the person close to them experienced gambling difficulties is different for children, parents or partners. For most, looking back there were early signs that something was wrong, but they were unaware of the extent of the harm until financial stresses or debt were revealed, or they saw mental health deteriorate. Overwhelmingly, people describe how they had not known about gambling addiction or harm and struggle to understand what is happening.
Children
For affected others who were children, some have memories from a young age of their parent gambling. Some are aware as children of the damage being done by gambling. They describe how their childhood was marked by gambling and gambling harm. Others become aware as adults of the role that gambling difficulties played in their childhood.
I think my first memories probably begin at age four or five… But essentially, I was born into a family that’s a working-class family. Both my parents are actually immigrants. They got married in the UK and it was an arranged marriage. I think the story of gambling harm starts around then. I’m not really sure exactly if my dad had been gambling before prison or after prison, but I do know that as soon as my mum had met him there were sort of difficulties right from the beginning.
I remember when I was younger going into pubs and playing on the fruit machines. We would play with him as well, thinking it was a game. I remember seeing him putting money in. I was very young and at that age, you think adults have all the money in the world.
When I was about eight years old, I started to help my dad access gambling through the laptop or the computer. That would involve logging onto horse racing live streams and putting them on for him. I remember even setting up an online casino account and being there to help him deposit and withdraw money as a kid.
Some are protected by their family members and do not find out about their parent’s gambling difficulties until they are older. When they look back, this makes sense of some of their childhood experiences.
When I was younger and they sat down and chatted and said that they were separating, at the time, it was “mummy and daddy don’t love each other anymore.” This thing is not going to impact you, etc. Then from then as I’ve grown older, I knew relatively soon that it was due to an affair, but then things would come out about him gambling.
I always remember him being taken to the races. He took me for my birthday. I loved horses when I was growing up, used to do horse riding, everything. I thought, “Oh, great, it’s just this.” Now, I’m looking back, because I was like, “We got access to here, we got access to there.” I’m like, “Was that an early VIP scheme?” Because he’s regularly betting, he’s then getting tickets to come to Haydock.
Parents
Parents of children who gambled explain they did not understand how damaging gambling could be. They were unaware of gambling addiction or harm compared to other issues such as alcohol or drugs. Some parents describe witnessing their children starting to gamble during their teenage years or when they are older. In some cases, the harm becomes quite severe before parents recognise that there is a problem – often when financial harms from gambling become clear. Parents describe not initially realising the extent of the gambling difficulties and that people cannot ‘just stop’. In many cases, parents blame themselves or feel guilty that they had enabled the gambling.
Well, [son] started gambling when he was 14, and it was online poker. As a parent, I advise my boys on the dangers of drugs, alcohol, predators, that type of thing, driving too fast when they pass the test. The one thing I never saw the danger in was giving him a laptop and a smartphone. Basically, what I did, I handed [son] a loaded weapon. I gave him the means to, basically, go down this path.
A bit of a bombshell hit when suddenly my son told me that he was in some financial trouble. And when we sat down and said, “Well, why?” at that time, it was a case of debt on credit cards etc. He mentioned that he’d started to gamble. And I just sort of said to him, “Well, stop it,” thinking that could be done quite simply.
He had £5 of his own money and asked me to put this £5 on for him. Six teams, something like that. Different European teams and whatever, and that first bet he won. He won £40 or £50. Because he was quite knowledgeable about that type of football, he got a bit of enjoyment out of that and I thought, great, a chip off the old block, something we could do together. Little did I know that two years later, his journey would be completely different to anything I’ve ever experienced.
When he turned 18, what happened was he then started getting loans out, payday loans. He maxed out his Barclaycard. That account got defaulted. But because my wife and I were out working, we had no idea what post was coming to the home. When we were here when the post came, he would always run down and get it and then bring two letters down so we didn’t know there were three or four letters there. Obviously, he was very, very good and resourceful at hiding it and covering it.
Partners
For people in relationships, some were aware that their partners gambled or had difficulties with gambling in the past. But because they did not understand gambling addiction or harm, they often did not appreciate what this meant. For others, the gambling was kept hidden, and they learned about it at a crisis point. People describe how confused they had been by how their partner had been behaving without them knowing why. When they find out the extent of the gambling difficulties, partners often feel shock, betrayal, or anger at the situation.
Their partner may have told them that they had previously experienced difficulties with gambling, but they did not understand the extent of it or that it could happen again.
Two weeks into dating, we were sitting in my dining room. He had his arms around me, and he said, “There’s something I need to tell you.” I was like, “Okay.” He said, “I used to have a gambling problem”. He said, “I went to GA for two years, and now I’m cured.” I’m very, very good with money. I was a bit I’m not sure about this. I said, “What sort of gambling?” He said, “Fruit machines.”… I’d never even heard of gambling addiction. I’ve never gambled in my life apart from the occasional lottery ticket. I don’t understand scratch cards. I don’t understand fruit machines. I know nothing about gambling at this point.
When I met [partner], he told me straight away, like our second date, that he’d previously had problems with gambling. I didn’t really know what it meant at the time when he was telling me. He was honest, and he told me this is what had happened in his past, but that it was fine, and he was OK now and it wasn’t a problem, but he had some debt as a result of it. And then two years sort of went by blissfully… Actually, I guess I was blissfully unaware. I didn’t have any reason to suspect anything, and it was pushed to the back of my mind.
Some partners explain they would have had a different reaction if it was drug or alcohol use. They did not initially think that gambling could be as addictive or harmful as it is.
I started a relationship with them, didn’t know they had a gambling problem, and I think probably found that out maybe six months in. I remember them telling me, and looking back, I realised I didn’t really understand what that meant. I think about if he had said, “I have a drinking problem,” I would’ve had a very different reaction to what I did have where I just swept it under the rug and didn’t really treat it very seriously. Over this next period of five, six years, you come to fully seeing little steps of what that really means.
When I met [husband], at first I didn’t realise that he was a gambler. As we carried on with the relationship a little bit, he felt that he had to tell me that he was or that he had been. My first instinct was to be relieved about it, to be honest, at first, because I’ve been in relationships with alcoholics, I’ve been in relationships with people who use drugs. Gambling to me was like, well, that’s the least of the least.
Or when they first become aware of their partner gambling, they did not realise there was a problem at the time. In some cases, when people speak to their partner about the problem, they initially try to hide the truth or deny their involvement with gambling. But this becomes harder to do once the gambling harm escalates.
He used to spend quite a lot of hours in Leicester Square when we went out in the shops they used to have there at the time with all the machines in that you just popped the money into the Jackpot machines and even on our evenings out, that could have taken up an hour, an hour and a half of our time with me just standing there, but because it was a completely different environment to anything I’d ever witnessed or seen before, I didn’t see it as being anything wrong… Looking back now, there were flags. But ones that if you weren’t aware, you wouldn’t have noticed.
I asked him about it. He was quite ashamed but I didn’t know enough about it and I don’t think he realised that it was a problem at the time…I just thought it was one of them things. I was a bit shocked, a bit taken back, but I didn’t know enough about it.
Gambling is often kept secret from significant others until losses reach a point where they are no longer able to keep up every day behaviour, such as paying bills, or they are short of money all the time.
At the start of the relationship, so much of it was hidden. Even though he’d made that initial admission, there was a problem not really knowing what that looked like. The increases in, “Can I borrow money,” was a really huge thing. That just crept up and crept from these amounts of £20 to, “Can I borrow £100? I’ll give it back next month.”
It was like, where did this wage go? What’s happened to this?… I would start to notice that he would go and spend like £10 on scratch cards and I thought that’s a lot to spend on scratch cards and to me, it’s a waste of money. We spoke about it but it wasn’t a big thing and stuff. I think he showed me a screenshot like he had whatever he’d bet saved, maybe put £50 in, and then it’s like a £300 pot sitting there. He ended up gambling all of that.
In some cases, this leads to the person coming forward and telling their loved one about their gambling difficulties. In other cases, these become known accidentally, such as when opening a bank statement, or the person who is gambling going missing.
Many partners or family members had been aware that something was wrong because the person who was gambling had a change in mood or they were more absent in the relationship. But they did not know what the problem was.
His mood had changed a little bit, and he was quite withdrawn or quite down in the dumps and I couldn’t work out what it was. I kept asking him and he was like, nothing, nothing, it’s all right, it’s all right. Then the night he was due to go on his work do, a day just before he went, he told me that he’d been gambling and he’d gambled a couple of hundred pounds. At the time, obviously, it was a shock. It was a lot of money, but we had no commitments and I didn’t realise this was going to be an issue going forward.
Partners often describe feelings of shock, betrayal or anger as they learn the extent of the gambling difficulties. The sense of being deceived could lead them to start questioning every aspect of the relationship and their time together. Some described how much devastation gambling could cause in a short space of time.
I rang his phone and it went straight to voicemail… So, I texted his mum to see if maybe he’d gone there, if maybe we’d had a row or whatever. She rang me, and she just basically came out with it and said that she discovered that he’d been gambling again… I describe it now as like a jigsaw puzzle, it just came together in front of my face quite quickly. All I was thinking was, oh, that’s why this didn’t happen. That’s why we didn’t go on that holiday. That’s where that money went. That’s why I didn’t move in.
I very quickly found out that actually, it’s a very destructive addiction to have… Not long after we got married, he just went back to the gambling. I witnessed first-hand how devastating it is, how devastating it can be in a very, very short space of time within the year. It was just horrific. It was a shock, to be honest.
But when I saw him, I couldn’t speak… I was angry, I was upset, I was scared, I was worried. I literally felt everything I thought I could possibly feel like at the time. And I just sort of started asking questions about things that he probably couldn’t answer at the time. Like, is it true? Do you really want to live with me? Did you just do it to get away from your mum because your mum was getting suspicious? and they were all the kinds of things that were going through my head.