Often, an important first step for people to stop gambling is to put in place barriers. These barriers limit the opportunity, money, or time to gambling. Many find this helpful. But for affected others, this often means taking on significant responsibility. Affected others may take on a role in monitoring the person’ activities. They might take over finances and make extra efforts to keep the household stable, which can lead to additional stress and pressure. Nonetheless, for many affected others, establishing these barriers relieves some worry about the person gambling.
The are tools people use to stop them being able to gamble. This includes self-exclusions – requesting gambling companies to prevent them gambling. Others install software to block gambling websites or give up smartphones. Affected others say this works better when many tools are used at the same time.
We obviously self-excluded from the sites that he was using initially but then quite soon after GamStop became a thing. So, we signed up to that pretty much straight away as soon as that came out, and we still do that now. Immediately after he’d [inaudible] he actually sold his phone in the pawn shop before he went to work in a desperate bid to obviously get his money back. So, he just got like a really old standard phone that had no internet access, no nothing, and he used that for quite a while and that worked quite well until everything sort of started moving more online.
We’ve used the GamStop, but we also have the iPhone content restrictions switched on. So, any content that’s rated 18+ is blocked from his phone. He can’t even download apps. It’s all password protected, and I am the only one who knows the password. So, if he needs to download an app, he has to ask me to turn it back on and then he can get the App Store app. I think for us, it’s always been a multitude of things, so it’s the control of the money, it’s the content restrictions. It’s just all those tiny little things that we can put in place. Every little thing is another building brick on the wall that stops him being able to gamble.
All these barriers in isolation are as good as a chocolate fire guard because they can all be got round. However, if you put them together and you’ve got a suite of controls and barriers in place, they’re not only there to protect my son, they’re also there to manage my anxiety as well so that I’m not spending 24-7 worrying about has he gambled?
The only game that he’s got on his phone now is Sudoku, which I don’t mind, although he does play it a few times a day, he’s not obsessive over it. There’s only so much Sudoku you can take in a day. If I thought he was playing on it constantly, I’d take that off as well. We play Wordle every morning, but that’s it.
The thing that got me about it was that he banned himself from a site or two, which you think, okay, lesson learned. He’s took that temptation away, but just went on to download other apps on his phone.
He doesn’t have a physical card, so there’s no ability for him to withdraw cash. Then there is this understanding that at any point in time I could say, show me your bank statement. He’s on GAMSTOP, but then he manually banned himself from every website he could think of. Again, the options are removed so there’s just not even the choice there.
An important measure often involves affected others assuming control of finances, monitoring banking transactions, and overseeing phone activity. These actions, while necessary, often lead to tensions within relationships and add to the responsibilities of the affected other.
He sort of said that he knew he needed to go back to GA because it was the only thing that worked. He didn’t want to have control of his money anymore. He needed somebody to do that for him because having the money in his pocket made him feel really anxious. He knew he needed to self-exclude.
Every time he made a purchase, I got a notification straight to my phone. The idea was then he couldn’t be withdrawing cash and he couldn’t be gambling on websites because I would know. That then became a very toxic thing, as you can imagine, where it’s not an intimate relationship. It becomes a managerial where I’m monitoring him very, very closely. Then the arguments that will come from that. I think that real damage to your ability to have a healthy, trusting relationship.
Checking [partner’s] phones and making sure that he’s not gambling on his phones, he has no control over the money whatsoever. I thought this is going to be really hard. This man is a 6-foot ex-rugby player and the man of my dreams. One of the things I love about him is his masculinity. I’m, “Okay, so I will take control of all of these things, but I don’t like the word control. I’m not doing this to you, I’m doing this for you. To keep your masculinity, we’re going to do it this way…I said, “I will never be able to make it impossible for you to gamble. All I can do is make it really bloody difficult.”
Others avoid places where there is gambling is available.
The thing that’s always been there though is, that we never do anything that’s associated with gambling… I think it’s really important for people to put strategies in place that they don’t put themselves into situations where they might get tempted to do something, or don’t test themselves by going into places like that, going into the bookies, looking on the phone.
I used to love going to racecourses. I used to love going to the casino. If I was on a cruise ship, I’d go to a casino. Now, I don’t ever want to do that again. So actually, for someone who would have would have possibly contributed to the industry funding-wise, not an excessive amount, I will never want to do it again because to me, they’ve lost all my trust.
Our children play a massive part in our story, and we just we don’t know what the extent of harm they will have faced or if we’ll ever know… and we’ve really tried hard to change our change habits in our children too. So we don’t let them go to the amusements anymore. We discourage talk of gambling if they mention it… and the older to two know about [partners] gambling experiences now so they’re a bit more understanding of it.
People said that these protection measures would need to be maintained to prevent the other person from gambling again.
There’s so many things you have to think of and you have to keep these plates spinning to protect him because the protection measures that you put in place for a recovering gambling addict, they’re there for life. The meetings are there for life, the checks are there for life. The finance, the way the finances have to be, they have to be that way for life.