Recovery
Recovery (person who gambled perspective)

Rebuilding yourself and connecting with others

Most people’s recovery journey doesn’t end once the person stops gambling. They described the ongoing process of rebuilding themselves, which involves understanding and coming to terms with what has happened. This process includes reconnecting with others, regaining self-worth, and hope for the future.

After the other person stops gambling, or the relationship ends, many reflect, seek counselling, learn about gambling, or access support networks to process their experiences. They say becoming more knowledgeable about gambling addiction often helps in this process.

Many use their experiences to assist others, driven by a passion to stop others suffering. This includes volunteering, writing memoirs, training as counsellors, establishing peer support groups, or campaigning for change.

We’re still on Twitter both personally, and we’re still both on there all the time if anybody needs us. We do message and try and do as much as we can…. And I’ve done a blog and we’ve done all these kinds of things together that we can, and we’ve built quite a good community there so I know that if anybody needed us or equally if we needed them for anything then we would all be there for each other.

That’s why I’m so passionate about things like this because I think people just don’t know. My brother was an intelligent, popular, lovely, smart, funny person and [gambling] dug its claws in him. He was desperate and it made him more desperate.

I spent a tremendous amount of time in this space. I’m not really sure what the word is of the space but essentially, I’m a trustee for a charity that I’ve helped set up called the Gambling Education Network and it means so much to me. I think, you know, it’s something that gets me up and it’s this thing that also, you know, I think about before I go to bed. It’s sort of an all-day affair. And the reason it kind of is my personality right now in the past two years of working in this space, I’ve kind of distanced myself from friends and everything else, like any anything that I used to do before has sort of taken less of a priority. That’s included medical school. And the reason is, is because I think it’s a huge problem and really neglected. I just feel that it’s, you know, one of my callings. I think when I was 18, I felt like I wanted to go and help people. I wanted to make the world a better place and that’s why I went for medicine. I thought, you know, science and all of that was how I would do it. But then I’ve come to realize that I can, you know, I feel like my purpose and place is actually in this space and there’s so much to be done and I can have so much more of an impact.

And the way I sort of think about it is thinking about my, my younger self. I think about little Kishan or little Kish. I call myself little Kishan in my head and imagine how children like myself when I was a child were or are being affected by gambling harm through a family member’s gambling. It just really resonates to think that, you know, they’re completely innocent and it can be really horrible and for a long period of time, and even today, I experience gambling harm and it’s all legacy harm, and it’s very difficult. I sort of have a lot of empathy to children who are going to be the sort of next generation or are the next generation now and that’s sort of what drives me.

Kishan

At first, I was anonymous. I came out of the gambling crisis and that was my way of promoting awareness about the issue. As I started to go on Twitter, I realized that there were many others doing the same. I met up with a few. I started to build a community of people that I could trust and friends and then eventually I de- anonymised a couple of months later.

I just try to engage and motivate and sort of be a part of as many different projects as I can and support other projects. I think we’re all in this together and if you know there’s not millions of us, but thousands of us, maybe. The more we develop and the more we grow, the better for the thing that we’re campaigning for and essentially that would mean less gambling harm and prevention of gambling harm.

I am now working for two different gambling awareness charities. From a lot of things that I have experienced and learned over the last probably five, six years, I’m now hopefully using as a positive and giving back from where I have been able to help my family.

I do find now what we’ve been through is helping us, or helping me because like I said, doing the work with GamLEARN and GamCare, and Betknowmore etc and being able to be part of research programmes, where I can bring my voice, my experiences… I suppose I’m fortunate that, I have an academic mind, so I love research, and I’ve always been a great believer in, arm yourself with as much knowledge as you can deal with and understand.

I think my therapy and help has been through just being in the space and actually feel like I’m doing something about it or contributing to raising awareness.

The reason why I joined [charity], is not only because of my events career background. Before working for the charity, I worked in hotels, but also, I’m an affected other. A family member of mine gambled the majority of my life and so it’s something I’m very passionate about. Also, when I joined, I had no idea whatsoever that gambling harm was as extreme as it was. A lot of more understanding just came up of that.

I do quite a bit on Twitter and stuff because I think if I can just help one person, and I know it’s all cliché… I like doing those little posts because I do get some people who genuinely, genuinely say, “Thank you so much because just seeing your smile and reading that sentence of positivity makes my morning,” and the fact they say that they don’t have to say that it’s those kind of things are really important to me now.

The job I was doing and the job I do now is still in healthcare. And I’m trying to actually get health care to understand a bit more around gambling addiction in the current role that I’m doing in this moment in time.

I started writing it down initially about five years ago, because I suppose five years ago, I had a little bit of distance from the fallout, if you like, of everything that had gone on before. I suppose initially I started writing things down as a way of journaling it or just writing down my thoughts, writing down where we were at now, how we’d got where we were, blah, blah.

It was just journaling really initially. They were just journaling pages and then I started thinking, well, it might be helpful to other people to read how– You see, there’s lots of books from an addict point of view or from a medical point of view, if you like. There’s very little from families or partners, so I thought that might be interesting. Maybe I could write that. It was a thought that was germinating for a while and then I went to–

I love writing. That’s another thing, I love writing. I think because we’d been doing the job that we’d been doing, I haven’t had a lot of time to sit and just do what I like doing. It was my little go-to place, but then I started realising that it was a bit of a cathartic thing for me to write down, to remember how it felt. It was quite hard to write because you had to really go back there and remember what it felt like. There’s a particular bit in the book about when we were coming back from London on a coach and you might have read that. When I was thinking about it, I was really there, I remembered everything about it. It was like, I remember that, I remember how mad I was and I remember how angry I was.

It got exhausting writing it to be honest, because all these feelings would be coming up. It took quite a while to write. Then I started asking Nick questions about how he felt actually and what he felt because our two accounts are the same, but slightly different because it’s coming from his point of view and my point of view, which is quite different sometimes. I remember details that he doesn’t remember, and I didn’t realise he thought that about something that I felt so angry about. It was interesting.

Donna

Some describe a journey to understand why the other person gambled and describing feeling at peace because they have better insight.

If we were having this discussion four years ago, it would be in my view a completely different discussion to what we’re having four years on. And that’s because as an affected other I’ve been on a journey of really trying to discover the reasons behind why my son became addicted to gambling.

I feel like, it’s weird. I’m at peace with the fact that I’m aware of it, and that I know that it wasn’t my dad that is– he’s a gambler and he’s doing this to spite his family and friends and everything, the fact that actually there’s somebody who’s really struggled for a number of years. I feel that, but I’m also feeling a bit at peace because I’m aware of everything that’s going on, whereas there is some families and people out there who aren’t aware. I can see how it could continue. I think I have been, my mum, stepmum, dad, family, have all protected me and my sisters because of it. That’s why when I was first asked, “Have you ever experienced gambling harm?” I said, yes. I wanted to say, but it wasn’t that bad, but that’s because I was protected from it. Whereas actually for my mum, stepmum and dad and my uncle, for example, the harm was felt a lot more.

I’d say I’m at peace with it now because I feel equipped to deal with it or to understand it a lot more and I know what to do, or at least have guidance on what to do and who to reach out to. This is an industry that is just taking advantages of people left, right and centre and not caring, in my opinion. That there is also a group or a community in this country, of people with lived experience who are fighting tooth and nail to make sure that eventually, people will have all the information they need to be aware of these dangers through gambling, and also fighting relentlessly with the government to make sure that those changes are in place nationally.

That is a good to know, is that I’m not alone, never have I been. We might have felt that as a family at one stage, but that now, there is actually people and anybody can join as well. If you are experiencing the harm, through working with the [organisation] over the last two years, it started as a decent group of like five people, and every time we run an event, there’s at least another 10 people who signed up who we’ve not heard of before. I think it’s just constantly being like, you know what, even if it is just to come along, there’s no pressure to talk about your experiences, but just to be around people who have experience similar to you, it helps. That’s the therapy in itself.

Emily

Many say that an important aspect of recovery is reconnecting with others. This may entail mending relationships damaged during the other person’s gambling difficulties, dedicating more time to family, or forming new connections. It is also important for affected others to reclaim their own sense of self.

It’s funny because one of the kids when we’ve been running this charity, one of the kids thought that I was called [husband] and Donna. She didn’t realise I was Donna… I think for us at that time, it was about reclaiming our individuality a bit so that he wasn’t relying on me, I wasn’t relying on him all the time. That was really important to do that I think because otherwise, you just get enmeshed with that, which is what had been happening, really, that we were so together that we couldn’t pull apart really to deal with it, to deal with what we had to deal with.

Some said said they feel happier and able to experience things that they enjoy. They feel as if they have things to look forward to and more time for themselves.

My childhood wasn’t really a normal childhood. So, you know, pets, toys, birthdays, all sort of normal childhood things weren’t just really not in my sort of life. But I’m really happy to sort of be exploring some normal things in the past few years and so I’ve got an adorable dog called Bella. She means the world to me.

I’m coming to a new point now that I finally, I was doing four jobs and it was taking up probably 90% of my time. Then otherwise, I was just sleeping or fitting things in. Things have changed now. I’ve got a nice full-time job, which again I’m really enjoying, but I’ve got more thinking time for me now.

Affected others remain aware that the other person could relapse and get into difficulties with gambling again. This motivates them to continue to use previously established barriers and strategies to support the other person’s ongoing recovery.

We’re at a point now where we both feel open enough to talk about if we’re having any of that kind of worries or anxieties. Like I sometimes get anxious if he’s not communicating with me about things and he gets anxious obviously if I’m not communicating about money and like he gets a bit tetchy if he hasn’t been to GA for a while… We just take each day at a time. We’re not naive to the fact that in the future, there may come a time when this might happen again, and we could go right back to square one. We just literally just live each moment at a time.

They’re always going to be tumultuous because it’s never going to be a mill pond when you’ve got an addict. Today’s a really good day. That’s how we all live our lives a day at a time with [son].

By me naming [son]’s addict, we’ve actually opened a line of communication, where we can differentiate between [son] and Keith, which for some people, probably, sounds bonkers, but actually, it really helps our family. It gives you an honesty, and it gives you an openness.

I feel like we try really hard to see things from each other’s perspective so that I can try and understand. I do know from what [partner] has said that a lot of it is you feel like you need to fix everything, and that gambling will fix everything.

I find listening to [partner] talk and trying to see it from his perspective is so valuable to me in knowing how I can support him. And the same for him, to me… we felt like doing it together and being able to cross-reference that support was just basically getting the best of both worlds.

Things are much better. Essentially, he is a very different person than what he was before. We do have conversations where I might say, remember when you said blah to me, or you did this, and he is like very embarrassed about that now and has this standard line of, but I was sick. That’s fine. We laugh about it. Borrowing money off me doesn’t happen anymore.

Many are angry and frustrated at the way gambling companies are allowed to operate and the harm they cause and the ongoing risk to the person close to them.

I want to cure everybody. If I could make gambling illegal, I would do it in an instant. I want to shout from the rooftops, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” For me, the stigma went when the anger kicked in.

My Twitter is pretty active with gambling stuff… A lot of the posts I see would be talking about the failures of regulation, and about online games being addictive by design very intentionally. I get comfort in just knowing that other people see this problem.

Get Support

If you feel like you need support or someone to talk to about your own or someone else’s gambling, there are several organisations who can offer help, support and answer any questions you may have.

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