Taking Back Your Life: Women and Problem Gambling

Introduction

In the year 2000, I discovered one of my dearest friends was addicted to gambling. Her addiction had started out so innocently: one day, Sherry took her elderly mother on an outing to see the brand-new casino on the outskirts of her rural hometown. Later, when her mother became chronically ill, the casino became a place where Sherry could occasionally escape from the stress of caretaking. Like some casinos, this one was dry: it served no alcohol. Sherry is a recovering alcoholic of many years, and she was absolutely delighted to find an alcohol-free venue where she could still get away from it all.

During the many weekends when she commuted to her mother’s home to help her, Sherry sometimes tucked her in at night and then headed out to the casino for a few hours of not thinking about what was happening. The respite excuse morphed into pure escapism as her mother’s condition deteriorated. Once Sherry sat down to the Wheel of Fortune game and started placing bets, she didn’t have a thought about her mother or the problems ahead. The flashing lights, the buzzing of the crowd, and the occasional alignment of a small winning combination lulled her into a kind of trance. Once in a while she won more money than she lost, but winning was not really the point anymore. She had found a successful way to escape.

After her mother’s death, the inheritance Sherry received provided a means to keep on gambling—and for higher stakes. Sherry discovered many more casinos beyond the one in her old hometown. In fact, within fifty miles of her own home she found five of them, one a major destination resort.

Instead of facing the grief of her mother’s death, Sherry just kept on gambling. The inheritance didn’t seem like real money anyway, she says. During the next few years, she periodically tried to limit the money and time she spent gambling and was amazed at the difficulty of that task. She tried various methods that made sense to her, but nothing worked. Leaving her credit cards at home only resulted in a forty-mile round trip to get them after she ran out of cash at the casino. When she told herself she would only spend two hours at the casino, she found that she didn’t leave until hours later when her money had run out.

When Sherry finally told me what was going on, she had been gambling for five years. I was astounded. I thought I knew her so well. How had she managed to keep this hidden for so long? How was she able to continue to work full-time and lead what looked like a normal life? And what kind of friend was I? I hadn’t even noticed. Sherry was still struggling, so my first thought was to read the research literature and find out what was working for other women. Much to my surprise, I found very little written about women with gambling problems, and even less on how they successfully stopped.

Sherry’s experience opened my eyes to a compulsive behavior facing women in our country, a problem I had not imagined before. I wondered how women were recovering from this problem, or if they were recovering. These questions became more important to me as I learned about the many women in longtime recovery from alcohol and drugs who then succumb to a gambling addiction. I was well aware of the proliferation of casinos in our country, but I had naively assumed that it was mostly men who were gambling there. A walk through the several casinos in the area made it clear that women were gambling as never before. And when they found themselves in trouble, many of them—like my friend Sherry—had trouble finding anyone to guide or encourage them in the recovery process. The local Gamblers Anonymous groups at that time consisted primarily of men. In contrast to the local Alcoholics Anonymous groups, there was no core of women who had worked the Twelve Steps and were available for sponsorship. No gambling addiction treatment programs were available locally, or even within Washington state.

What started as mere questions about how to help and support my friend grew into a broader quest for answers on this important topic. I decided to try to find out for myself whether and how women were recovering from compulsive gambling. Since I am a university professor, I naturally turned to the tools of academia for my search. At that time, most of the articles on gambling research were based on male experience, and finding information about the unique experiences of women proved extremely difficult. I decided to use the Internet to find women who had successfully quit their problem gambling and were willing to share their stories about how they did it.

The Internet Survey

That July, with the help of my university’s media and technical staff, I launched a Web site designed to recruit women to respond to a survey and share their experience about how they recovered from gambling problems. (Recovery is a term used in Twelve Step programs to indicate people who are not only abstinent from an addictive behavior, but are also working on becoming a better person, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.) In the survey, I asked participants to respond only if they had six months or more of abstinence from compulsive gambling. The Web site stated the purpose of the study and described how to participate in a 79-item survey (reprinted in the appendix) and/or a personal interview. It assured responders of their anonymity: their email addresses would be blocked from my view. It also included a project approval statement from the Human Subjects Review Board and links to various problem gambling sites that might be helpful to the respondents.

Of all the challenges involved with formulating this project, one of the most delicate was finding four women on campus at my university who would agree to have their pictures posted on the home page of a Web site on compulsive gambling. We finally solved the problem by screening their faces so they could not be recognized.

Publicizing the Web site so women in recovery could find it was another challenge. It took several months to be picked up by the major Internet search engines such as Google. Eventually, we had direct links from the National Council on Problem Gambling site, various state agency sites, and several other sites that help problem gamblers, such as Women Helping Women at www.femalegamblers.info.

The survey site was fully functional and online from the latter part of 2000 through 2001. During that time, 264 women from all over the United States with varying lengths of abstinence completed the survey; 136 of them had not gambled at all for six months or more (for an average of about three years). These were the consistently abstinent women I had been seeking, and this book focuses on their data and their stories.

Fifteen of the 136 were recruited for personal in-depth interviews. These women were extremely generous with their time and willingness to tell me the details of their harrowing journey through compulsive gambling to recovery. Excerpts from these interviews appear throughout this book to illustrate these women’s experiences. Great care has been taken to keep the interviewees anonymous by giving them different names and removing any identifying information.

The goal of the Internet survey was to give voice to these women’s experience in three general areas:

 1. How did gambling become a problem for you?

 2. How did you stop gambling?

 3. How were social supports (family members, friends, professional help, self-help) helpful or not helpful in your recovery?

The survey asked about demographics, education, and family history; the patterns, extent, and consequences of the gambling problem; and recovery steps. The women were also asked to describe in detail what had been most helpful, and to speculate on what they would have liked from helping professionals. Many of the survey questions were open-ended and designed to encourage participants to elaborate on their answers. For example, to the question What is your meaning of recovery? one woman referred to a new alertness to life, including the sound of the woodpecker outside my door. Responses to the open-ended questions are included throughout the book.

It’s important to note that the respondents and interviewees do not represent an average group of women who are experiencing or recovering from gambling problems. Rather, they are what’s called a convenience sample in research terms, that is, they were available and willing to respond. Compared to national averages, these women were better educated, attended more professional treatment and Gamblers Anonymous meetings, and were primarily white and middle-class. However, these attributes did not protect them from gambling’s wide-ranging consequences—consequences common to compulsive gamblers regardless of age, income, or race. The respondents reported high gambling debts (on average $46,670), lost jobs, suicide attempts, bad checks and forged checks, bankruptcies, embezzlement, and prison terms, as well as emotional, mental, and physical deterioration. But all these women overcame their addiction’s grip, and its devastating consequences, and stopped gambling. I’m happy to report that my friend Sherry is one of these women, and her story is woven into the book with those of the other women I interviewed.

What I learned through the survey forms the core of this book. I can’t say that the findings were a great surprise to me, although I didn’t go into the project with preconceived notions. I am a professor in my university’s school of social work, not an expert in gambling addiction. However, what I did learn was informative and enlightening. The respondents do not represent all female gamblers, nor do their recovery experiences necessarily reflect the latest scientific findings on gambling addiction or best practices in the field. The stories and experiences they described were about how recovery worked for them. As a researcher and as an individual who knew others struggling with problem gambling, I knew it was important to share their stories with others. To that end, their personal histories are the backbone of the book.

From the beginning, academics and professionals in the field of gambling treatment have expressed great interest in the project. My friend Sherry and I were not alone in identifying a gap in knowledge about the recovery process of women with this problem. In 2001, I presented preliminary results at the National Council on Problem Gambling Conference, and in 2002 presented the research findings at a National Conference of Social Work Educators with my colleague Dr. Lisa Avery. Lisa and I also published two journal articles on the research in Social Work and the Addictions in 2002 and 2008.

One of the most interesting experiences I had in bringing this research to light was serving as a panelist for the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at a Columbia University conference, High Stakes: Substance Abuse and Gambling, in June 2001. The distinguished guests on the panels included the CEO of Harrah’s casino hotel chain, researchers from Harvard, and Leslie Stahl of CBS News as one of the moderators. I was a little starstruck and, before my panel session, worried about what I could possibly contribute in such company. Then the (male) panel moderator turned to me, looked me directly in the eye, and said, Now, Dr. Davis … is there really something special about women? I responded very sincerely with Yes sir, yes, there really is. I relaxed and smiled as the audience laughed, and then explained what was special about women recovering from compulsive gambling.

Hope, Hope, and More Hope

This is a book about recovery and hope. But it is also a book about human suffering and the relentless pursuit of some kind of fix for the broken parts of our lives, whether we gamble or not. The purpose of the book is to share the hope of recovery for women everywhere, especially those who are still entrenched in the world of gambling and are feeling very alone.

There has been a significant increase in research on women and compulsive gambling since I conducted my Internet study in 2000 and 2001. This too inspires hope that academia and research are catching up with the reality that women are experiencing gambling problems almost as much as men are. Unfortunately, the research on what works to help people with problem gambling is still very limited. That is why these women’s stories, telling what did work, need to be shared.

This book also notes some pertinent research findings available in areas that were not covered in the survey. These areas include national trends around women and gambling, factors that may influence a woman’s gambling behavior, treatment developments, and ideas to help prevent compulsive gambling.

About This Book

The book has two parts, with chapters that mirror the major sections of the Internet survey. The first part, The Road to Problem Gambling, discusses how the survey respondents progressed from recreational to self-destructive gambling. Chapter 1 explores today’s realities about women: the rising numbers of female gamblers, why they are so invisible, and how their gambling problems differ from men’s. Chapter 2 addresses the question How could a nice girl like you get hooked on such a self-destructive behavior as compulsive gambling? Chapter 3 offers questions, cues, and stories to help you consider whether gambling is a problem in your life or the life of a loved one. Chapter 4 describes the costs and consequences of the survey respondents’ gambling behavior, and what kinds of experiences helped them to stop.

The purpose of part 2, Finding Your Way Out: Recovery Options, is to suggest a variety of recovery paths that are grounded both in research and in the real-life experience of the recovering women. It soon becomes clear that although women have some commonalities that affect the context of their addiction and recovery, their personal experience may dictate very different goals, different methods for achieving them, and different measurements of success. This section covers the phenomena of relapse and the bumps along the way to success (chapter 5), Gamblers Anonymous (chapter 6), professional help (chapter 7), what it’s like to get well on your own (chapter 8), and support from family members and friends (chapter 9). Chapter 10 describes how the women have maintained their recovery through the challenges of their new lives, and some of the rewards of doing just that.

Remember, this is a book about recovery and hope. The purpose is twofold: (1) to share the hope of recovery for women everywhere, especially those who are feeling very alone and still finding their way, and (2) to offer concrete details about how the women actually stopped gambling and built a better life for themselves in recovery. They didn’t all do the same thing. Many relied on Gamblers Anonymous for support, but some did not. Some went to professional treatment, but some recovered on their own. It becomes clear that there are many paths to recovery that can work, and many have common themes. As you meet the women who are traveling these paths, you may discover a way out of your own problem with gambling. A common saying in Twelve Step groups that applies to this book is Take what you like and leave the rest. Becoming aware of the many women who made it to the other side can spark the hope that begins your own journey to recovery, and the details of how they did it may suggest what steps might work for you.

Although the book is primarily focused on women, there is something here for men as well. Human suffering is not gendered; nor is the relentless pursuit of a fix for the broken part of our lives. Nor is the hope of recovery. The fact that these women took their lives back from what many agree is a cunning, baffling, and powerful problem can be a beacon of light for us all.

My heartfelt thanks go to the women who took the time to answer the Internet survey and to the women who allowed me to interview them in more depth. I sincerely hope I have captured the spirit of their inspiring journeys.

PART 1: The Road to Problem Gambling

CHAPTER 1

The Feminization of Gambling

It’s not that we don’t like men. It’s just that we don’t identify with all their issues, and they don’t identify with ours. Marilyn, age 72

This is a book about how to take your life back from compulsive gambling. It is written for women, about women, and based on the real stories of ordinary yet desperate women who succeeded in their efforts to stop gambling. Although the book is written especially for women struggling with compulsive gambling, others are invited and welcome to read on, especially family members of these women, and professionals and academics who want to know more. The primary focus is on women, however. This chapter will explain why.

Women Gamblers: Almost Invisible in Their Misery

You cannot tell by looking at a woman that she has spent all of her last paycheck at the casino the night before, or that she is thinking about how she can feed the kids with no money, or figuring out where she can ask for a loan. Even close family members can be deceived up to a point—and tragically, sometimes that point is suicide. You cannot smell gambling on her breath, and her eyes don’t dilate no matter how big her problem is. You won’t see much of her in past research studies on gambling, and you will see too little of her in formal treatment programs. You may see her with a roomful of recovering women at a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in a few cities, but in many meetings throughout the country, men will still outnumber her. She may show up at a health clinic with gastrointestinal problems related to uncontrolled gambling, or at a mental health clinic for anxiety or depression, but it is very unlikely