Loved ones’ series: How to rebuild trust that has been broken by their gambling?
Building trust takes two… even if one person broke it
It has been a little while since I posted on the blog, and even longer since I wrote something for the loved ones of addicted gamblers. Whilst this post is mainly written for partners of those who gamble, you can of course extract some value from it even if you are the gambler yourself. If you are a parent or otherwise linked to an addicted gambler, you will find that certain bits may not apply, but others will.
This article will focus on some of the common stumbling blocks as well as possible solutions for building trust again with a partner who is gambling addicted.
Many people think about trust and assume that re-establishing trust rests entirely with the person who is or has been addicted. This would seem right since you did not ‘choose’ for them to be addicted and have already suffered enough as a result. The reality is that they also did not choose to become addicted.
And even if it would still seem fair that they make the greater effort to restore trust now that you have spent so much energy and emotion on supporting them, the rebuilding of trust cannot happen simply by them changing their behaviours. As a partner, you will also need to be open and willing to work on building it.
It takes a lot of time and does not necessarily happen in the way that many people expect it to work.Reliability and trust cannot be fast-tracked simply by them telling you the right things, giving constant reassurance or you watching them follow through on one or two promises.
It also cannot be achieved through having endless control mechanisms in place, although such can often feel helpful for everybody right at the beginning.
Trust is built through experiencing that your partner is staying true to their words, is able to act on their promises and is continuously choosing honesty over their addiction. Not just once but on a consistent basis. Additionally, you will need to proactively support your own healing to allow your anxiety to settle and the hypervigilance to gradually reduce. Something that in turn is often hinged on the gambler’s willingness to be honest and communicate. This balancing act is difficult but can absolutely be worth the efforts!
Peter and Michelle: A Case Study
The following case story is based on true events but details have been changed to protect the indentity of those involved. Consent has been provided to share this story.
‘Peter’ and ‘Michelle’ had been married for 23 years. They had raised children together and weathered many emotional storms over the years. Although they were quite different as people, they had always managed to communicate well, and thanks to the high levels of respect they always had for one another, they had been able to work things out most of the time. Michelle, who was my client, had never had any reason not to trust Peter hence he was in charge of most things concerning the house bills and finances.
He was a trustworthy, honest and principled man who had Michelle’s best interest at heart.
So when one day Michelle found out via an accidental slip of the tongue from their family business accountant that Peter had discussed selling their family home, she was beyond shocked. What on earth was going on that she had not been made aware of? Was he having an affair and about to leave her? Had he lied about how well his business was doing?
She left the accountant’s office in a complete daze. Later that evening when she confronted Peter, he broke down and told her about his many years of escalating gambling problems.
How he had been desperately trying to chase back what he had lost. And how they were now facing a position where their family home would need to be sold so that he could repay the money he owed his business.
Michelle did not even know where to start with processing these events.
Was she meant to be angry or sorry for him?
Did she want to help him or make him suffer for what he had done to them?
And even if things were to get sorted, how would she EVER be able to trust in him ever again after what he had done… After all, it felt like a multi-layered betrayal.
It was bad enough to hear that he had been gambling and become addicted without telling her, but to think he could go ahead and start discussing the sale of their family home without consulting her… she could not believe this was the person she had known all these years.
How things unfolded
In the case of Michelle and Peter, this moment of realisation became the beginning of a rough journey for Peter with his addiction. For Michelle, there were many moments of deep despair, a lot of anxiety and feelings of hopelessness about the relationship. And many points where she was certain that she would never be able to forgive him for the turmoil his addiction caused their family.
Being faced with the prospect of losing both the house and his wife and everything he ever cared for, Peter did however decide to seek treatment. And although the journey was far from straightforward and involved many ups and downs and setbacks, the pair of them stuck through it together and managed to come out the other end.
They made it work because they both wanted to make the relationship work, and both of them realised that there was no chance for their relationship to continue if Peter did not choose a life of abstinence from his gambling. Michelle also came around to realise that she needed help healing from the events and that without her also putting in effort to heal and move on, there would never be a good balance between them ever again.
With both of them doing their absolute best to find a way forward, they eventually managed to find happiness together again. Their relationship would of course never be the same, but as we used to say in sessions - it evolved. In many ways, their relationship became one of more depth and honesty.
But it is not easy, and I would be lying if I said that this was the standard outcome. It really is not. Many once good and compatible couples end up coming apart when the gambling comes in between them.
Rebuilding trust takes mutual effort, dedication and copious amounts of patience and perseverance! It also requires each person to take personal responsibility for their healing journey as well as mutual responsibility for the healing of the relationship.
The Mismatched Timelines for Healing and Building Trust:
The knife-edge phase: where both of you feel deserving of validation and love, and neither one of you has it in you to give.
One of the things I hear all the time from both parties (gamblers and their loved ones) is the challenge that arises when the gambler takes strides in their recovery and feels a lot better about themselves. Whilst this is exactly what we want to happen, they often start to feel quite resentful and irritated if their loved ones are not cheering them on and expressing how proud they are. They are trying so hard and nobody is even noticing it let alone giving any credit for it.
Yep I know you may be thinking, ‘what on earth do they expect after the put us through’ but I am just being honest. This is still often what goes through their mind at this stage.
To make matters worse, it is often at this time that the loved one, who may for the first time in a while take their focus off of the gambling and put it onto themselves, start falling apart.
Hence, instead of praising their recovering partner, they may nitpick, question, get a bit overcontrolling and micromanaging and just in general are not quite with the high vibe that the gambling partner is now seemingly swept away by. This point often ends up being the knife-edge for the relationship where both partners (or parties) feel deeply misunderstood, yet are often so caught up in their personal feelings that they are unable to see the other person’s perspective.
Nobody is right and nobody is wrong – there is just this extremely mismatched energy going around that makes it difficult to understand one another.
If this is you, you are probably wondering how you will ever see yourselves out of this situation together.
Trust in general is a hard topic. Most people have had their trust broken at some point in their lives in big or small ways. The experience is far from pleasant and brings along with it significant feelings of anxiety, agony and at times even panic.
For many of those who live with an addicted gambler, the experience becomes more or less one that feels like a constant. And just like the gambler who is allowed to be human, the loved one is too. And a natural response to chronic tenseness, anxiety and uncertainty is to get stuck in a stress-state that can get very difficult to downregulate from.
The Erosion of Trust: What You’re Up Against
Before we discuss what you can expect from the healing process, it can be helpful to understand the components that erode trust to begin with. There are a few things that tend to be symptomatic of couples that have had their trust broken as a result of gambling addiction.
Living with broken trust means losing trust in yourself
Living in this uncertainty is something you are sharing with your addicted gambler. In fact, I often say to family members that the experience is one of riding alongside them in their rollercoaster. They have very poor control over where things are going, and unfortunately, you have even less. Constantly carrying a pit in the stomach, wondering if your partner, child, parent or whoever your loved one represents for you will yet again fall prey to their addiction and let both you and themselves down again.
If it happens again, you are up against not only another gut punch that comes from the gambling losses and the breach of trust, but you may also be stuck with your own decision-making and the crushing feeling of no longer trusting yourself to protect you from the pain inflicted by their gambling.
This does not make you stupid or gullible. A tough reality for many of those who live with and love an addicted gambler is to understand the following: they are conflicted as part of their addiction. You are conflicted because you don’t know if their addiction is going on in the background and whether, at some point, you will end up feeling like a mug for being too trusting and berate yourself for letting yourself down.
Should I accept this one more time? What have I threatened in the past that I should be upholding now? Shall I keep my boundary or risk them starting to take for granted that I don’t mean what I say? What on earth shall I do?
Regaining trust in them, strangely now equates to regaining the trust you have for yourself. And with a high degree of hypervigilance, fear of their relapses and feeling as if the next disaster is only around the corner, it is easier said than done to trust your instincts too.
Distrust around honesty and money
You don’t trust that even if they did gamble, they would tell you. This happens because you have indeed experienced it before. There is no trust about money – as a loved one, you may no longer trust them to carry even a couple of pounds for good reasons.
Power imbalances
This happens both financially and emotionally. Frequently, you as the loved one may now have full control over finances and spending, while it can easily feel as though with that you have become just a ‘teacher’ or a ‘Mum/Dad’ in the relationship instead of equal partners.
Emotional distance and disillusionment
The gambler tends to feel like they have mastered something big by the time they have stopped gambling. They have! The problem is that so have you. And you may have suffered alongside their gambling for long periods of time before they finally quit too. Many of you would have watched countless attempts to stop that that have later shown up as unsuccessful, and your hope has turned to disillusionment.
Feeling disillusioned matches poorly with the gambler’s newfound excitement about their new sober life, and you might find that neither one of you are getting their needs met through one another at this time!
Loss of safety
You are naturally no longer going to feel safe if you have experienced that someone you love is able to tell you lies, gamble behind your back and/or create elaborate stories to camouflage their activities. Whilst rationally, one could easily believe that the minute you have financial proof that they are no longer getting up to no good — your emotional system will not catch up as quickly. Existing in a constant state of anxiety waiting and watching for someone else to pull the rug from under your feet will take an enormous toll on your feelings of safety and security. This is what many loved ones report struggling with, sometimes for very long times after the discontinuation of the gambling itself.
Anxiety and control
For those who have had their trust broken, anxiety is now running very high. Naturally, you have not had a consistent enough streak of being able to trust them, hence your brain is doing what the brain does best: issuing constant red alerts that sends you into a spin wondering if they are still gambling but just keeping it from you. You are forgiven for feeling like this and you have to remember that this is your brain responding to what it has been through in the last many months and years. Unfortunately (and nobody likes to hear this) you cannot therefore make it just their job to reinstall a state of trust and to create forgiveness. It has to be a mutual job. Even then, only really time, consistency and watching the process evolve over the longer term can really make you trust them again.
Righteous indignation
Felt by both the gambler and by the partner. You as a partner feel angry and outraged, feeling like they have now had their time in the limelight of supportiveness while you have been dishing out helpful hints, managed the finances, the kids, the empty house while they were out looking after their newly identified needs for more hobbies and interests in recovery. You are not wrong for feeling like you are now bereft of support, empathy, understanding and frankly even company!
The trickiest thing in the world is that they will feel equally right and equally resentful in their position. From their perspective, they have been pulling out all the stops to conquer their addiction. They likely know that the addiction affected you badly, but equally know that they cannot support you at this time if they are going to be able to manage themselves through the early phases of recovery. They are therefore feeling stuck, lonely, and unappreciated for their efforts.
So there you are. Both are feeling angry. Both feel unseen, unheard and unappreciated. And both of you feeling like you are in the right and the other one in the wrong!
In the Hope of Building Trust, Loved Ones Often Take on Counterproductive Control Measures
In an attempt to feel safe again, many loved ones begin to:
• Check bank accounts repeatedly, and follow up with questions about transactions
• Ask for constant reassurance even if such reassurance has since a long time stopped doing the job
• Monitor behaviours and jump to conclusions about them being back to gambling if anything irregular occurs
It makes sense. You are trying to protect yourself. Your emotional brain is in a very triggered state after all the shocks and nasty surprises that it has been exposed to. Naturally, it is trying to warn you of possible dangers and pitfalls. It makes you believe that you would be better off ‘catching them out’ in case they are up to no good. The reality is that you would get very hurt regardless.
The ‘strategies’ listed above rarely rebuild trust. They often increase anxiety and resentment on both sides.
Why? Because reassurance from someone who has previously hidden the truth is going to be fragile. And more importantly, it keeps your sense of safety dependent on them.
So without further ado, let us move on to the steps that can help you as a loved one create a sense of personal safety and help you regain a sense of trust in both them and yourself.
A small caveat: the next steps outlined are dependent on the idea of having a partner who IS doing their bit to recover too. Awful as it sounds, if your partner is someone who is not taking their own part in wanting to heal the relationship and move away from gambling, none of what follows will work in the way it is intended. If this is your situation please read one of my previous posts in this series.
Rebuilding Trust: What Actually Helps
Learn to separate your worries from theirs
You may find yourself thinking:
“How did I not see this?” “Can I trust myself to make the right decision now?”
“If it happens again, will I protect myself?”
So rebuilding trust in them becomes tangled with something even more important: rebuilding trust in yourself. It also requires you to get in touch with you as a person, your identity, and to assess whether or not you feel that you have it in you to forgive fully and move forward together. These are not decisions that you can be expected to be making overnight!
You will now need to allow yourself some time to process what has happened, heal from what you have been through and the ups and downs of it all, and to see how you feel.
For now, make sure that you focus on healing yourself primarily. If the markers of them trying to recover are all there; you have to choose to trust that they are managing their recovery. And with that, you try to shift your attention and energy towards yourself again.
Letting go of their ‘stuff’
Many people misunderstand the concept of letting go in the context of other people and their problems. It is often perceived almost as a dismissal of their natural state of involvement with their partner, or as though they are being told not to care for what happens to them. This is not what letting go is!
The part you are encouraged to let go of is not your investment in them as a partner, your love for them or any of the caring traits that you inhabit. You are, however being encouraged to recognise that caring is different from attempting to fix in the context of addiction. You can care, love, support and generate ideas for healing.
But their addiction and progress in recovery are not about you. In fact, you cannot travel their recovery journey on their behalf. You can be their cheerleader while they do their work, but you must not step in and try to do the work for them.
This is potentially the most difficult thing in the world to learn to do when it comes to close family members and partners, so please do not beat yourself up if you have not worked out yet how to do it. It is also a process and not an overnight achievement. You start this process by letting go of more and more of the responsibilities that you have carried for their recovery, and gradually, you will get the hang of it. When you do, it will feel freeing and also contribute to better balance in the relationship again (provided they are willing to pick up their recovery work of course).
Do not assume that you are right and they are wrong
Remember: in all of this, there is and will never be an objective judge of your relationship. There is also no prize provided to any of you for being right. Not because being right about them relapsing or being right about them having hurt you and that they should understand your pain. Your partner may be asking of you to sweep all your pain under the carpet and applaud their recovery efforts all while they appear blind to yours or see it but seem comfortable with ignoring it. Yes, this will 100% feel unfair to you but it is the reality that you are now facing. I am not asking of you to stick by and understand until there is nothing left of you. I am telling you so that you can understand and expect more realistically…if they are having a hard time battling their recovery you can be certain that is taking up most of their emotional bandwidth. So much so that they will struggle to even notice what is happening on your side of the relationship.
Honest communication about your personal timeline
What matters right now is honest and ideally not overly emotional communication, boundaries and dedicated time to look after yourself for a bit and attempt to heal what has broken inside of you before you try too hard to repair the relationship fractures.
This often feels quite counterintuitive since you will feel as though your healing is dependent on theirs, but in reality you will both need to come through this as two fully emotionally independent adults, who by all means are allowed to need and want the support of the other. But you must not need it for emotional survival!
Five Steps to Support Your Own Recovery
1. Prioritise your own recovery
You are not just “supporting someone in recovery.” You are recovering too. That means:
• Reconnecting with your own routine and identity
• Allowing your emotions (even the ugly ones)
• Seeking your own support (therapy, peer groups like Gam-Anon)
You cannot rebuild a relationship if you are emotionally depleted.
2. Set boundaries — and mean them
Boundaries are not punishments to your partner and they will not work if done with one particular outcome in mind. They are protection for you and a part of your need to express your truth and experience.
Examples might include:
• Financial transparency requirements
• Clear consequences if trust is broken again
• Space to process without pressure to ‘move on’ at their pace.
And perhaps most importantly: do not agree to a ‘clean slate’ you do not actually feel that you are ready for. In truth, you will likely never feel like the slate is completely clear. That would be very unnatural after what you have been through together.
3. Reduce reassurance-seeking (even though it’s hard)
This will feel counterintuitive. But constantly asking ‘Are you gambling?’ or ‘Can I trust you?’ may soothe you momentarily, but it weakens your internal stability long-term. If you really think about it, you will also realise that even a positive response can be followed by a thought of ‘yeah but they told me that when they gambled too though didn’t they’. So after all, you will need to remain centred and just trust that they do the right thing. If they don’t you will need to revisit your personal boundaries again.
4. Communicate honestly — without trying to win
Remember you are not in a competition of who suffered the most. You both suffered plenty! Your side of this is to be able to validate your personal stance. Examples of what you may feel and wish to communicate are:
‘I am still feeling hurt- please give me some space and time to process and learn to trust again’
‘I am trying to trust but it will take time’
And equally, being willing to hear that they feel:
• Effort is not recognised
• Progress is not being acknowledged
You are often both feeling the same thing in different ways: unseen, unheard, unappreciated. Recognising that can soften the conflict.
Last but not least, take time to look after yourself. Treat yourself with self-compassion and make efforts to look after yourself emotionally and physically. Without repairing your own body and soul, you will find it impossible to support your partner and anybody else who has been victimised by their addiction.
Thank you for taking the time to read my blog and if you know of anybody who would benefit from reading it, please feel free to share it.