Family is often impacted by addiction even if they do not share the addiction. Years of covering for the addict, repairing his or her damage, and the chaos and drama that go with addiction all serve to damage families. Often families become enmeshed in the addiction, and the addict becomes expert at manipulating family members and playing them against each other.
Gambling is a pastime that many find to be fun and rewarding, while others find it to be a crutch they cannot escape. Often perceived as a harmless activity, gambling is becoming a growing problem for potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals throughout the world.
When there’s a problem or compulsive gambler in the family, more than just the gambler is negatively affected. The entire family suffers as a result of the behavior and thinking of the gambling addict. How each family is impacted depends on the severity of the gambling problem, how long it has gone on, the closeness of the relationship with the gambler and other factors. Serious financial, psychological, emotional, social and legal problems may completely undermine family functioning to the point of collapse.
The negative effects of problem or compulsive gambling on the family are widespread in this country. According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, an estimated 2 million U.S. adults (1 percent of the population) are compulsive or pathological gamblers. Another estimated 4 to 6 million (2 to 3 percent) can be considered problem gamblers. An estimated one-third (35 percent) of adult problem gamblers have children at home under the age of 18.
Let’s examine some of the ways that gambling affects the family.
Financial
Out-of-control gambling and repeated gambling losses take a tremendous toll on the family finances. Well-meaning family members, usually the spouse of the gambler, often try to “help” the gambler by lending them money, bailing them out of financial difficulties, paying their bills, helping them to stash money to gamble, and other behaviors related to providing money to the gambler. This is classic enabling and does no good either for the gambler or his or her family.
Ultimately, the financial losses become too great. The home may be forced into foreclosure. The family may have to declare bankruptcy. When bills can’t be paid because the gambler has squandered all the money on chasing the losses, more than just money is at stake. The provider can no longer provide, and everyone suffers.
Signs of financial difficulties related to gambling include the following:
• Financial statements go missing
• Calls from creditors
• Mounting debt
• Unexplained cash advances on credit cards
• Assets disappear from the home
• Bank accounts drained
• Sudden, unexpected bills
• New loans taken out
• Money for bills used for gambling
By LeAnne Bagnall
Too often, the media relays images of today’s American father in a rather dishonorable, scornful, and offensive light, which may seem out of tune with a customarily prideful and patriotically minded nation. In the news, we hear of irresponsible dads who are absent from the picture, unwilling to support their families, and who choose to carouse in their drunken revelry instead of behaving like a good father should.
By Meghan O’Dell
Addiction invaded our home in 1991. It slithered in and sat down at our dining room table, grew large and fat, fed on our misery, laughing, mocking us with its power. It claimed Jeff when he was just a fourteen-year-old boy. I did everything I could think of to save my son, but in the end I could do nothing, not really, to extricate him or to free our family from addiction’s claws.
This is one of Libby Cataldi’s many gripping, vivid descriptions of the way her son Jeff’s addiction affected her family. In Stay Close: A Mother’s Story of Her Son’s Addiction, Cataldi chronicles her family’s descent into drug addiction and eventual rise into hope and recovery.
When a family chooses to do a professional intervention to help a loved one with alcohol or drug addiction, it’s usually because they have tried everything else and feel they have no other option.
These are families in crisis. Over the years, the addiction has damaged not only the addict but the family and friends who have dealt with the chaos the addict has created. Addiction tends to run in families, so the addict in crisis might not be the only one dealing with drug or alcohol issues. By the time the family seeks out an interventionist patterns of co-dependency and enabling have been cemented. This means that although some family members may feel committed to the intervention, the risk for unintentional sabotage of the process is high.
“They are fragmented people,” explains Jane Mintz, a licensed addiction intervention specialist who has come to be known as a specialist in handling very complex, potentially volatile interventions. “They have different opinions. The intervention is as much about the families as it is about the affected individual. They’re in as much crisis.” … Continue Reading
Alcohol abuse is a serious enough problem for the individual who has it. But the effects of alcohol abuse extend beyond the individual to the entire family, often with extremely damaging consequences.
By Colin Gilbert
Despite bountiful examples serving as evidence to the contrary, the American myth that wealth equals happiness lives on in the cultural mindset. Of course, financial security can contribute to a person’s sense of comfort and peace of mind.
Most would agree that being “comfortable,” in the sense of having all basic needs met without difficulty, can foster a deep sense of contentment. However, happiness soon becomes an unattainable ideal when it gets tied up with an insatiable desire for personal possessions and luxurious living. When you always want more, you’re never satisfied, and the dissatisfied are more likely to turn to drugs or alcohol.
Whether you live on a cozy cul-de-sac in Connecticut, in a farming community in Iowa, on the beach at Malibu or in one of our nation’s inner-cities, it is highly probable that you know a family impacted by drug addiction. Perhaps that family is yours. Addiction knows no boundaries; it crosses every socio-economic line, does not spare those who are highly intelligent or those that come from a “good family”. In fact, drug addiction is an equal-opportunity destroyer.
