Chapter Ten

Crazy Is as Crazy Does

Some of the greatest automobiles of all time, in my opinion, were made in the United States during the 1930s. They were holy objects to young boys who dreamed of owning and driving such elegant beauties. I also thought that the huge, red fire engines of the time were among the greatest wonders on earth, right up there with the Zeppelins from Germany. As a child, I visited fire stations in Atlantic City and Pittsburgh, where I stood gazing up in rapture at these incredible giants. The most impressive of all was the long ladder truck that needed two men to steer it, one in front and one at the tail.

So it was that on a spring Saturday, when I was in the fifth decade of my life, in mid-career and burdened by responsibility, a time of maturity and adult wisdom, I found myself stopping to admire an old fire engine.

The pulse leaps in beholding such a grand old machine.

“Oh, my Gawd. There's a for sale sign on it!”

After much haggling and impossible rational justification, a price was reached. Since the great red monster could not move on its own power, it had to be hauled home on a long flatbed trailer to my newly completed garage. Neighbors gawked, children ran about wide-eyed, dogs barked, cocks crowed, and geese hissed.

And my dear wife said, “You've lost it, Taber.”

“No, no!” I cried. “I've found it!” At last, I had something important to put in the garage.

The big gold letters outlined in black on the lift-up hood spelled out ‘Woonsocket.’ The gilt of the letters was crackled and the red paint was faded a bit, but I knew without a doubt that all this could be restored to its original beauty.

What I did not realize was the impossible cost of antique truck restoration. To achieve show-quality engine restoration, I’d have to haul it all the way to upstate New York and pay almost $5,000!

Like gambling, the antique fire engine business was easy to get into—my purchase price was only $1,000—but very expensive to maintain, hard to win with, and extremely difficult to get out of.

I learned that my fire engine had been built in the 1930s at the Woonsocket, Rhode Island fire station by the firemen themselves, starting with a 1936 Ford truck chassis. It seems they often had problems with underwater rescues, so they built what may have been the first rescue vehicle in the country. They outfitted it for underwater diving with helmets, air pumps, and the usual assortment of brass nozzles, hoses, and tools.

All that elaborate gear had long since been lost, but the huge nickel-silver bell on the hood was still there. Along each side of the truck were heavy steel doors opening into storage compartments. In the back were two benches facing each other, for the crew. Black oilcloth awnings could be rolled down to cover the open rear cab, which was also covered by a tarred wooden roof for weather protection.  

The firemen gave little thought to the overall weight of this behemoth. Its huge, cracked tires reached above my waist. One replacement tire and tube to match the originals (I would need six) would cost over $200!

Slowly the estimated costs of restoring my prize mounted. After a while, I found myself just sitting on the old, cracked leather seat in the cab, brooding. In the cool darkness of the barn I spent hours dreaming, thinking, and working up an appetite.

Had I, as my dear wife suggested, really lost it? Was I guilty of dragging old, unrealistic childhood dreams into my adult life? Pathological thinking is logically wrong, incorrect, and irrational thinking. More than this, it implies distortion, exaggeration, and misperception—all based on unrecognized needs and feelings. In the simple language of Alcoholics Anonymous, this is stinking thinking, the kind of thinking that leads to relapse. Was I a pathological buyer, a compulsive shopper bereft of insight? Was I now on a path that would lead to complete destruction?

Ideas can be so sublime and attractive! And what is a great fire engine if not an inspired idea?

The destructive power of ideas is easy to see in mental disorders like paranoid schizophrenia. But delusional thinking is often overlooked in less well-studied but more common conditions, such as pathological gambling. Other than one major, impulsive purchase, I decided I was not yet showing signs of any remarkable mental illness. “I'm OK and you're not,” was still my motto. But was I truly competent to evaluate my own thought processes? They say an attorney who insists on representing himself has a fool for a client!

Was there any real possibility that I could restore my rescue wagon, or was this merely my own delusional thinking? It had been slowly dawning on me just how mental the mental disorder of pathological gambling was, and now I was beginning to question my own grasp on reality. There were days when I just knew I could overcome all obstacles and meet all expenses to complete the restoration. Other days all I could do was sit alone in the cab and be filled with gloomy despair, knowing my goal was years away, perhaps unattainable.

On such days, of course, my thoughts returned to gambling and gamblers. I wanted somehow to walk in their minds, see the landscape of ideas they saw and feel the emotional currents they felt. And I wanted to do all this without becoming one of them. I was certainly not the first to try to view the landscape of the gambler's mind. Trail-blazing work such as my friend Henry Lesieur's sociological study of gambling clearly implied that thinking is seriously altered as gambling progresses. Lesieur described how gamblers chase their losses, and how the chase itself progressively blinds them to alternatives to gambling. The gambler comes to see gambling, the very cause of misery, as the only available solution to problems. The gambler's thinking comes to limit the possibility for self-correction. People around the gambler, of course, see the situation far differently, but the gambler can only respond to the world as he or she sees it at the time.

Sitting in the silent old fire wagon, I remembered my first meeting with Dr. Lesieur. The Journal of Gambling Studies, which Henry was to edit so well for so many years, was still a dream in those days. I had flown into New York City on business and met Henry not far from St. Johns University, where he was then a professor. We discussed editorial policies and professional politics, then Henry went on to do a task of monumental labor, founding the Journal and serving as its first editor.

Another man who explored this strange territory of gambling mentality was my old friend and mentor, Dr. Robert Custer, a true pioneer in the treatment of pathological gambling. Bob wrote a popular and graphic account of what passes through the mind of the gambler during the various stages of gambling's downward spiral. What begins as a jubilant and euphoric quest ends, inevitably, in black depression and utter failure, the destruction of all one holds valuable. Bob knew the gambler well, and was one of the warmest, most caring men one could ever know.

Cognition is the psychologist's word for thinking, emotion, and the interactions between the two. Lesieur and Custer, although they did not classify or offer theoretical explanations of the cognitive elements they described, mapped the landscape as the gambler views it, noting what have become standard landmarks.

From these important beginnings, my own theories developed as a result of continued daily work with gamblers in the clinical arena. Eventually I could no longer avoid a growing belief that we had only scratched the surface.

Years earlier the psychiatrist Edmund Bergler suggested that unconscious forces and conflicts, learned in the formative stages of development, promote the gambler's excited, altered thinking. Bergler wrote at length on feelings of uncanniness during bouts of gambling. Bergler, trained in Freudian psychoanalysis, gave little importance to the role of consciousness in directing gambling behavior; he seemed to feel that most of the dynamics important to gambling were well outside the awareness of the gambler. The act of gambling was merely symbolic of unconscious conflicts. All this was in line with his Freudian orientation, a school of thought with which I had never been really comfortable.

According to Freudians, I must have acquired a useless barn and a useless fire wagon for reasons that could only be uncovered during prolonged psychoanalysis. I would certainly rather spend the money restoring my fire engine than on psychoanalysis! Besides, those of us who harbor irrational ideas seldom realize the irrational nature of those ideas. After a while, even a preposterous idea becomes familiar and comfortable. How did I ever get into this gambling thing, anyway?

I thought about the man who first hired me to work in the Brecksville Division of the Cleveland Veterans Administration Medical Center. Durand ‘Dewey’ Jacobs, Ph.D., my old boss, was an outgoing, warm person. Our friendship dated back to the 1960s when I was a university professor, long before I went to work for him. His optimism was boundless, and he encouraged the work with gamblers at Brecksville. After he moved to California, Dewey became actively involved in gambling research himself. He, too, found evidence of dissociative reactions—strong feelings of unreality—among gamblers, but believed that intensive gambling, not unconscious conflict, was at the root of the dissociative experience.

For whatever reasons, feelings of detachment and unreality are hallmarks of psychotic behavior, and we were now observing them in pathological gamblers. But neither mental health professionals nor gamblers themselves think of gamblers as psychotic. Perhaps we should.

At the hospital on the Gambling Treatment Program, I was making my own small research contributions to the understanding of the mental part of problem gambling. Our research team, in addition to myself, consisted of Angel Russo (a soon-to-be Ph.D.), Bonny Adkins, M.S.W., and Richard McCormick, Ph.D. Together we studied ego-strength scores from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a widely used personality test, in nearly 60 pathological gamblers who came through our treatment program.

Ego-strength is a concept that includes a sense of selfhood, self-esteem, optimism, and a capacity for internal control of one's own behavior. Gamblers' scores were significantly lower than those of problem-free people. This suggested the possibility that gamblers may experience disorganization of thought, intrusive thoughts and, perhaps, totally irrational ideas, especially under the stress and excitement of active gambling. We published our findings in the first issue of the new Journal of Gambling Studies.

Of course, the restraints placed on thinking by ego can be tossed aside deliberately, as in any creative process. Some people, however, cannot make that choice. They either did not develop a well-defined ego structure, or had not learned how to edit, sort, evaluate, and control their own thoughts. Emotional and intellectual self-management is a never-ending task, and one we never seem to master completely.

Could gambling itself induce a psychotic or semi-psychotic state? Or was this condition already latent in gamblers, and only evoked during gambling? Simply put, do gamblers get drunk on gambling? Perhaps so. Bob Custer had observed what he thought were withdrawal effects in hospitalized gamblers. Gamblers themselves often shake their heads in wonder over their own behavior, as if they can't believe they did what they did, and I have even seen a complete loss of memory for heavy gambling episodes.

Over the years of working with gamblers, through phone contacts and during professional meetings, I had become friends with Richard J. Rosenthal, M.D. Richard was a psychiatrist in southern California who worked in private practice with problem gamblers. He had made referrals to our program. Dr. Rosenthal had a gentle, warm personality with a love of the abstract, and he began to develop a most comprehensive analysis of the thinking of the pathological gambler. I soon came to admire and appreciate his work.

Dr. Rosenthal's work is not easily understood by those not trained in psychoanalytic thinking; the mental health fields can be dark and difficult. Nevertheless, Dr. Rosenthal's impressions arise from extensive clinical experience. Having spent so much time working with gamblers, he truly understands them.

Rosenthal emphasized the role played by primitive ego defense mechanisms such as extremist thinking, splitting issues into black and white, projection of one's own personal characteristics onto others, over-idealization as opposed to total devaluation of people, feelings of powerful omnipotence, and clear denial of reality. These unconscious mechanisms, according to Rosenthal, shape and sustain a system of self-deception that the gambler uses to make the irrational seem rational. He also recognized that poor ego development and confusion over ego boundary issues (“Who am I?”) contributed to reduced reality contact. My account of the death of William Beatty in Chapter 1 illustrates the reduced reality contact and loss of critical judgment noticed by those who have worked with gamblers.

The truth is that hundreds of gamblers give up their lives every year in pursuit of their addiction. They die for their ideas in what they may see as a noble and reasonable quest. To die for an irrational idea is not easy to understand. Most professional mental health experts hardly appreciate the thinking that goes on inside the active pathological gambler. I wanted very much to be able to examine these ideas at close range.

Suddenly, as I sat in my old fire engine brooding, the leather beneath me felt smooth and soft. The dials of the flat instrument panel began to glow faintly. I glanced out at the hood and saw bright gold letters against fresh, red paint. And a strange, uncanny mood settled over me. Great imagination, I told myself. So, to prove I was in control of my thinking, I deliberately imagined a companion sitting beside me. Dr. Fringe! But here was a strangely older Dr. Fringe. He now had a wispy white beard and steel-rimmed glasses. And he was dressed in a frock coat and tall, black hat. I hadn't ordered that, but it was interesting.

“Ideas, Taber!” cried my vision of Dr. Fringe. “They aren't just important. They're life or death! We'll never understand or cure pathological gambling until we understand the ideas. Oh, by the way, nice rescue wagon you have here.”

“I didn't plan on using it to rescue gamblers, Dr. Fringe,” I stammered. “We all know that bailouts from gambling problems only make the situation worse.”

“Of course not, Taber,” he replied. “What we have to do is rescue gamblers from their own ideas, not from their enablers or their gambling problems. Normal, rational alternatives to gambling are so clear and obvious to most people, but they're just not visible to pathological gamblers because of psychological blinders. An alternative unseen is no alternative at all. The idea of a non-gambling life is too remote and intolerable for the gambler to contemplate. His thinking has become too narrow and too limited by the preoccupation with gambling. He can't see the meaning and joy of life because he's in a trap of his own making. Gambling becomes a compulsion driven by an irrational need to re-enter the euphoric, altered state of mind created by gambling action.”

“I know all that, Dr. Fringe,” I answered. “The addicted gambler is willing to pay any price to get into action and to stay in action. You and I know gambling is only a game, a mere pastime, a recreation. Clearly, there must be distortions of normal reasoning that make self-defeating behavior seem perfectly logical to the gambler. But persuasion, logic, and re-education almost always fail, just as trying to ration or prohibit gambling always fails. What is one to do?”

“Taber,” said my imaginary seatmate, “If we’re to explore the inner world of the pathological gambler, we must first suspend our common, ordinary standards of thinking and all our own basic values and beliefs. The gambler is sure he's right, and feels that others can't understand his rightness because they, not he, are lacking in his special insight.

“One doesn't develop extremely narrow, self-destructive thinking like Bill Beatty's in just a few weeks or months. Delusions grow up gradually, when we need to invent explanations for what is happening. At first they're just reasonable-sounding ideas that might be true, and the gambler tries them out on himself and on others. They seem to work, to persuade people, and to put off the inevitable consequences of chronic gambling. Finally, like all deep emotional convictions, the gambler's delusions become necessary: They simply have to be true. Otherwise, the total failure, the complete lack of meaning in the gambler's life, would be undeniable. His mental house of cards would crash down, and life for him would be intolerable.

“If what have become articles of faith turn out to be false, the dream world of the gambler would fall apart. That prospect would be as frightening to him as the repeal of the law of gravity, or failure of the sun to rise, might be to the normal mind. If things suddenly floated in air, if the day didn’t dawn, we’d all doubt our sanity. We could panic and resort to desperate measures ourselves. What would we have to lose if everything we thought we knew turned out to be 180 degrees away from the truth? Death might seem better than trying to live in such chaos.”

“True enough,” I agreed. “Gamblers are convinced their thinking about gambling is infallible. Doing something frequently is supposed to make you an expert, and that is exactly how the gambler sees herself, as an expert on gambling, not a victim of gambling, or of her own thinking and emotions.”

Suddenly a loud banging on the rear wall of the engine cab interrupted the learned discourse between Dr. Fringe and me. I turned and peered back through the small, grated window into the rear compartment, and saw Al staring back at me!

“Come on, damn it, Taber, let's go,” cried Al. “People out there need new ideas to keep them alive, and you two sit there jabbering like school teachers.”

Al's galoshes had been replaced with hip-high, black rubber waders, and he wore a bright red fireman's hat with a gold eagle lunging forward over the wide brim. I was a bit worried by the large, glittering axe he held in his hand.

There were others seated with Al in the back, but I turned to stare at Dr. Fringe in wonderment.

My strange companion took up the discussion as if there had been no interruption. “Delusions, of course, are not lies, Taber. You know that. One who suffers from a delusion has a genuine conviction that the false idea is true. In the gambler they are symptoms of the mental disorder we call pathological gambling.”

The banging resumed and I called, “Hold it just a minute, Al. The Fringe and I are planning strategy.

“Well, Dr. Fringe,” I said, “since the gambler is really not psychotic or crazy in the usual sense, the term delusion may be too strong. We’re really talking about half-truths, or what I call magic thinking. Narcissistic and egocentric are other terms that describe the self-absorbed, magic thinking of the pathological gambler.”

“Call them what we will,” cried Dr. Fringe, “delusions, magic thinking, self-deception — such ideas are not just simple mistakes. What matters is not that people have such ideas, but that they act on them to their own self-destruction.”

“Magic thinking, for one thing,” I said, “can protect us from a chronic bad mood. We call such a mood dysphoria, or dysthymia, or simply depression. Unpleasant moods are relieved by comfortable delusions, but reality only makes the mood worse in the long run.”

“Back to basics,” said Fringe. “The main purpose of the gambler's delusional system seems to be to defend and protect an addiction to gambling, but the gambler does not see his gambling as a problem, or the problem, because gambling is the ultimate anti-depressive drug. Life without gambling would seem intolerable because of the depression such a life suggests.

“The differences among childish or magic thinking, serious fantasy, self-deception, thought-distortion, and psychotic delusion represent points in a spectrum that runs from lightly-held whimsy to serious psychopathology. So long as we find our major satisfactions in the normal routine of daily responsibilities, we have the ability to enjoy fantasy safely, and to pull ourselves back to the rational world that adults find far more satisfying than dreams.

“By the way, Taber, your wife may be right. What's a practical guy like you doing with an impossible dream like restoring an old fire wagon?”

Now he was getting a little too personal. And how did he know what my wife thought?

Renewed pounding and yelling from the back of the fire engine saved me. Glancing back again, I saw Fanny peering at me through the port of a huge brass diving helmet. “Put this sucker in gear, Taber, and let’s get going,” her voice echoing from within the helmet.

Reaching down, I flipped the ignition switch and tramped on the starter button. The wagon trembled and its engine roared to life.

Carefully, I backed the great wagon out of the barn and drove slowly out to the road while Dr. Fringe continued his discourse as if this were a routine we had practiced many times before.

“People sometimes can belong to two cultures at the same time,” he lectured. “It's not impossible, psychologically, to move back and forth between two different languages, belief structures, value systems, and standards of behavior. Normal people can act out the role of gambler and find it entertaining. The pathological gambler, in contrast, puts on the mask of normalcy between gambling bouts. Alienation is the price he must pay to get on with the gambling. Little wonder some advanced gamblers have told us that at times they felt like they were two different personalities. In fact, they were!

“The gambler has at least some awareness, especially in the mid stages of his gambling career, that the self-deceptions are false. At such times these falsehoods may become conscious lies he puts forth to defend a progressive dependence on gambling. Eventually he can no longer lie to himself about being hooked or about destroying his life, but now he's in the desperate, final stages. He knows that gambling is the cause of his pain, but even then, he must continue in a mechanical, mindless way, to combat increasing depression and avoid the admission of failure through more gambling. Such is the nature of addiction. Betting and losing is better than not betting at all!”

“Well, Dr. Fringe,” I offered, “let me suggest that all other serious addictions are also promoted by a similar set of irrational, self-deceiving ideas. The words change but the process is the same. Other addictions will probably replace gambling if the thinking itself is not corrected.”

“And correct these ideas we shall,” cried The Fringe. “Get her rolling, Taber. I see a tortured mind just ahead.”

And suddenly we entered a dim, humid land of tangled ideas. Mist rose from bubbling swamps, and in the background, over the sound of the engine, one could hear a dull, deep thumping that seemed to shake the ground.

“That thumping noise is the urge to gamble,” shouted The Fringe. “It's always there, pounding away night and day. Sometimes you can't hear anything over the pounding. GAMBLE, GAMBLE, GAMBLE goes the drum.”

Now a huge tree completely blocked our path. It  dominated the entire landscape, and I could see no way around its massive growth.

“This is what an obsessive idea looks like,” cried Al, who had jumped from the rear cab. “See how it crowds out everything else?”

Indeed, I could see tiny plants around the base of the Big Idea Tree, small plants that I somehow understood represented ideas like family, job, loyalty, and health.

“This monster is the idea that Gambling Is An Important Activity” said Al, swinging his axe against the gargantuan trunk.

There was a loud hissing as the giant idea came folding down upon itself. Clearly, it took only a single blow dealt by the Axe of Reason to reveal how empty and inflated the importance of gambling had become in this pathetic mind. We knew it would grow back quickly, of course, without constant work in the garden of the mind, but it was a start.

“Of course gambling isn't very important,” said Al, as he admired his work. “I used to think gambling was the only thing in the world to live for. But now I know it's not important except, maybe, to the casino owners. Gambling is just exciting little games meant for brief diversion, nothing any serious mind would bother with for long. It's just trivial, and that's the seed of the vital idea we must plant here. For the pathological gambler, gambling looks like a mysterious, exciting, easy, and sophisticated path to the good life. But it’s only a temporary way to escape depression and self-doubt.”

“Right, Al,” I agreed. “Gambling games are just that; games, nothing more. Gambling does no work, serves no noble purpose, is not really a way to earn money, produces no useful product, and yet can be a deadly hazard to mental and physical health because of the severe stress it can cause if you take it seriously. It should never, never be used as a remedy for depression or other psychological pain.”

“Enough gab, Taber,” said The Fringe, as he scraped some fertile soil over his small seed of reason, which would grow into the realization that gambling is trivial. “Let's get going. I see other evil thoughts things to conquer.”

And so we lumbered along through one gambler's mind after another. Strangely, we were able to jump—truck, tools, crew, and all—from mind to mind. Dr. Fringe clutched his precious bag of seeds as I steered our way around tangled webs of delusion and great swamps of self-deception. Each time Dr. Fringe yanked the rope to the huge bell on the hood we leaped to a different mental landscape and came upon new, frightening, ideas.

At one point Fanny again donned her brass diving helmet and put on a huge rubber suit. We connected her air supply and communication line, and then started up the portable air compressor as she slipped beneath the surface of a particularly nasty looking pool of murky water. The gambler's mind through which we traveled at the moment lay submerged under the idea I Can Win It Back. He was obsessed with the belief that lost money somehow still awaited him in some magic realm, needing only a bit of luck in order for him to retrieve it. He had to win it back, of course, if he was still to believe in gambling.

“OK,” we finally heard Fanny report over the phone link, “I've found the plug to drain this swamp, but before I pull it, you people make sure you have my lifeline tied to something more solid than this guy's reasoning.”

We tied Fanny's line to the truck and Al told her, “All set, Fanny. Pull the plug.”

Immediately the swamp began to recede, and soon Fanny's helmet emerged above the water. As the last of the scummy liquid gurgled away, Dr. Fringe buried a seed he claimed would grow into the idea, What's Gone Is Gone. It would allow this gambler to let go of fantasies of winning anything back from the past. He would come to understand that the outcome of one gambling episode—win or lose—has absolutely no effect on the outcome of any other future gambling episode. He might never understand the absolute truth by becoming a mathematician, but he would believe it, and that was what mattered.

In yet another mind, an enormous, fire-breathing beast with nasty body odor and gigantic teeth suddenly attacked us. We knew, of course, that it was only the image of an idea, a shadow with no physical reality, a silly thing to put out of mind with only a simple command. But it certainly looked convincing. Indeed, this idea it is a formidable adversary to the pathological gambler, as long as he gives it a life of its own.

“What the hell is that?” I cried.

“This,” replied Tom (now an active member of our idea-fighting crew), “is the idea that Gambling Will Be The Solution To All My Problems. This guy really thinks that the cause of his problems will solve his problems. Is that crazy or what?”

We disposed of this obnoxious demon quickly of by a blast of clear thinking from one of our fire extinguishers. Dr. Fringe then released a small animal from his bag of tricks that he claimed would grow into a vision of life without gambling. This cute, furry little fellow would teach the gambler that problems can only be solved by diligent work, planning, skill, and service, never by games of chance.

“As a physician,” shouted Fringe, “I can assure you that More of the dog that bit you is not the way to get the dogs out of your life.”

During our whole trip, I had noticed, Vincent and his devoted Millicent sat in the truck whispering together and writing notes. I rather imagined they had not wanted to risk soiling their meticulous outfits by getting involved in actual rescue work.

As if coming from a great distance, I heard a thumping on the cab door at my left. A voice was saying, “Wake up, Daddy. Mommy says dinner's ready. Why are you sleeping out here in the truck, anyway?”

My crew was hastily departing. Millicent, taking Vincent's outstretched hand, climbed out of the rear passenger compartment. Just before she vanished, she placed her writing pad in my hand. “Here's our list of dumb ideas, Dr. Taber, all the ones we've just stamped out on this rescue mission,” she said. And then she was gone.

“Mommy, Mommy!” my daughter was saying. “Daddy's sleeping in his fire engine. Why doesn't he take a nap on the couch like real daddies do?”

“Because sometimes,” I heard my wife say, “I'm afraid your Daddy's not real. He spends a lot of time working hard on problems most people never knew existed. It isn't easy trying to get people to change their minds, so he needs to relax on weekends. At least that's Daddy's story, and as long as he brings home that paycheck we don't argue with him.”

It was an unwritten rule that my family did not discuss my rescue wagon, just as we did not discuss a number of other family things, such as why my wife never put the cap back on the tooth paste, or exactly what our oldest son did at college when he worked part-time as a night guard in a girls' dormitory. Ordinary mysteries surround every family, but my imaginary trip into gambler-land was not ordinary. Nor was it subject to debate or discussion at dinner.

After dinner, in the twilight, still under the spell of my own strange dreams, I walked back out to the barn wondering if, indeed, my beloved engine really did have magic powers. One of the chickens was perched on the steering wheel, so I opened the driver's door to chase it out and discovered a yellow writing pad on the seat. The writing was not in my hand. Whoever wrote this had a perfect hand and perfect spelling, neither virtues of mine. I carried the pad out to the picnic table under the tulip tree, where I read what Millicent had written. If not her, then who?

There was a simple list of 30 ideas, clearly written and neatly numbered under the title, Dumb Ideas Gamblers Love. After each item, she had recorded a few of the comments we had made as we went along on our odyssey. How could she have done all this writing during our wild ride through gambler-land?

Thirty different mental landscapes! Had we really visited so many in one trip? Millicent had cut through all the theoretical talk about delusions, self-deception, and magic thinking to come up with a simple, accurate title for precisely what I had been trying to isolate: Dumb Ideas! Somehow, that title made thinking about thinking a lot easier. Each dumb idea we had encountered on our rescue mission was listed, along with a brief note.

Dumb Ideas About Gambling

1. Gambling is an important thing to do.

Gambling is about as dumb as watching paint dry. That's what many wives and enablers feel, but somehow they let themselves believe the gambler’s idea that gambling is the greatest. Buying into the fantasy only enables the gambler to bury his family for longer, with their tacit acceptance.

2. Gambling is a way to earn money.

It is only if you operate the business and don't gamble yourself! The edge in favor of the operator guarantees success over the long haul. The poor gambler dreams about the big win. Magic thinking tells him that gambling is a fun and proper way to earn a living, or to get caught up financially.

Wouldn't it be great if we could get gamblers to dream about all the big losses they suffer? It's not money that solves the problems anyway. Money would only be an embarrassing responsibility. The gambler thrives on action, not money. The action makes him feel excited, alive, exuberant and powerful, a feeling some people get with cocaine, food, sex, or a host of other activities to which people can become addicted—anything, really, that feels good and works in a hurry.

3. People who don't gamble are stupid, slow, or scared.

Taber's normies, of course, aren't necessarily any of these things, but gamblers have little time or patience for normal people. Advertising tries to make the gambler seem like a special person, a person with luck, knowledge, skill, good looks, and an ability to enjoy life. I remember billboards outside of Reno with slogans like, “Play where the winners play” and, superimposed on a large lollipop, “Don't be a sucker, check our odds.”

Someone, at some time, needs to say to every gambler, “People who don't gamble are OK, really OK.” Choosing abstinence is prudent, smart, and, with all the pressure we have today to gamble, downright courageous.

4. Gambling is healthy recreation.

False! Gambling, in fact, goes with other addictions like alcohol abuse, smoking, and overeating. Heavy gambling makes other addictions more likely. There's nothing healthy about gambling that you couldn't get for a lot less money doing something else. Thirty percent of hospitalized gamblers have heart problems. Many have not had their decaying teeth or ailing bodies checked in years, not to mention the underlying depression. Far from keeping a person mentally alert, gambling is like any other drug. It shuts down most of the mind in order to concentrate on the one source of pleasure that brings instant relief.

5. My gambling is under control.

That's what gamblers always say! Coming from a chronic gambler, this is psychological denial in its purest form. He says he can quit anytime, and sometimes he can for a while, but the urge, the consuming appetite, is still there. By this time, he's already lost control of part of his thinking. His urge to gamble overwhelms good judgment and social training. Because the addiction produces an overwhelming appetite for constant action, the gambler becomes powerless, not just over gambling, but all phases of life. Life becomes unmanageable.

It's next to impossible for an active gambler to admit that life is unmanageable and out of control, because that would be too damaging to his ego. So, finding himself in a position equivalent to racing down Fifth Avenue naked on top of a raging bull elephant at high noon, he yells to his friends along the way that this is only the way he planned to get home all along. When the gambler is most assured about his own beliefs, he looks most preposterous in the eyes of his friends. And, not incidentally, in the eyes of casino workers.

6. I don't have to quit; I can just cut down and ration my gambling.

It's the dream of the alcoholic to be able to drink normally, but if you ask him what normal is, he can't tell you. He has no idea how much is enough, and laughs at the idea of stopping with one beer. It's the dream of the pathological gambler to gamble normally. But what is normal gambling? He has no idea.

If you want to make a gambler uncomfortable, ask her how much she thinks would be a big enough win, in order to stop gambling for good. That stumps them. Then they laugh. So push for an answer. “Would $50,000 be enough? No? How about $5 million, would that stop you?”

At this point, they usually get irritable and change the subject. The pathological gambler doesn't want to cut down and be normal. She only wants not to be hassled for money so often, to be left alone to ply her addiction. She's stuck: Without risk, there's no thrill; because of risk, there’s no peace of mind.

7. Other people don't or can't understand me.

Of course we understand, we're not stupid! But since the gambler really doesn't understand herself or what drives her abnormal behavior, she finds it very hard to believe that anyone else could, either. Any non-gambler who tries to talk to a gambler is likely to hear, “You were never a gambler, so how could you ever really understand what it feels like?”

Dr. Fringe says the gambler should be trying to understand normal folk, not the other way around. We all know what it feels like to have strong impulses; all human beings do. We also know how difficult it is to deny a strong impulse. But we manage to do it most of the time. The gambler complains that she's not understood as a way of disarming arguments against gambling. There are lots of twists to this theme:

“You don't really understand how difficult it is to do what I do!”

“Your don't understand my needs; if you did you’d help me.”

“You don't understand gambling. You have to take a few losses in order to win.”

“You really don't understand … the horses, the odds, the stock market, how I play poker, why I gamble, the meaning of life, the rebel in me, etc, etc. …”

Gamblers sound like children! Parents hear it all the time; “Ah, Mom, you just don't understand. All the kids are doing it.” Or, “Gosh, Dad, you were a kid so long ago you can't possibly know what's going on today.”

8. I can win it back.

Not in a million years, kid! We have to understand the statistician's Law of Independent Events, a principle of mathematics that explodes the delusion of the win it back idea. The money is gone, lost, nonexistent, and past losses can have no possible effect on the chances of how future bets turn out. None! Zip! Every bet is always mathematically independent of every other bet except, possibly, in a few situations that are never allowed in gambling games.

A casino is a temple for the religion of bad mathematics.

If the marble falls on the number 15 in a roulette wheel having only 26 numbers, that doesn't remove the number 15 from the next spin. Each number has the same probability of coming up each time; past outcomes do not change a thing. If hitting 15 removed it from the wheel, other numbers would be more likely to come up, since there would now be fewer numbers in the pool of possible winners. The odds on any other number would drop from 1 in 26 to 1 in 25 and would continue to decrease with the removal of each subsequent winning number. That's what the gambler likes to think happens, but it doesn’t. That's just wishful thinking.

If there are 25 boys from which to pick two basketball squads, each pick increases the probability that any one of the remaining boys will be picked next. The odds eventually drop from one in 25 down to one out of one—a certainty—for the last boy to be picked. But always, each card and each roulette number remains a contender from play to play throughout the game. And so the odds remain the same regardless of the gambler's wins and losses. This is also true in rolling dice at the craps table; every resulting number remains as probable as before.

“I've lost the last three, I must be due now, they owe me,” thinks the gambler. But this logic exists only in the gambler's mind, not in the real world. The laws of probability grind on, blithely unaware of human desire or need.

In the game called blackjack, or 21, cards are played from a deck, and are not returned to the deck until the whole deck is shuffled. So if a card counter—someone who can remember what cards have already been played—remembers that so many face cards or so many aces have been played, he would actually have the ability to use the odds in his favor. Since, in this game, the cards left to play do depend on those played, the probabilities that influence the outcome of each hand are not independent, one from the other. For this reason, most casinos use up to five decks in the shoe or box from which cards are drawn. Then, in addition, they require the dealer to shuffle and start over when he is only halfway through the five decks. This makes it very difficult for the card counter to use his memory to overcome the house's built-in edge, and makes interdependent events almost the same as independent events.

Besides, any consistent success on the part of an expert card counter merely gets him banned from the premises.

Gambling operators have nothing to gain by offering the kinds of games that the gambler dreams about, games in which somehow one loss would make the next win more likely. But of course they do encourage that fantasy. Gambling outcomes are almost always independent from each other: football scores, the fall of the dice, the turn of a card—none of these depend on what has gone before, on the past experiences of the gambler, his wins and losses, his hopes, desires, needs, or feelings of specialness.

One common strategy gamblers employ is doubling-up after every loss until the almost inevitable win. This can be tried in a number of games, including roulette: If you lose on red, put down twice the amount on red for the next spin. Should this succeed, the players might soon come up against a house limit on the amount one can wager. Plungers who try this are proponents of the absurd Martingale system. The cold, hard fact is that the odds never change with the amount of the bet or because of what's been lost. And the odds are never in the gambler's favor.

It’s really pretty simple: If you're betting on a coin toss—heads or tails—you minimize your losses and maximize your wins by always betting on the same outcome! If you change your calls between heads and tails, you can only decrease your overall score. So, in gambling, bet the most likely outcome and stick with it, no long shots and no impulsive changes in your betting. Now that's dull! A machine could do it. In efficient betting, the kind that minimizes loss, there is no room for ego, style, or great expectations. Stripped of the dreams we bring to the table, gambling is a bland, repetitious exercise in futility.

When a gambler says, “I can win it back,” he's just saying that he can get the old rush or high back when he goes into action. This is his real win, a potent effect for which some are willing to pay an ultimate price in self-destruction.

9. I'm smart; I have a system to beat the odds.

If you tell this to a casino and show them good credit, they'll give you a free room, free meals, and first-rate entertainment. They'll even send a limousine to get you, and perhaps pay your airfare. Casinos, some stockbrokers, and the bookie love any player who thinks he has an infallible system.

Gamblers are smart, as a matter of fact. And gamblers waste time developing elaborate schemes in futile efforts to beat the odds of their particular games. There are systems for handicapping horses, picking stocks, and placing bets at craps tables. These systems are inevitably designed to deny the reality of the Law of Independent Events. But developing these sometimes ingenious, always flawed plans—designed to convert negative probabilities into a positive result—can be much, much more than just ways to gamble; the gambler can get just as high working on the system as he does with gambling. We must always remember that intoxication, not winning money, is the quest of all addicts.

The more complex the system, the more ego the gambler puts on the line in each bet. Gambling operators know that a problem gambler will defend ego to the last penny. The best any system can do, when results ultimately depend on chance, is minimize losses and reduce gambling to a dull, mindless grind, a routine no pathological gambler would find interesting for long.

10. People respect a heavy bettor.

We suspect it's the money that rational people really respect, not the fool who throws it down on the table. We don't mean to say that pathological gamblers are fools, but that's the way others see them. The whole big shot image of the gambler, down to and including the huge bet, is a pathetic attempt to carve out an identity and shore up a weak ego. Nevertheless, the pathological gambler is eager to believe in the dream created by the gambling promoters.

Casinos and racetracks exploit the myth that society admires the big time gambler, the heavy player. The gambler, in American history, has a romantic role. Most gamblers in history were actually impulsive, self-seeking rascals whose unsavory careers were punctuated by failure, dishonesty, and violence, all seasoned with whiskey.

11. Someday I'll score a really big win and quit with honor.

What a dream! No amount of money is ever enough to lure the gambler away from the euphoric fix at the tables or tracks. Gambling is not about money. Most pathological gamblers we know, in fact, had many big wins along the way, but none was ever big enough. Many pathological gamblers get started with an early big win, but evidence suggests that a big win only promotes more gambling. A big win doesn't stop or satisfy the urge. The big win, if and when it comes, only whets the appetite for more of the same. The very worst thing that can happen to a gambler is a win! It temporarily forestalls the nasty consequences of immature behavior. As long as the gambler wins, there is no need to grow up and learn to appreciate normal responsibilities.

12. Gambling will be the solution to my problems.

Here we have the kind of thinking that persuades the gambler that black is really white. He is going to try to convince us that the problem is actually the only solution that will work for him.

Gambling—the cause of the gambler's misery—is seen as the eventual answer to all problems. This is like the alcoholic who can't function in the morning without that first drink: In order to feel normal again, to feel adequate to the demands of a new day, the alcoholic must have a drink. Thus, he reasons, alcohol solves the problems that last night's drinking created.

To stop gambling would leave the gambler broke and depressed, a loser. To continue gambling, he believes, gives him at least a chance of getting even. The delusion here is that gambling that in the long run can only make matters worse is seen by the gambler as the only chance of getting even.

The only rational solution to any serious gambling problem is to stop gambling, completely and for good. Gambling is no more a solution to a gambling problem than is more alcohol a solution to a drinking problem.

13. Expensive presents will make up for past disappointments.

In the words of one long-suffering and angry wife, “Look, Turkey, if you think one lousy mink coat can make up for 20 years of unexplained absences, no paychecks, and false promises, you've got another think coming!”

Many a pathological gambler has come home after a big win—say, for example, $5,000 to brag to the family about his success at gambling. “I won $2,000 today!” he tells the wife. (The extra $3,000 goes back to his secret stash for the next gambling spree.)

Does he turn over the entire $2,000 to the wife? Hardly! Rather than pay long-postponed creditors, our gambler loads up on lavish, unasked-for presents, confident they’ll buy back the admiration and love he has thrown away by past failures. The gambler never seems willing to let go of control. And, having low self-worth, he cannot understand that he would be loved for some of his personal characteristics if he were not gambling. So he buys gifts. He might ostentatiously hand his wife a few hundred bucks, just to play the big shot.

The fancy presents never seem to fix the relationship, but gamblers never learn this lesson easily. They are often unable to comprehend the emotional needs of others, and astounded when those closest to them disown the desires and feelings they think a wife and family should have.

14. Gambling makes me feel better.

For a little while, yes, gambling pulls the gambler out of depression and self-loathing. The old juices flow once more. Never mind that it always seems to take bigger and faster action to pump up the old high. For the moment, at least, the gambler comes back to life and lives out the old dream. In the late stages, however, even this is taken away, and gambling becomes a joyless ritual, a mocking form of slow psychological suicide. Gambling may be a nice entertainment for some, but if you need it to feel good, or to change how you think, serious trouble is coming.

15. Money is my problem.

If only it were! There are thousands of easier and more certain ways of getting money than by gambling.

The gambler sees his problems as financial. So do family and friends. In the face of a big loss or a poor run of luck, the gambler, rather than question his reasons for gambling, tries to find the money to continue solving the problem through gambling. It's useless to try to argue the gambler out of a delusion—but he'll eventually see the truth himself when he starts getting help. Of course, we don't need to feed or encourage a dumb idea either. Friends and family must be educated so they will not be drawn into the trap of thinking that the primary problem is financial. The pathological gambler has a severe emotional problem that he must deal with first. We do them further harm if we try to solve the problems with money, gifts, loans, or bailouts.

Gambling is a psychological or mental problem, and it's wrong to believe that the gambler's pain comes from financial reversals. Most of it is mental depression, coming as a rebound effect after the euphoric, artificial high of gambling has worn off.

16. I’ll pay it back.

If a gambler wants money and tells you he'll pay you back, don't bet on it! He's probably sincere, but you're not dealing with a fully rational person.

Rather than abstain from gambling in the face of overwhelming losses, the gambler tries to raise money through increasingly risky means: bank loans, finance companies, credit cards, loans from credit unions, sale of property, family resources, loan sharks, bad checks, embezzlement, or other crimes.

Gambling-related crimes are usually nonviolent. For a pathological gambler, there is seldom any conscious criminal intent. He really does plan to pay it back, he really wants to pay it back, and he may feel horribly guilty when that proves to be impossible. For a while, he does manage to pay it back, by either winning a little or borrowing from yet another source. But the total debt builds up, and good intentions turn to ashes. Foolish gambling is not itself a crime, and this fact distinguishes him, in his own mind, from the common crook, even as the gambler steals to continue.

17. Borrowing to gamble is OK.

Never! Gambling is recreation, just like the movies or picnics. Would a prudent person borrow the price of a theater ticket? It happens, but most adults learn to put off their recreational pleasures until they can afford them. The gambler's magic thinking tells her she can use her pleasures to pay for the necessities of life. She’s got it backwards!

There are a few people who are paid illegal wages to gamble. They’re called shills, and they earn a small living by pretending to gamble at the tables, with money or chips given to them by the casino. But the gambler isn't interested in working at gambling for a wage.

Since the gambler foolishly sees gambling as being about money, he sees nothing wrong in borrowing to finance more gambling. But borrowing to gamble is like borrowing to buy street drugs or alcohol. It's equally irrational to borrow to pay debts caused by gambling. The consolidation loan is a familiar part of the family life of most pathological gamblers, and putting all the debts caused by gambling into one package is as stupid a solution as gambling itself. So is filing for bankruptcy. These tactics merely take the pressure off and allow the gambler to get back into action sooner.

The reason gamblers are always in a hurry to pay the bookie, casino or brokerage house is simple: They want to maintain their gambling credit and their credibility as gamblers. Loans to pay gambling debts or to finance further gambling are always mistakes. They take away the pain temporarily, without solving the problem. Loans postpone and worsen the eventual day of reckoning.

18. Stealing to gamble isn't really stealing.

A gambler once admitted to me, “A thief is a thief is a thief!” This started an argument among other members of Gamblers Anonymous. Every thief, gambler or not, convinces himself he had some compelling reason to steal; gamblers who steal because of gambling problems seldom see themselves as thieves in the legal sense. But of course, they are.

When gamblers steal they don't spend the money on high living, and they often do keep accurate records, intending to pay the money back as soon as they win. Somehow, they use these peculiar virtues—”I don't live in luxury and I keep records of what I take”—to separate themselves in their own minds from those they generally think of as thieves.

But ask the widow whose trusted lawyer took her inheritance and lost it at the racetrack if he's a thief, and she’ll make that point very clear as long as anyone will listen. She doesn't want to hear how he planned to pay it back with interest, or how he recorded everything he took from her in a neat account book. She doesn't even want him in jail. She wants him dead!

At first the gambler-thief, intent on making sure he can get into action whenever he wants to, does pay the money back, often time after time. In this way, he comes to believe he will always be able to pull himself out of the soup in the future.

“Why do people persist in crossing the street against the red light?” asks the frustrated policeman. Because, of course, they get away with it almost all the time. Jaywalkers don't think of themselves as bad people or law-breakers. Once in a while, a jaywalker is killed or injured; and once in a while, a gambler finds she can't replace the stolen money orders, the company funds, or the customer deposits entrusted to her. Even then, caught in the act, there are endless ways of avoiding jail. Company insurance policies, sympathetic supervisors, and lenient courts all seem to conspire to protect the gambler-thief from the just consequences of her behavior. So, when that rare and unlucky gambler does go to jail, it comes as a horrible surprise to everyone. At this critical moment, the risk of suicide or other desperate acts is very great. Such is the shock to the wounded ego when the dream of infallibility is smashed and exposed.

Not all pathological gamblers do illegal things. About half of those who come for help have current legal problems. But stealing, like gambling, starts small and builds gradually. A lot depends on opportunity; if the gambler is in a job that offers a high degree of financial responsibility or gives him control over cash, he is much more likely to start borrowing a little here and there to finance gambling. It gets easier because guilt and anxiety lessen with practice. The amounts get larger and the payback time gets longer. The total debt inexorably builds, and good intentions are rationalized away.

Finally, one day there’s a knock on the door, a surprise audit, or an uncovered check at the bank. Now the world doesn't care what you thought you were doing. You're a thief!

19. The more money I have to gamble with the better my chances of winning.

This is a common misconception among gamblers. They’re always trying to acquire and protect a reserve of gambling money. Mathematically and statistically, the chances of winning or losing are unrelated to the amount available for gambling on any given day. If the gambler has a little money, the chances favor his losing a little money; if he has a lot of money, the same odds favor his losing a lot of money. The odds are not affected by the size of the hoard, only by the rules (or odds) of the game, and they always favor the house. Any other idea is pure self-deception. A big poke means a big high, that's all.

Compare the next misconception with the false idea that more money increases the chances of winning.

20. Even if I only have a few bucks, I might as well take a shot.

We remember a gambler who expressed this so well. He told us that he had taken the family's last few dollars to buy milk and bread for the children, and started off to the local convenience store. Somehow, his feet just turned by themselves and carried him to the all-night card game where he had lost paycheck after paycheck. He reasoned that his children really deserved so much more than milk and bread. His mind once again began to spin out the old daydream of buying his wife fine presents, fixing up the house, and getting a new car.

He thinks, who wants a miserable old loaf of bread and a bottle of milk anyway? I've seen guys walk out of that game with hundreds of dollars. I remember the day I cleaned up and took $500 home. First, I'll buy into the game tonight for a few bucks, since that’s all I have. If I spend it all on food, I'll have nothing tomorrow, for food or gambling. This way I may win enough for both. Might as well take a shot, since I have nothing now anyway.

Translation: “Boy, am I depressed by just thinking about how I've neglected and deprived my family. Getting milk and bread is no thrill; a little gambling would be. Might as well take a shot, since I'm a bum anyway.”

Any way you look at it, big bucks or no bucks at all, every sign points toward gambling in the gambler's mind. The pathological gambler sees no reason to pay off a little debt, buy a little food, or live a little like normal people; his fantasies tell him he could parlay a small stake into huge winnings. And so things always get worse.

There’s a story of a man who lost everything in Atlantic City, a story acted out again and again on the streets of that town every day. He called a relative, who wired him money to get home. That small amount of bus fare became, in his mind, a chance to get back into action, a ticket to a big win. This fellow had discovered, as many before him had, a neat way to take just one more shot. He got a few dollars in travel money from a pool of relatives and friends by placing a series of desperate, whining phone calls in which he vividly described the personal dangers of living without food on the streets during winter. Naturally, he always called collect. Eventually he had to give up when no one would take his calls any longer, and he finally hitchhiked out of town.

21. Somebody will be there to bail me out if things go wrong.

The crazy thing is, pathological gamblers do get bailed out time and time again by misguided relatives, employers, customers, and even the courts. Because of these bailouts, when they finally do reach the end of the road, gamblers will have a very hard time accepting the fact that no one is there to save them. Instead, the gambler becomes expert, with practice, in finding just one more financial rescue. When finally all the bridges are burned and no solution is forthcoming, he may become depressed and start to panic. Rarely does he find his own way out of the mess he has created without tough love from GA members and, perhaps, from professionals.

22. The reason I gamble is…

The gambler usually blames gambling on lack of money, as we have seen. He claims he has to gamble to get money, to get even, or to get ahead. Sometimes he’ll blame his wife and try to put the guilt on her for some real or imagined shortcoming; she’s a bad cook, she’s either too passive or too demanding in bed, or she refuses to get a job to help out. He may blame his parents, his children, his boss, his bookie, the casino, or whatever. He may say he gambles because he is nervous, depressed, bored, frustrated, under enormous pressure and stress at work, on and on. The truth most often seems to be that he is psychologically addicted to gambling and seldom realizes it.

The gambler's general tactic is to externalize the reasons for her gambling and her losses. Rather than accept the responsibility and see her own immature personality as the cause, she blames outside forces or events which she says make her gamble. Rather than change, she wants to change the world to suit her dreams.

23. If only I knew why I gamble I could stop.

If he finally gets into treatment, the gambler will challenge the therapist, saying that if he could only understand why he is forced to gamble, if he only had insight into the supposed psychic forces and events that caused his gambling to go out of control, then he would be able to quit. Here the gambler tempts us to ignore his present gambling and embark with him on a distracting and endless search for causes in the dim and uncertain world of the unconscious.

Professionals have nothing against insight; we should always attempt to understand why we behave as we do. But intellectual insight, even when it is accurate, doesn't tell a gambler how to live without gambling. Resisting the urge to gamble depends on self-control skills that must be learned in their own right. Knowing why he gambles gives the gambler very few clues about how to maintain abstinence. The search for insight may be a long and expensive way of avoiding a search for a more mature lifestyle. To believe that in knowing the causes of gambling one is finding a cure is simply magic thinking; it is a way of trying to believe that there is an easy, painless solution to the problem of growing up emotionally and psychologically. But there is no such way. Surprisingly, many psychotherapists still tend to encourage this magic thinking; they don't want to be seen as bad guys by forcing the gambler to look at reality.

24. Willpower is the answer.

The pathological gambler, when she thinks of stopping, uses the same magical thinking she used in her gambling. Here, too, she believes only what she needs and wants to be true. She continues to elevate the role that her own special powers or her ego will play in reshaping her life. She hopes that some simple change in the way she thinks, or some special effort of will, can let her go on living the way she always has, without major and radical changes or sacrifices. It cannot be!

The literature of psychiatry and psychology has very little to say about the popular idea of willpower. Professional mental health workers talk a lot about motivation, decision-making, and other complex concepts, but they find that willpower is not really a very useful way of describing motivation. Pathological gamblers are usually unable to stop gambling without some special outside help. Yet deciding to stop with willpower alone, rather than giving up delusions of personal control, is typically the first sign that the gambler is beginning to recognize the problem. At least she's talking about stopping.

When a gambler first decides to quit, he expects to master the addiction just the way he expected to master gambling: alone, without help, and in a hurry. Recently a young man called the hospital to complain of financial problems related to gambling. In more than three years of racetrack gambling he had lost $35,000, his life savings. He was so angry about this, he said, that he had decided to take a day off from work to solve the problem!

A whole day! He thought one appointment with a psychologist might help. He was angry and disappointed when no quick cure could be offered, and his last words were that he would just try willpower. He will almost certainly call for help again, but he made an important first step in deciding to deal with his problem. He will try to solve the problem in various ways himself first, and that will be risky and painful. It's going to take more than a day off from work. It may take the rest of his life. Does he have any better way to spend it?

25. My wife (or minister, or therapist, or doctor) can stop me from gambling.

The real danger is, they may actually try. But no one can truly stop a gambler from gambling. If we physically prevent gambling, we leave the urge untouched and the personality unchanged. Sometimes, trying to avoid personal responsibility, the gambler will try to set someone up as a kind of gambling policeman. This gives him someone to blame when he returns to gambling.

The script goes something like this. “From now on, May Belle, you get my paychecks, you keep the books, you just let me have an allowance for lunch, gas and newspapers.”

“Fine,” says a delighted May Belle. But three weeks later, she hears herself saying, “Bert, some of the checks are missing from the back of my checkbook, and the bank says if I don't bring in $110 right away to cover checks I know I didn't write, they're going to freeze the account.”

Resorting to the logic of the pathological gambler, Bert dismisses any guilt on his part by saying, “You were supposed to guard the checkbook and not let me have it. I found it just lying around in the bottom of a box behind the ironing board in the closet. You know you shouldn't leave temptation in my path.”

We would not accept this from a child of five, yet the 35-year-old gambler thinks we should accept it from him.

Getting other people to take control of our behavior seems to save us the responsibility and effort of developing self-control. When we sabotage the policeman's best efforts, it lets us be free of guilt and gives us someone to be angry at. “How could you have let me do a thing like that?”

A police officer’s lot is not a happy one. It's one of the most miserable jobs on earth, and accepting the duty will probably complete the destruction of a relationship.

Sometimes friends, spouses, relatives, and even therapists, think that their love and caring will reform the gambler. This magical thinking is always disappointed. When people around the gambler get as ego-involved in helping him as he is ego-involved in gambling, we have a destructive relationship that produces a spiral of mutual enabling. Like a hungry shark, the gambler immediately senses that the effort to help him is based on the irrational, emotional needs of the helper. The gambler takes advantage of these feelings by using pity, helplessness, and gratitude to manipulate the helper into paying debts, lying to cover him, lending money, and buying off the law. This is hardly a good path in the development of mature, marital intimacy.

26. I can't stop.

Does he really want a method that works? Or does he just want to go on gambling, without taking the blame or responsibility for the misery it causes?

The usual reason for not being able to stop is the financial delusion we talked about earlier; “As soon as I get even I'll stop. I can't quit now while I'm behind.”

People always seem to seek help for the wrong reasons: legal problems, family pressure, health failure, financial need, hopelessness, etc. They want the pain to go away; stopping the gambling is what they know the rest of us want to hear. Ironically, and fortunately, the original motivation really doesn't matter. At some point during abstinence, many stumble onto the right motivation. Suddenly they feel good again, they notice the arousal of self-worth and self-respect, and they find that life is more relaxed and manageable. At that point, when they have begun to face the real problems gambling allowed them to avoid, they may begin to believe, in fact, they can stop after all.

Thousands of gamblers have stopped with the help of family, professionals, and Gamblers Anonymous. But many gamblers feel theirs is the worst case, a unique case, or the most complex case on record.

One older man confessed, “Life would simply be worthless if I stopped; I'd probably kill myself if I didn't have gambling. I can't stop.”

That idea can't be changed with rational argument or clever pressure from a family member. It really takes a capacity for faith; faith in someone else's way, faith in a strange, new program that has helped others. This faith, of course, must flow from within the gambler. It cannot be forced upon someone who does not want to change. In the light of faith, it then takes willingness and hard work.

Toward the end of a long gambling career, most pathological gamblers no longer cling to the old dreams of big wins and easy living. Yet they remain convinced they can't stop. They've had the big wins and lost them. They've had the good times, but always ended up broke, alone, and feeling sick. And yet the way out of the misery remains invisible to them.

“If all that pain couldn't stop me, nothing can,” says the old gambler. Often they've taken up new addictions, such as alcohol and drugs. Their smoking continues at a heavy rate. Impulsive eating slows them down and drives up weight and blood pressure. Work loses its challenge, and when all else fails they spend hours just staring at the television without noticing what's on. Hope is washed away by depression and chronic stress. Any trace of spirituality is dead.

Strangely, at this very point, something remarkable sometimes happens. All resistance is gone, the promise of gambling has vanished, and all that's left is one lonely, broken human being. At this moment of defeat some small spark may propel the gambler toward surrender, toward the acceptance of some other way of thinking and acting.

“I knew it was pointless to gamble any more, I knew I was going to lose it all again. I didn't even want to gamble, but I just didn't care anymore.”

Faith and hope are the two main ingredients of any recovery. The faith must be in a program of real recovery, and the hope must be for a completely new way of thinking and living.

27. Sometimes I feel like I'm outside myself just looking at what's going on.

In the late stages of gambling addiction, some people develop bizarre delusions and even frightening hallucinations. They actually begin to think they hear and see things that aren't really there. Especially during intense bouts of gambling, some gamblers have reported strong feelings of unreality called depersonalization, feelings of being outside oneself, personally detached from the events in which one is actually participating.

One gambler who had lost millions of dollars in a favorite casino over a period of several months reported, “It was just like I wasn't playing any more myself. I was looking down at the tables from up above and seeing this man who looked and acted like me playing cards below. It scared the hell out of me, but it didn't stop me. I kept going back until the police caught me stealing from the company.”

Another gambler said, “I was tossed out and barred from this little casino in Nevada 'cause I busted the dealer's jaw. I wasn't drinking, and I swear to God I saw him deal me an ace. I saw the damn ace, but when I looked back at my hand the ace was gone, and I just knew that the dealer somehow must have crooked it back and given me a three of hearts instead. Later I realized how dumb I was. God, did I need an ace that night! I was wrong, but I wanted to get even in the worst way. I punched him out and they had to drag me off him, but at the time it just didn't seem like it was me doing it.”

Gambling usually stops being fun long before gambling stops. It becomes a joyless, desperate, and mechanical routine, as if the gambler loses a sense of personal responsibility for the gambling; he feels like a helpless onlooker. He's alienated now, even from himself and from his gambling. Although rather rare, such extreme alienation can be frightening. He begins to think he may be crazy. His gambling and huge losses reinforce the idea that he is actually different from normal people, that he is sick or crazy. A moment of clarity, at last!

28. Sometimes I think I really have two personalities.

As the gambler sees himself doing incredible things in his devotion to gambling, more and more of what he does seems alien to his basic nature. He gets the feeling, “This isn't really me doing this.” All he can think of to explain why he can lie, steal, or act with brutality and indifference toward loved ones, is to propose that there is a gambling personality and a normal self within the same body; a kind of Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde personality split. He finds it harder and harder to accept personal responsibility for his out-of-character acts.

The first step toward restoring a whole personality is the last thing a gambler ever thinks of doing; admit that gambling has resulted in a severe loss of control, that life has become unmanageable. Without this public admission, the misery continues.

29. Suicide will solve my problem.

This may be the ultimate self-deception. Usually, in those rare cases in which suicide is attempted, the attempt is just another step in the irrational chase, just one more attempt to gain attention and sympathy, or to manipulate the world to fit the gambler's needs. In one exceptional case a gambler did, in fact, take his own life, with carbon monoxide.

Jim started out as an attorney who managed money for widows and orphans in stock accounts. As he learned more about financial markets he began speculating with his own money in futures contracts. Pretty speculative stuff. Prices for commodities vary wildly at times and react violently to news that might affect future prices. Large amounts of money can be made and lost in a matter of days or hours, just the kind of fast, high-stakes action the gambler loves.

Jim did well at times, but was a long-term loser. He told himself he needed more money to play with so he could diversify his investments. Telling himself that he was doing them a favor, he began to speculate in futures contracts in his customers' accounts. Before he knew it, he found himself several million dollars in the hole and unable to cover his huge losses. He realized that he was now a criminal who, by his own thinking, had wanted only to do good for his clients.

Jim was never able to step back and look at the big picture. He came into treatment after he had lost his professional license and his wife, and had been disbarred by his state bar association. But he never gave up his drive to control. He was a star patient, quickly learning to say and do all the right things. We learned after his suicide was reported that his former employers had taken out a life insurance policy on him, in their favor, hoping to eventually cover their losses. Jim himself never had any real plans to make restitution, never mind what the GA program called for.

Jim was a manipulator and a game-player to the end. He killed himself the day after he was able to change the beneficiary on the company's policy to his wife's name. Clearly, he saw his own death as a logical part of the game, a step that would help him set things right and make everything good again.

30. I can't afford to pay for treatment, or take time off from work to go to Gamblers Anonymous meetings.

This is a popular idea with gamblers who still think they're in control of life. Treatment is very affordable, and Gamblers Anonymous is the cheapest and most effective form of treatment for anyone really willing to follow the program. Anyone who wants professional help in addition to GA can probably find it with persistence. Compared to gambling losses, and the energy it takes to continue the chase, finding real help is cheap and easy. It's not the time or money that's lacking; most likely, the gambler just hasn't decided to quit gambling yet.

***

Millicent’s Dumb Ideas list was a valuable one, so that evening I converted the 30 ideas into a series of simple test questions. That's what psychologists do, they write tests for others to take. I happen to like using only two choices without any None of the above or I don't know responses. It's not really a scientific way to write a test, but when it comes to deciding what to believe, I like to present people with strong contrasts and no middle ground. People are good enough at finding compromises without my help; my job, I think, is to find the unnoticed and often ignored alternatives. I don't make choices for people; I just try to find out what the choices are and then present them.

I re-worded a few items to make the right choice a bit less obvious. The next day I carried my 30-item test to work, where Ruth typed it up. We began asking our gamblers to take the test. Although I have no idea about its actual scientific accuracy, it always stirred up heated discussions and made for interesting group therapy sessions.

We did notice a lot of denying. “Yeah, I thought about that, but I never really believed it.”

The way I wrote the test, there could be no doubt about the right answers, at least from the point of view of the normal, ordinary, hard-working nerd.

Test: Ideas About Gambling

(Circle the number of any item below you agree with, or mostly agree with. We will assume you disagree with any item you do not mark. Consider each item, and do not write on the test except to circle the numbers of the items you agree with.)

1.    Gambling, in the scheme of things, is a pretty important thing to be able to do.

2.    Gambling can be a good way to earn money.

3.    People who don't gamble seem to be relatively stupid, slow, or timid.

4.    Gambling can be a healthy recreation.

5.    My gambling is under control.

6.    I don't really have to quit. I can just cut down and ration my gambling.

7.    Since I’m a gambler, other people don't or can't understand me.

8.    I can win back losses if I play long enough.

9.    I'm a pretty smart person, so I have my own system to beat the odds.

10.    People respect a heavy bettor.

11.    Someday, I might score a really big win and quit with honor.

12.    Gambling could be the solution to my problems.

13.    Expensive presents can make up for past disappointments.

14.    Gambling makes me feel better.

15.    Money is my real problem.

16.    If I borrow it, I will pay it back.

17.    Borrowing money to gamble with is fine; it's just a way to get some money             temporarily.

18.    Stealing to gamble isn't really the same as stealing by a common criminal.

19.    The more money I have to gamble with, the better my chances of winning.

20.    Even if I only have a few bucks, I'm better off taking a shot.

21.    Somebody will always be there to bail me out if things go wrong.

22.    The reason I gamble has nothing to do with my personality.

23.    If only I knew why I gamble I could stop.

24.    Willpower is probably the best way to stop gambling.

25.    My wife (or minister, or therapist, or doctor) can stop me from gambling.

26.    To tell the truth, I probably can't stop.

27.    Sometimes, I feel like I'm outside myself just looking at what's going on.

28.    Sometimes, I think I really have two personalities.

29.    Suicide might solve my problem.

30.    I can't afford to pay for treatment or take time off from work for Gamblers             Anonymous meetings.

Actually, the ideas in test form did not work out too well. People, as it turned out, were very reluctant to agree publicly with ideas that seem to have guided their behavior for years. It seems that once a dumb idea is put into writing, people are a lot less likely to endorse the idea. But until you pull it out and examine it, it can go on directing actions.

One afternoon about a week after I found the tablet on the seat of the old fire wagon, I bumped into Millicent, who had come to the hospital to pick up the wife of a gambler we had just admitted to the program.

“Hi, Millicent,” I said enthusiastically. “I can't tell you how much I appreciated all the great notes you took during our trip the other day …”

“Our trip?” she asked nervously. “What trip was that Dr. Taber?”

As my different versions of reality fought in my head for some sensible resolution, all I could do was stammer, “Oh, er, well … I was on a kind of trip and I, er, thought, I guess, that you knew about it …”

“Sounds like you've been working too hard, Dr. Taber,” Millicent said sympathetically. “You can't let those gamblers get to you, you know.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Thanks for picking up Mary, here. When you're up on the floor sometime there's something I'd like to you look at. It's a set of ideas, and I think you must have had a hand in getting the list in order.”

Still looking puzzled, Millicent said goodbye while I stood in the hall wondering, if not she, who?

Some weeks later, Mary was back to pick up her husband and take him home. Home was in a state several hundred miles distant.

In a final interview with Mary and her husband, I made sure he had all the parts of his Gamblers Anonymous starter kit, since there was no GA meeting in his hometown. They were going to have to bootstrap themselves into a support group by advertising in the paper and holding meetings in their home at first. As we went over several last minute items, Mary mentioned how much she appreciated Millicent's help in learning how to deal with the madness of the gambler’s thinking. Mary had been the subject of lots of emotional blackmail and distorted thinking from her husband.

Then she pulled a folded paper out of her purse and offered it to me.

The paper certainly looked like it came from the yellow legal pad I had found in the cab of my engine weeks earlier. And the handwriting was the same perfect script I remembered. I read the following with some amazement:

If we are to protect ourselves and help the pathological gambler, we must go beyond simply being able to recognize his common magical ideas as false. Here are some suggestions.

First, learn to recognize a gambler's delusion, and separate it from normal, rational thinking. Recognize the emotional need that underlies the dumb idea; recognize that desperate need to get into action, to revive the old euphoria of gambling. Stay in touch with basic truth: Gambling is trivial recreation, not a way to earn a living. Cling fiercely to the idea that we must give the gambler what he needs, not what he wants. The gambler must not be allowed to control you emotionally, socially, or financially.

Second, do not decide that everything the gambler says is nonsense, and never stop listening, unless you decide to separate. Learn to listen without arguing, without thinking you have to be a part of the delusion. If the gambler thinks you have written him off as a fool and are no longer listening to him, you have lost your chance to be helpful. You will not be able to help him explore his real motivation. The gambler, like anyone in trouble, needs to sense there is love underneath your firm resolve.

Third, if you are involved with a gambler, seriously consider getting help yourself. Doing the right things is terribly difficult. If you face the situation alone, you will be outnumbered. The spouse of a pathological gambler usually suffers signs of psychological abuse. Do not let years of deception and abuse continue to take joy from your own life.

Fourth, never argue with a delusion. Never debate, reason, cajole, beg, or use your love to try to get rid of somebody's false idea. Remember, a delusion is held for strong emotional reasons. Even if you know the real reasons the person believes as he does, presenting these reasons as part of a campaign of persuasion will only make you seem silly to the gambler. I don't mean you must accept the delusion as true yourself, or that you have to walk on eggs in dealing with a gambler. Certainly not! Just don't argue or get excited. Simply state your own view of things, as often as you like, in a firm and calm manner. But never get trapped into an argument. You need not defend, explain, or expand on your own view. Keep it simple.

Finally, you are likely to lose and be overwhelmed in any argument. Gamblers are very good at messing up the mind of someone they're trying to manipulate. Play your broken record by quietly repeating your own belief, and then put some space between you and the gambler if the pressure gets too great. Leave open the invitation to discuss the real problems: his dependency, fear, self-doubt, and overwhelming urge to gamble again. Remember always that, given the right conditions, the gambler will have the capacity himself to see the falsity of his ideas. When he sees it for himself, and only then, he will begin to change his behavior.

Mary let me walk to the copy machine and copy her paper as she and her husband prepared to leave.

“This is good advice, Mary,” I said. “And it comes from someone who's been through it all and came out on top. Let me hear from you, please.”

The work one does is nothing if it does not add meaning and insight to life. As usual, working with gamblers was teaching me more about myself.

Was buying an antique, oddball, fire rescue wagon irrational thinking on my part? Had I, as my wife jokingly accused, lost it? No, I don't think so. Antique fire engines are a treasured part of our national history. And yes, by doing a few extra, part time jobs, I could eventually have afforded a full restoration. Still, I could not give myself a completely clean bill of mental heath in this matter. The irrational part lay in thinking that my personal happiness and fulfillment depended on having and restoring this mechanical Wunderbeast.

Could a pathological gambler have a full and rewarding life without gambling? Of course! Could I have a full and rewarding life without a fire engine? Of course! Was I the only man available to preserve this piece of history for all time? Never! Might not I have far better uses for the time and money that this project would require? Yes!

My dear wife had suggested college for the children. What a thought!

Within a week of placing an ad in Hemmings' Motor News (a monthly magazine devoted to antique motor vehicles), the fire engine was sold to a wealthy man who owned a machine shop. I recognized the dream in his eyes, and gladly gave my prize over to his tender care.

Was I a wimp and a traitor to sell out my dream and settle for a more boring and nerd-like existence? Others get to make that judgment, of course, but I have never lost any sleep or self-esteem over it. Besides, I have some color photos of the old monster, and I can pull these out any time I want to look at my past.

All of which leaves me struggling with a question. If not Millicent … who?