When Someone You Love Is Gambling, Drinking, or Trading

Support for parents, partners, and families. In person in Logan Square, Chicago, and online across Illinois and Minnesota.

If someone you love is struggling with gambling, drinking, or trading, you are probably carrying a weight of your own right now — confusion, fear, anger, guilt, exhaustion, sometimes all at once. You may not know whether what you are seeing is really a problem, how to bring it up without starting a fight, or how to help without making things worse.

Most advice written for you assumes you are a supporting character in someone else's recovery. I want to start somewhere else. You are allowed to get help for yourself, now, whether or not the person you are worried about ever picks up the phone.

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You Don't Need Their Permission

The most common reason family members wait is that reaching out first feels like jumping the gun — like getting help before the person with the problem does is out of order, or disloyal, or an admission that things are worse than you have been telling people.

It isn't. By the time someone contacts me about a partner or an adult child, they have usually spent a year or more managing this alone: checking accounts, covering for someone, lying awake doing math, rehearsing conversations that never go the way they rehearsed. That is its own kind of exhausting, and treating it does not require anyone else's cooperation.

I want to be straight about what that help can and cannot do. The evidence that coaching a family member can get a resistant gambler into treatment is weak — I go through the actual numbers below, because you deserve them rather than a sales pitch. What I can offer with more confidence is help with your side of this: the decisions, the sleeplessness, the anger you feel guilty about, and the question of what you actually owe someone who keeps doing this.

Chris Beerman, LCSW, CADC — Chicago therapist helping families affected by a loved one's gambling or drinking

What I Can Offer You

I'm Chris Beerman, MSW, LCSW, CADC, an addiction therapist in Chicago. Alongside working with people who gamble, drink, or trade, I work with the people around them, in three different ways.

Therapy for you, as my client. Not a briefing session about someone else — actual therapy, for what this has done to your sleep, your work, your health, and your sense of what is reasonable to put up with. Many people arrive having lost track of what they think, because they have spent so long managing what someone else thinks.

A single consultation about a specific decision. Sometimes you don't need ongoing therapy. You need one honest conversation with someone who has seen this before: whether to pay off the debt, whether to tell his family, whether to take over the accounts, what to say to your kids, whether it is time to leave.

Sessions together, when it makes sense. If the person you're worried about is already working with me, I can bring you in. That often covers the practical questions — who manages the money now, what gets checked, for how long — and the harder one underneath, which is how trust gets rebuilt after someone has been lied to about money.

Start with a free 15-minute consultation. You can tell me what has been going on, ask whatever you want to ask, and get a sense of whether I'm the right fit. You don't need to have it organized first, and you don't need to have decided anything.

If It's Gambling or Sports Betting

Sports betting apps have made gambling constant and private, which lets a habit grow before anyone else notices. Watch for secrecy about money, borrowing that doesn't add up, mood swings tied to wins and losses, and a shift from watching a game to needing the game to go a particular way.

If that sounds familiar, the free gambling addiction test will give you a clearer read than another night of guessing, and my gambling addiction therapy and sports betting addiction therapy pages explain what treatment actually involves. If they are ready to do something themselves, my guide to how to stop sports betting is written for them rather than for you. The gambling resources page has additional support options.

If It's Drinking

It is hard to tell the difference between heavy drinking and a drinking problem in someone you love, because closeness makes excuses easy to find. Signs worth attention include drinking that has quietly increased over time, failed attempts to cut back, defensiveness when the subject comes up, and drinking that has started to touch work, relationships, or health.

My alcohol addiction therapy page and the free alcohol use test can help you get clearer on what you are seeing, and there is a longer piece on how to tell if someone has a drinking problem when life still looks fine from the outside. The alcohol resources page has more options.

One safety note: someone who drinks heavily every day should not stop abruptly without medical advice, because alcohol withdrawal can be dangerous.

If it's cannabis, pills or other drugs, instead of drinking or alongside it, my substance use therapy page explains what I work with and how.

If It's Trading or Investing That Feels Like Gambling

Frequent trading — especially options, margin, or crypto — can produce the same highs, lows, and chasing as sports betting, even though it happens in a legal brokerage account and can be defended as investing. Warning signs include checking positions constantly, trading to win back losses, hiding the size of an account from a partner, and a calm, capable person becoming irritable and secretive around money.

My stock and options trading addiction therapy page covers what this looks like clinically, and there is a longer piece on whether day trading is gambling and where the line actually falls.

The Money Question

If the person gambling is your husband, wife or partner rather than your child, the money side is a different problem — you may share accounts, debts and liability, and the questions about trust are different too. I have written that up separately in what to do when your partner has a gambling problem. If it is your partner’s drinking rather than gambling, see my partner drinks too much: what can I do?

Start with the thing families ask most, because the answer is usually a surprise: you cannot self-exclude someone else. Illinois runs a free self-exclusion program through the Illinois Gaming Board, and it is genuinely useful — but the Gaming Board states plainly that "a person cannot exclude their spouse or significant other," and the application has to be completed in person by the individual. Self-exclusion is something you can hand someone. It is not something you can do to them. My Illinois self-exclusion guide walks through how it actually works. Minnesota has one narrow exception: the Mille Lacs Band’s gaming law lets an immediate family member ask for a person to be added to its exclusion list. The Minnesota gambling self-exclusion guide has the details.

What is inside your control is your own exposure. Separate your accounts. Freeze your credit with all three bureaus, which is free, so nothing new opens in your name. Take yourself off the list of people who can be borrowed from at midnight. Get the actual number, if you can, rather than the number you have been given, because the real figure is almost always larger and almost always the thing being protected.

The harder question is whether to pay it off. If you already have, you are not a fool — nearly everyone does it once, and it usually comes from love and panic in equal measure. But paying a gambling debt removes the consequence that was about to arrive without touching the reason it arrived, and it very rarely ends there. The full version of that conversation is in my guide to helping without enabling. For the financial side, nonprofit credit counseling is a better tool than I am. And if you want to understand what they are actually facing, my guide to recovering financially after gambling losses lays out the debt options plainly — including why paying off a card without closing it can make things worse.

If the person you're worried about is ready to do something today, the 24-hour betting shutdown plan is a concrete first step you can send them.

How to Bring It Up Without It Turning Into a Fight

There is no perfect script, but a few things reliably make it go better.

Pick the moment deliberately. Not during a game, not while they are in action, not at the end of an argument, not at 1 a.m. Nothing said in those moments survives the night.

Describe what you saw, not what they are. "There were four transfers to the sportsbook last month, and you told me you had stopped" is a fact, and hard to argue with. "You're a compulsive gambler" is a diagnosis, and it hands them something to deny.

Make one ask, not five. One specific, doable request beats a comprehensive account of everything that has gone wrong.

Expect it to go badly the first time. Being found out produces shame, and shame usually comes out as anger. That reaction is not evidence you were wrong to bring it up, and it is not the final word.

What CRAFT Is, and What It Honestly Can and Cannot Do

Community Reinforcement and Family Training, usually called CRAFT, is the best-developed approach for family members of someone with an addiction, and I work from it. It teaches you to reinforce the behavior you want to see, to stop absorbing the consequences of the behavior you don't, to communicate in ways that don't set off a fight, to invite treatment at the moments when it might actually land, and — this part matters — to look after your own life while you do it. It is the opposite of the confrontational family intervention you have seen on television.

Here is what the research shows, including the part most sites leave out. In the landmark trial, CRAFT got 64% of unmotivated problem drinkers into treatment, against 13% for Al-Anon facilitation and 30% for the confrontational approach (Miller, Meyers & Tonigan, 1999). A later systematic review found CRAFT roughly twice as effective as comparison approaches at getting a treatment-resistant person into treatment overall — but for gambling specifically it was no better than the comparison conditions, and most of the underlying studies were rated weak (Archer et al., 2020).

So I am not going to tell you that CRAFT will get your husband or your son into therapy. For gambling, that claim isn't supported. What CRAFT gives you is a coherent framework for your own decisions — which is the part you actually control, and the part that is currently keeping you up.

If They Refuse Help

Some people are not going to agree, and no amount of correct phrasing changes that this week.

When that happens, the work shifts rather than stops. You still decide what you will and won't fund. You still decide what you tell the rest of the family. You still decide what has to be true for you to stay, and what would have to change. Those decisions are entirely yours to make, they get easier with support, and making them well often does more to shift the situation than another conversation would have.

It is also worth knowing that people rarely go from refusing help to accepting it in one step. They usually go from refusing, to arguing, to a quiet stretch where nothing appears to change, to reaching out at a moment nobody predicted. Your job is not to force that. It is to still be standing when it happens.

Support Made for Family Members

These are for you, not for the person you're worried about.

  • Gam-Anon — meetings for family and friends affected by someone's gambling, in person and virtual. National hotline 844-475-4213.
  • Al-Anon — for families affected by someone's drinking, with in-person, telephone, and electronic meetings.
  • SMART Recovery Family & Friends — free meetings built on SMART's tools and on CRAFT, covering gambling and other behaviors as well as alcohol and drugs. Online and in person.

If you need someone right now: Illinois gambling helpline 1-800-GAMBLER, or text GAMB to 833234. National problem gambling helpline 1-800-MY-RESET — call, text, or chat, 24/7. For alcohol and other substances, SAMHSA at 1-800-662-HELP (4357), free and confidential, 24/7, or the Illinois Helpline at 1-833-2FINDHELP. If anyone is in a mental health crisis or thinking about suicide, call or text 988. If someone is in immediate danger, call 911.

Keep Reading: For Partners and Families

If it's your partner

If it's your child

You Don't Have to Have All the Answers

Watching someone you love struggle with gambling, drinking, or trading is exhausting, and there is no perfect script for handling it. What matters most is that you don't have to work it out alone.

If you want help thinking through your own next step — or you are looking for a therapist for the person you're worried about — start with a free conversation and we can talk through what makes sense for your family.

Schedule a Free 15-Minute Consultation

You can also check insurance and book online with Headway.

Chris Beerman, MSW, LCSW, CADC · Chicago Addiction Therapy · Logan Square, Chicago · Serving Illinois and Minnesota

This page is for information and support. It isn't a diagnosis, and it isn't a substitute for care from a licensed professional who knows your situation.