Chapter Eight

“You just don't understand me!”

I swatted off flights of mosquitoes as I mixed mortar for the concrete blocks going into the wall of the large garage I was building. My goal was to lay 12 blocks daily. After a day on the Gambling Treatment Program, my little stint of physical labor was supposed to bring detachment and escape from the intellectual and emotional rigors of work.

 Laying block leaves time for contemplation. And on this spring day, I thought about taking and avoiding responsibility. My gamblers were teaching me a great deal about these problems, so as I toiled away I sorted, analyzed, and re-sorted my own growing awareness of the huge range of human deceit.

Since the appetite for gambling almost always outruns a gambler's capacity to earn money, few if any pathological gamblers can maintain heavy gambling year after year without getting others to help pay the inevitable toll. How to raise the necessary cash? This question is on the gambler's mind day and night, at work, at play, at mealtimes, wherever he goes and whatever he does. He or she never stops looking for more money, more credit, or some way to divert assets to cash for gambling.

It occurred to me that perhaps I could go around the neighborhood asking neighbors to help build my garage. The Amish of Pennsylvania and Ohio help each other build, don’t they? But, even on days when it seemed I was in over my head with this project, it never occurred to me that anyone owed me their help. I would have been far too embarrassed to ask for it. This, however, was not an ethic my gamblers shared. Not that they were ungenerous. Most problem gamblers—and alcoholics, too—have a streak of compulsive generosity. On one hand, they always expect others to overlook their failures; in turn, they are ever ready to bail out a fellow addict in trouble when they can.

Normal people are generally prudent with their time and money. So great was my desire to help my patients become normal that the gamblers at the hospital sometimes called my group therapy Nerd Training and called the sane, ordinary people I referred to Taber nerds. In turn, I extolled the virtues of the nerd: study, hard work, patience, simple honesty, even gullibility. Nobody is perfect, not even a nerd. But being a nerd seems to work.

The truth is, it's just as hard for a pathological gambler to adopt the values and habits of my normal nerd world as it would be for me to adopt the values and habits of the Amish world. (No electricity, no gas engines, church loyalty, farm work, plain food, and so forth.) However, if my life and all that I treasured depended on converting to the Brethren, I would definitely give it deep consideration. And I would certainly need a lot of direction and tolerance in making the transition.

As I hefted my blocks, I wondered how it happens that some people come to expect, demand, and connive to get help from others, help they must have in order escape problems they themselves created in pursuit of euphoric pleasure?

When country people help each other build barns, they’re making an investment in the future of their culture, not offering a bailout for foolish behavior. Gamblers, on the other hand, suffering from self-inflicted problems, often use this help-your-neighbor ethic as an effective weapon to obtain money for gambling or for creditors. For the gambler, the help required is far from being the path to freedom and independence. It’s a tool to perpetuate addiction and dependence.

People with money or access to property and valuables become paramount in a gambler's life. These well-situated people must somehow be drawn into the endless search for action. We use words like rescuer or enabler to refer to these persons who, in spite of repeated disappointments and bitter experiences, continue to assume the role of exploited victims. Words like sucker, Santa Clause, and mark do as well, but are less kind, and you can't use real words in clinical practice. It's offensive. So you use polite, made-up words that sound important. Hence, enabler.

When we see a rescuer paying the gambler's bills year after year we’re tempted to think such a person is stupid, but intellect actually has very little to do with the need to help people in trouble. Just as the gambler needs to believe that gambling will someday pay off and be a solution to problems, so the provider, rescuer, or enabler must believe that he or she is somehow helping the gambler instead of making things worse. To me, both appear mentally ill.

Was I any different, sweating away in the hot sun building a barn/garage just because there was an open space next to the house? Would some saintly ghost of Sister Teresa come out of the woods and magically eliminate my errors, give meaning to my existence, and help me complete my project? What a crazy thought! But that's precisely the kind of thinking that underlies the demand for a bailout by a desperate gambler. Stranger still, it works most of the time!

People who support the gambler have egos, too. They want to feel important and useful. Ego, more than humility, may be what drives a saint to sainthood. The gambler knows this, and creates a convincing scenario to insure that the victim goes away feeling good about, or at least not to blame for, what he or she tried to do to help.

Generally speaking, there are two techniques the gambler uses to blackmail help from an enabler. Let's call these the ‘Golden Goose’ and ‘Tar Baby’ methods, and explore the variations on these techniques, variations limited only by the gambler's imagination.

As I reached for a block, my wandering thoughts came together: Emotional blackmail would make a great topic for my community seminar next Wednesday! I'd make up a list of the different ploys gamblers use to get people to help them, and we'd share our experiences. Any given gambler's spouse is exposed to a limited set of confidence games, but this stuff can be analyzed and taught so that more people will get a broader education about the traps into which enablers seem to fall.

I had agreed to spend an afternoon with members of Gamblers Anonymous, Gam-Anon, and other interested people from the community in what was to be called a Community Seminar on Pathological Gambling. I didn't want it to be a regular meeting of GA, or a professional-level seminar. So a local hospital would host the meeting as a community-relations project, and I would simply manage the meeting. It was part of a continuing attempt to build community involvement, which had saved the program from termination in the past. Customer loyalty is insurance against future attacks by the budget-cutters.

When does such politics serve a good purpose, and when does it become a scam serving selfish interests? I'll contemplate that later. Back to the basics of blackmail!

The Golden Goose theme comes from the old Brothers Grimm fairy tale, a complicated saga involving a fellow who gets stuck to the Golden Goose in an attempt to snatch a gold feather or two. In the spirit of charity, some good people try to pull the first greedy person off and get stuck themselves,to a growing chain of would-be rescuers.

The Golden Goose story admonishes us that a desire to help can get us into trouble as readily as sheer greed can.

A scam or con is a confidence swindle, in which the swindler first gains the confidence of the target or mark, then delivers a sting, resulting in loss of the mark's investment. The Golden Goose con works on the more positive emotions and qualities of character such as love, hope, ambition, devotion, loyalty, and responsibility. Lust and vanity can also be motivations. The gambler appears like a golden goose, someone with so much to offer, someone deserving of protection and care.

The Tar Baby theme comes from the children's stories told by Uncle Remus, a character invented by Joel Chandler Harris. Tar Baby is a pathetic tale of Bre’r Rabbit’s accidental attachment to a dummy child made of sticky tar, built by crafty Bre’r Fox.

The Tar Baby con works on feelings such as duty, responsibility, guilt, fear, anxiety, insecurity, and unconscious perceptions of personal worth. It exploits our desire—our ethic—to help unfortunate people in trouble. When someone presents himself as a helpless, unlovable infant, the con runs something like: “You with all your ability and resources must help a pathetic, unfortunate person in trouble like me. It's your duty, your moral obligation.”

The Golden Goose and Tar Baby cons lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, but their aim is strikingly similar. Both are designed to get a helper stuck in a place where no rational person would want to get stuck, if he thought about it unemotionally.

The two themes are, “You have to help me because I'm so worthy,” or, “You have to help me because I'm so worthless.” Neither makes much sense in terms of treating an addiction. None of us has to help anyone; it's always a matter of free choice. But tell that to the enabler and you won't get far.

As these thoughts rumbled about in my head, I continued my labor, and began to write a handout for the community seminar in my head.

1. A case study of the Golden Goose Con

Vincent—he refused to allow anyone to call him Vince—was 35, and at the height of his persuasive powers. His finely drawn face usually offered a happy smile that brought joy and feelings of specialness to every female in sight. Vincent liked to wear gold necklaces, open-to-the-waist shirts, and a five-o'clock shadow that seemed a natural part of his dark complexion. He was handsome, and he knew how to use his good looks without arrogance or condescension.

His marriage to Millicent was not going well, and that's what brought them in together for a counseling session.

Millicent was a jewel: blond, with blue eyes, she was pale and delicate. She, too, was partial to rather extreme and dramatic clothing, appearing at our first session in a dark blue, full-length dress with lace accents and with what I judged to be real pearls around her neck. Although troubled by the pending failure of a marriage to a man she obviously loved very much, she laughed easily and listened well. She was a total extrovert who seemed to forget her troubles with complete involvement in people around her.

I quickly settled the question of whether or not Vincent was a pathological gambler. He most assuredly was. He had been gambling since the age of 12, when his father taught him to play cards. For the past several years, he had been taking frequent early flights to Las Vegas and returning the same night telling Millicent that he had been out on business clients. Vincent worked in industrial real estate sales, and evening appointments that required him to be away from home and office were common. Money for necessities around the house was becoming uncommon, however.

Millicent knew that sales were up, but very little of their increased income ever found its way to their checking account. Unexpected expenses, loans to needy friends, illegal payoffs to building inspectors—these were some of the lies Vincent had been using to explain his gambling losses to his wife.

I learned that Millicent was the only daughter of a man who had been the mayor of a large Midwestern town. He had later gone to Washington, D.C. as an appointed official. She had traveled along with her family and was close to her father until, over his violent objection, she had fallen in love with Vincent and married him. In Millicent’s mind, her father the politician represented the best in male authority figures. She reverently described him as commanding, charming, dynamic, and gregarious. She had never understood why her father disliked Vincent since, in her eyes, the two of them were so very much alike. Dad was just jealous, she felt.

Dad, who must have become a shrewd judge of human nature during his years on the political circuit, saw clearly through Vincent's surface charm. He must have seen the immature, self-centered, demanding nature that lay behind the attractive exterior. He knew a manipulator when he saw one; he himself was not against manipulation per se, and surely had done his share. But his ethics told him that political manipulation could be statesmanship when it serves some higher, common good, rather than purely personal pleasure.

To Millicent, the risk-taking of the successful politician was no different from the risk-taking of the real estate broker. The gambling, which she had accepted and participated in early in their marriage, was only an extension of that risk-taking propensity, an element essential in sparking the strong romantic feeling she had for the significant man in her life. Romance, to her, meant taking risks. She was unable or unwilling to see the critical differences between her father's character and Vincent's. She was frustrated repeatedly as Vincent continued to fail, and to waste his time and money on gambling. She was determined, as many enablers are, to keep at her self-assigned task in life—the my love will cure him mission—until her version of reality finally came true.

Vincent truly was a Golden Goose whose fine feathers attracted this idealistic and romantic young lady. In fact, he attracted and influenced most people with little effort. People seemed willing to sacrifice personal needs for him, and look for chances to help him because it felt so good just to be around him. He was witty, bright, charming, and sincerely flattering to everyone he met. The energy was there, and it didn't take a theatrical casting director to sense that Vincent had a brilliant, natural ability to move people in his direction. Once attracted, his admirers, like moths around a candle flame, or peasants around a golden goose, seemed addicted to him and unable to leave or let go. When they reached out to touch him, they found themselves stuck fast. This attraction, this bright potential that acted as an irresistible lure to those around Vincent, is not an unusual trait in problem gamblers. It is one reason they often succeed in appearance, while progressing toward disaster.

During subsequent sessions, Millicent, in spite of her anger at how badly things were going in the marriage, found it impossible to blame Vincent. She put her anger aside to defend him against all criticism. She often spoke for him, defending and explaining his behavior, looking always for some rational explanation of the gambling that would show that Vincent himself was not really to blame. She took his side in every discussion of his business affairs, and seemed certain that eventually her father would come to accept him.

Millicent's father was not hypnotized by Vincent's glitter. But her mother had sold some of her jewelry and given the money to Millicent to keep Vincent out of jail when he lost a large cash security deposit entrusted to him. Vincent's three older sisters had all, at one time or another, paid heavy prices for their devotion to him. I eventually discovered that many of Vincent's office coworkers made loans to him, and not one had ever even asked for repayment, or objected to his delinquency. Somehow, he appealed to their spirit of romance, adventure, or ambition. He always had some convincing story about how the investment his friends were making in him would pay off. Sometimes he made partial payments on the loans. He never appealed to pity, or presented a sad face to the world. To the contrary, he actually had a way of making people feel foolish if they had second thoughts about giving him money. Clearly, he believed in his own con, and that made him even more persuasive.

Once invested, his friends and relatives rode his emotional roller coaster up and down with him. Having burned someone with an unpaid loan, Vincent could go back to his creditor and charm a second loan out of him with appeals to imagination and greed. He could allay doubt, turn aside anger, and fire up faith time after time.

Although I was used to confronting people in a caring way with their failures, I found it particularly hard to be direct with Vincent. Perhaps it was the direct, innocent eye contact that seemed to show total attention to whatever I said. He seemed so eager to please, so responsive to the slightest nuances of body language. Early in our relationship, I recognized Vincent's ability to read people. He would have made an excellent therapist if he had had sufficient impulse control and patience to persist in school, although he might have had problems with ethics.

I was pessimistic about the future of this couple until, unexpectedly, Vincent accepted my challenge to attend a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous. Millicent tagged along, and the good people of Gam-Anon drew her into their meeting that was taking place at the same time in the same building. In a gentle way, they literally dragged her into their meeting—she was, after all, a gambler's spouse and she belonged in Gam-Anon—because she had started out insisting that she enter the GA room with Vincent. She wanted to be there to explain his special problems and defend him from attack. She just knew he was not like other gamblers.

It clicked! He liked it. So did she. Soon they were both articulate members in their respective groups, and they were helping other newcomers.

I can't really explain why they took to their recovery programs so well. They were social extroverts, and both were bright. I believed they would be too proud to accept self-help groups. I was wrong and unable to see that Vincent, in particular, would be able to turn his pied-piper skills to positive use. The gambling was gone, but little else had changed in the marriage. Millicent continued to be Vincent's number one fan, and his dazzling light still glowed in the night, attracting others to what was now a different, higher purpose: abstinence from gambling.

2. A case study of the Tar Baby Con

The second kind of con exploits the gambler's helplessness and the enabler's kindly disposition to help less fortunate people. We tend to help others out of compassion, guilt, moral training, fear of losing affection, and so forth. The gambler soon learns to play these emotions like a virtuoso to get money, tolerance, and forgiveness for just one more chance.

Joe, who specialized in Tar Baby scams, was a master in the art of exploiting pity, sympathy, and all the charitable feelings of others. People getting stuck to Joe and, in spite of their own resolutions to let go, they kept on supporting him, encouraging him, paying his bills, and ultimately ensuring his complete ruin.

For a while in his youth, Joe had been a coal miner. Alcohol came as part of the recreational entitlement of his profession, along with a pickup truck, Saturday football, fishing, hunting, and as many hound dogs as anyone could stand to have around the house.

Shortly after he took up his miner's pick, Joe began to have problems. He got drunk on beer one Saturday night and flipped his truck, twisting his back a bit and gashing his skull. The next Monday he hobbled into the mine elevator, and once down below he slipped on a wet spot and twisted his back again. Now he could go topside and file an injury claim that was to be the first of many. Early on, he claimed to contract a common miner's disease called black lung; this in spite of the fact that men with many more years in the mine had no signs of the illness.

Maybe people got sick of seeing Joe day after day in the union hospital waiting room. People felt sorry for him, and sorrier for his wife Kitty, who took in washing, did babysitting, and baked pies to make ends meet. Joe was not incapacitated sexually, so the kids kept coming.

Finally, after seeing Joe trying to pull his load at the mine, the crew chiefs and other workers begged the union steward to get Joe a pension, just to get a break from his constant whining and complaining. Everyone was also sick of lending Joe money because they knew, when he was home nursing his many ailments, he had the strength to make it across the road from his house to the veterans' club, where he played one quarter after another in the pinball and automatic poker machines.

By the time I met Joe, he was a master of the teary-eyed tremulous voice and the sad, sad story. He defeated every effort by his therapy group to deal with his gambling by bringing up one medical problem after another. Group was frequently interrupted by his need to stand and adjust his back brace that, strangely enough, he never wore at other times. He begged for a special chair, and then asked us to rearrange the chairs so the light from the windows would not shine in his weak eyes.

The more Joe displayed his store of ailments the more we all seemed to reach out to help him. But the helping never helped! Truly, here was a classic Tar Baby, a specialist in the art of evoking pity.

He was using a hypochondriac's con, if you will, although a true hypochondriac is something very different psychologically. Too late, we discovered his addiction to powerful pain medications. Supposedly, he had turned in all his medications when we admitted to our hospital, but as we learned later, one of his winter gloves had its fingers stuffed with pills. Joe was literally drunk on pain pills during most of his short hospital stay. I had no choice but to recommend his discharge, since he was inappropriate, unresponsive to treatment, and a violator of our policies against drug abuse.

He succeeded in conning his wife into coming to pick him up, and as he left the building to go to her car there was a string of patients following him and trying their best to talk him into staying. But Joe was unwilling to take a transfer to the drug abuse treatment unit, or accept a referral to a pain treatment specialist, who would help him find ways to live with pain without heavy drug use. Even as we chuckled at his manipulative behavior, we all felt a little sad for this pathetic man as he left.

Whether it appeals to attraction or compassion, a con is a con, and cons are designed to protect the con artist from having to make significant changes in lifestyle, thinking, or personality. It's that simple. The con artist fears change, responsibility, and the freedom to govern his life. The scammer harbors the illusion of freedom and independence, but of course has neither. He is himself hooked on his own con more securely than any of his marks. He believes his own grandiose dreams, and cannot or will not accept any other reality.

Scraping up money and getting out of legal problems are skills pathological gamblers master over the years. The point of my seminar would be to show how people must learn to avoid emotional blackmail, my phrase for all the different ways a gambler learns to tug on the emotional strings of decent people to get what he wants.

If I could specify some of these strategies, perhaps we could begin doing some systematic research on the frequency and effectiveness of different cons.

Emotional blackmail has one goal: protect and promote an addiction so that real personal change is avoided. It always involves three elements: A (1) desperate gambler; (2) a mark or rescuer who has access to money, credit or valuables, and (3) a deliberate, conscious story or scam.

The deliberate scam is the story the gambler will tell or lay on the person who is the target of the money-raising effort.

Intellectual and rational appeals—the wise investment cons—tend to wear out as the gambling career progresses. Everybody around the gambler eventually understands that there is a gambling problem, and there is no one left naive enough to fall for the old invest-in-me routine. The gambler must now use emotional appeals to pity. These seem to wear out more slowly, and are certainly hard to resist.

Obviously, the gambler can't go to his mother-in-law, or his supervisor, and tell the truth. “I owe three loan companies, two banks, and six loan sharks a total of $13,000. Please lend me $3,000 so I can go to Las Vegas and test out my new system—which has already cost me $25,000 of grandmother's money—for beating the dealer at blackjack.”

At this point, the gambler himself doesn't know the truth any longer, and, if he did, would definitely not tell it to anyone.

As the intellectual appeal of investing in gambling fades, our gambler must appeal to tender feelings. Exploiting guilt, fear, and pity is the only way left to con money from potential rescuers.

When an enabler fixes the financial, social, or legal problems of a gambler, the only accomplishment is to allow the gambler to return to gambling sooner. It never really solves the personality problems that underlie gambling, and it always creates new problems. But rescuers, like gamblers, are often slow to learn new ways of dealing with old problems.

Imagination also plays a role in energizing the enabler. When the gambler mentions that someone has threatened to break his legs, grandmother immediately imagines huge, ugly brutes emerging out of the rainy night, monsters armed with clubs and tiny IQs. She feels the pain, lives the terror, and cries the tears that she imagines belong to the gambler. Who would dream he made it all up? What kind of person would do that? It taxes the imaginations of good people.

I classify scams as light or heavy. Usually the light scam does not involve illegal behavior and is simply designed to divert funds already in the family purse away from necessary living expenses, to supply gambling cash. For example, the gambler tells his wife the payroll clerk was absent from work, or made a mistake, and therefore his paycheck is late. The check, right on time as usual, goes into the gambler's pocket as he supposedly prepares to go fishing over the weekend. But the fish are quite safe as he heads instead for the racetrack, expecting to win enough to double the check, cover his bets, and allow him to act the big shot when he returns home.

Depending on where one lives, it is often possible to make a full race card in the afternoon and hit the night races at another track the same Saturday evening. The gambler may then drive half the night to get to yet a third and even fourth track for Sunday racing. The real challenge is doing it without the family knowing while getting them to pay for it. This repeated and exhausting odyssey that the normal person would see as immature and foolhardy, is part of the specialness that is a significant part of the pathological gambler's attitudes.

I knew several pathological gamblers who carried complete, unused sets of fishing gear around in their cars. Others haul unused golf clubs, tennis rackets, and camping equipment, all mere decoys in service of the light scam.

As the gambler plays out the string of light scams, the losses mount, the lies escalate, and she becomes willing to shade her conduct over into bank fraud, less violent forms of robbery, and outright theft, all to raise the cash for the next gambling spree. The urge to buy into the action is overwhelming, since only action can temporarily bring the relief and release needed. Always there is the conviction that the money taken can and will be restored.

By the way, when we say an urge is overwhelming, we mean it is overwhelming in certain immature or incomplete personalities. No urge is universally overwhelming to everyone. Let us never lose sight of the fact that the most foolish or harmful urges are easily set aside by the great majority of mature people, most of the time.

The really heavy frauds, however, usually come after a gambling spree, when money foolishly or illegally taken and lost must be paid back. Pressure mounts as the fear of discovery compresses and limits thinking. Broke now, the gambler can't use gambling as an emotional escape, and there is no longer the chance of winning it back. The gambler is facing legal problems, and the anger of outraged creditors. Our gambler is also having marital and perhaps employment difficulties. The noose is tightening. Efforts to raise cash to pay debts escalate, becoming more desperate and imaginative. Soon, no act of deceit is too immoral, bizarre, cruel, or unthinkable to the pathological gambler who is hopelessly cornered.

The desperate gambler learns to count on human gullibility, as illustrated by the case of a gambler I knew some years ago. Call him Herman.

His cons in the early days were almost amusing. Herman would get up early Saturday morning, long before his wife and children, to figure out how to get money for the ponies that afternoon. One of his best ruses involved the family television set. He would sneak downstairs and remove a part from it. When the children came bounding down to watch their favorite Saturday shows the predictable howl would go up when no picture appeared on the screen.

“Hmm,” Herman would say, fiddling with the dials, rubbing his chin and shaking his head in mock concern. “Looks like the lateral dynoverter circuit is out again.” By now, Mom was commiserating with the kids. “Tell you what, Dear,” Herman would offer. “Let me have $20 and I'll stop in at Bill's shop for him to check it out when I go to the hardware store this morning.”

Amidst begging kids, Mom would dip into the grocery money. Herman would load the set into his car and give it a ride to the track, where he reinstalled the missing part before heading home after his last horse ran.

A few years later, he was stealing boots from a local store and returning them with the sad story that they didn't fit, and he had lost the sales receipt. Five years later, he was getting tranquilizer prescriptions from a dozen different physicians, and selling the pills in the factory where he worked.

We keep from seeing the truth about ourselves at our lowest points by telling ourselves that there are people still lower than we are. We need to do this in order to live with ourselves. Herman looked down on drug abusers.

Over a period of years, this believable man found a string of gullible people that included his wife, children, mother, dozens of different store clerks, and physicians, to say nothing of friends, co-workers, bosses, and casual acquaintances. Most amazing, he conned many of them many, many times.

By the time, I’d laid the last brick for the day, all the material I needed for the seminar was rattling around in my brain. Now I had to set it down on paper. Insight dawned as I cleaned the tools. Why do I think about problem gambling instead of relaxing when I'm building my garage? Because when I'm not actually with patients, there’s never any time for thinking at work. Thinking, in the federal bureaucracy, is frowned upon anyway; circumstances and selection procedures make it very unlikely to occur.

AL: Yo, Doc. You're an hour overtime. I thought you were the one who liked meetings that ended exactly on time. You're some kind of compulsive talker, so I don't dare ask another question and get you started again. Let me get you a coffee and you can tell me about how to quit smoking.

Taber: Al's right again. Thanks for your time and interest. Let's keep talking and learning from each other.

(Al clanks up to Taber, elbowing others aside to dispense the ultimate compliment,

envelopment in a massive bear hug and a bone-shaking slap on the back.)