Recovering gambling addict places her bet on a better life

Kathy Deschner, development director at Community Services Northwest, said her agency takes no official position on the proposed Cowlitz casino that’s headed for La Center. But she noted that many municipalities and jurisdictions — including Clark County itself — are still dead-set against it.

The projected $510 million hotel-and-casino complex will boast 3,000 slot machines, 135 gaming tables, 20 poker tables and a 250-room hotel, not to mention an RV park, 10 restaurants and retail shops on 152 acres. That’s more than 4,000 construction jobs, followed by more than 3,100 permanent ones, but it could lead to a whole lot of social and addiction problems, too, Deschner said.

How does gambling benefit Washington? According to Washington State Gambling Commission spokeswoman Susan Arland, the state does not tax gambling but local jurisdictions may. In fiscal 2010, she said, $31.7 million in gambling taxes were paid to local jurisdictions by cardrooms, pull-tab and punchboard operators, and charity games like bingo — plus $4.5 million in business-and-occupation taxes. That doesn’t include 28 tribal casinos. In 2008, Arland said — the last year statistics were available — tribal casinos contributed $12.8 million to local governments and another $4.8 million to smoking cessation and problem gaming programs.

Clark County took in $3.2 million in local gambling taxes in 2010.

— Scott Hewitt

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GAMBLING ADDICTION AND SUBSTANCE ABUSE

Substance abuse:

o self-limiting since the heavy user eventually runs out, passes out, overdoses

o bad behavior can be attributed to intoxication — less shame, less guilt, less responsibility

o no fantasy of enrichment

o money problems not necessarily central

o testable by laboratory

o tell-tale signs

o widespread public awareness of drug abuse as a disease or disorder

o treatment widely available

Gambling:

o not self-limiting as long as there’s more money

o bad behavior not attributable to intoxication — so greater guilt and shame, or greater denial and defensiveness

o fantasy of winning, enrichment

o resulting money problems become central, can have long-term consequences for whole family

o not testable

o easy to hide — no telltale physical signs

o less public awareness — more acceptance of gambling as legitimate recreation

o treatment not widely available

Source: Community Services NW

HELP WITH PROBLEM GAMBLING

o Community Services NW: 360-397-8484.

o http://www.notagame.org

o Evergreen Council on Problem Gambling help line: 800-547-6133.

Gamblers Anonymous Vancouver

o Hot line: 360-896-9602.

o Meetings: 7:30 p.m. Mondays at Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church, 12512 S.E. Mill Plain Blvd.; 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and 7 p.m. Fridays at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, 426 Fourth Plain Blvd. (parking lot off F Street)

Donna Hansen wasted years of her life doing the bar crawl.

She made no friends. She never drank. “I was with people who were like me but I didn’t talk to people and I didn’t drink one bit,” she said. “If I drank, I’d have to go to the bathroom and I’d lose my machine.”

Her video poker machine, that is.

“I hope you lose,” a crabby old guy at an Elmer’s Restaurant in Portland once told Hansen. He liked playing two machines at once, she remembered, and he wanted hers.

She lost. “Are you happy now?”

“Yeah, I am,” he said, and she knew he meant it. When you have a gambling problem, Hansen said, your only friend is your next bet.

But Hansen, now 60, found new friends, and built a new life, after she called a help hot line that hooked her up with free mental health counseling at Community Services Northwest. Nearly three years later, in observance of the ninth annual Problem Gambling Awareness Week, Hansen and CSNW’s gambling-addiction counselors invited The Columbian to hear Hansen’s story of gambling her life away — and rebuilding a new life afterward.

Cartoon living

Gambling addiction resembles addiction to drugs or alcohol — but it’s also different in ways that are perhaps even more insidious, CSNW counselor Chris Thompson said. “It’s not as tangible as an addiction to a substance,” said Thompson. “It’s driven by money.” And money is a mostly private, individual matter; doing illegal drugs may be something to hide or get help with, but how you spend — or squander — your money is generally considered your own business.

The mainstream view of drug or alcohol addiction has slowly evolved along a medical model, he said — addiction is considered to be a disease — while gambling addition is still viewed as a behavior-based character flaw. In fact, he said, savvy marketers, as well as and the designers of the gambling machines themselves, have gotten great at selling people on what he calls a “dream world” — where nothing much matters except the next win, and all behaviors are sculpted around that possibility.

“It’s like living in a cartoon,” he said.

But the gambling world isn’t so dreamy. According to research compiled by the National Council on Problem Gambling, 2 million of all American adults can be considered “pathological” gamblers and another 4 million to 6 million are “problem” gamblers. In Washington, there may be as many as 100,000 problem gamblers, and many more thousands of spouses, children and others affected by the problem. Problem gambling has been linked to higher incidents of child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, addictive behaviors, crime, depression and suicidal thoughts.

Thompson has spread the word about gambling addiction and resources to community partners and concerned agencies — and by distributing call-for-help fliers at bars and taverns. You can learn more about these offerings by calling 360-397-8488 or visiting http://communityservicesnw.org.

Writing it out

Donna Hansen has always loved to write. CSNW counselor Pati Hinkel seized upon that love as a therapeutic tool, giving her writing assignments to explore her emotions and memories — some of them awful enough to have been willfully blocked out.

“Those assignments have helped me figure it all out,” Hansen said. “They covered everything.” She added that it took “a lot of tears and pain and extreme anger. I could write down how the little girl in me still feels. There still is a little girl in me.”

She was the oldest of 16 children in a “family of addiction” that started with her alcoholic father; most of his adult children have struggled with addictions too, she said.

Hansen suffered a bad fall onto a concrete factory floor while at work in 1996, resulting in chronic back pain and her intermittent ability to work. Her first marriage ended in divorce and her second was headed that way — they’d been separated for eight months — when her husband of 27 years died suddenly of an abdominal aneurysm.

“I grieved so much for him. I grieved like hell,” she said. And on the first anniversary of his death, she said, “I decided I was going to dance.”

She went out with her sisters, who enjoyed video poker. Her late husband had, too. Gambling in his memory seemed like the thing to do.

Donna Hansen placed her first video poker bet on Jan. 10, 2001, at the Wet Dog Pub in Astoria, Ore. (Hansen is very precise about these details, as folks in recovery from addiction often are).

She was back on Jan. 11. She played a little longer. The next day, longer still. Before long ,Hansen was “fully in the swing of running to the bank and withdrawing money from the ATM to hit the bars,” she said. If one bar’s machines didn’t produce the wins she wanted, she moved on to another. “OK, it’s not good here, maybe it’ll be better there,” she thought.

She was addicted — to the excitement, the lights, the noise, the suspense and the possibility she could win big. What she was really addicted to, though, was escape — what she liked to call “zoning out.”

“I noticed when I was happy in my life, I didn’t gamble much,” she said. But when she was depressed, the most pleasurable thing in life was her next chance to win. When she was headed out to gamble, she was euphoric — and driving dangerously fast, she said. Headed home again, she was “usually broke and angry and praying to God” — and driving dangerously fast.

“My back was killing me; I was not sleeping. It was a vicious circle,” she said. “I think I was a ticking time bomb.”

Meaningless money

Someone who’d never carried any plastic other than a Sears card, and paid it off faithfully every month, now drove herself into the ground on credit.

“Problem gamblers often have an unusual relationship with money,” Thompson said. “It’s abstract. It doesn’t really mean anything to them.”

How much did she spend? Thousands on thousands. “I knew I was spending money I didn’t have. I had to ask my mom to help me pay my rent.”

One time she set out with family money to buy groceries and wound up betting it all. Her dream was doubling it, of course, and miraculously enough she did. Losing it all wasn’t part of the dream — but predictably enough, she did that too.

The shame and embarrassment were intense — especially as she admitted to her family that she’d gambled away all their food funds — but still not intense enough to quit.

“I continued to gamble. I loved it. I hated it. I hated myself for my weakness. I was disgusted with myself,” Hansen wrote in one personal essay. “I prayed to God to help me stop gambling. I thought I was really trying to stop, but I wasn’t. Everything I did contradicted what I really wanted.”

Video poker and other machine gaming are illegal in Washington, so when Hansen moved from Astoria to Vancouver, she said, she still headed south daily to gamble in Oregon. “Lots of people do that,” she said. She made the rounds from Gresham to Portland to Beaverton every day, she said.

Finally, she scooped up a call-for-help hot line flyer at a bar; a month later she summoned the nerve to call the Oregon Problem Gambling Helpline at 1-877-MY-LIMIT. Staff there put her in touch with Community Services Northwest, where she got an immediate personal assessment and started attending individual counseling with Hinkel. There were also group sessions led by Thomson and Gamblers Anonymous meetings. She was nervous about those meetings at first, she said, because she feared the other folks there would be either too “classy” for her or too “scummy.” They turned out to be folks from all walks of life, she said — and they became her friends.

Not done yet

She made her last bet on April 25, 2008. The way she describes it, going cold turkey from a gambling habit is just as awful as withdrawing from a hard drug. She endured “shaking, trembling and vomiting,” she said, as well as continued urges to go gamble.

Those urges have lessened but not disappeared, she said, even though it’s been nearly three years. Sometimes she dreams about gambling at night. Part of her recovery is realizing that she can never gamble again — can never be a “normal” gambler. “Gambling is not a choice for me. I have to watch my step. I’m just one bet away from a problem again, I know it,” she said. “I still have appointments with Pati. I don’t feel I’m done yet.”

Staying present and recognizing that the dream is only that — in fact it’s a nightmare — are the keys to her success, Hansen said. She spends lots of time with her adult children and grandchildren — making sure she’s everything a grandmother is supposed to be. That includes not wasting her time and money playing video poker, she said.

“I have friends and family and wonderful, positive grandchildren. I’m not bored,” she said. “Sometimes when I want to gamble, I focus on, ,What do I really want to accomplish today?’”