The Thing Before the Thing: Emotional Suppression as the Behavior That Makes Gambling Possible

I asked a group of people in gambling recovery to try what I called spoken journaling. Three prompts: how did your gambling start, were you okay before it started, and what behaviors right now are hard to control. The third question was the one that produced something I have been thinking about since.

One member, who had been in recovery before and understood his pattern well enough to narrate it with clinical precision, answered the first two prompts the way the literature would predict. A major life transition had surfaced unprocessed emotion from childhood. He had no models for what to do with it. Gambling became the thing he could go do alone that made the feelings stop, briefly, before making everything worse. Textbook emotionally vulnerable pathway, the kind Blaszczynski and Nower (2002) described as gambling that begins not as entertainment but as self-medication.

The third answer was the one that rearranged something for me. The behavior hardest to control, he said, was not gambling. It was the inclination to suppress emotion. To bury hard conversations. To keep things in. He identified this pattern as preceding the gambling, surviving through recovery, and operating independently of whether he was placing bets. He said it plainly: the suppression is what makes gambling easier to fall back into.

The Sequence Problem

Most gambling treatment models position the gambling as the primary target. Cognitive-behavioral approaches restructure gambling-related cognitions. Motivational interviewing addresses ambivalence about change. Twelve-step programs organize around abstinence from the behavior itself. All of these assume that gambling is the thing to stop.

What this group member described is a different sequence. The suppression comes first. The suppression creates an unprocessed emotional load. The load requires discharge. Gambling provides discharge. If you remove the gambling without addressing the suppression, the load remains and will find another outlet.

Khantzian’s (1997) self-medication hypothesis, originally developed for substance use, maps onto this account with uncomfortable precision. The hypothesis proposes that addiction is not a disorder of pleasure-seeking but of affect regulation: people use substances (or, by extension, behaviors) to manage emotional states they cannot otherwise tolerate. The drug of choice is not random. It is selected, often unconsciously, for its specific psychopharmacological fit with the person’s dominant affective difficulty. For this member, gambling’s dissociative quality, what he described as escape, matched his need to not feel what he was feeling about becoming a father without having had a father worth modeling.

Blaszczynski and Nower’s (2002) pathways model accommodates this sequence through their second pathway, the emotionally vulnerable gambler, but the model’s architecture still positions gambling as the outcome variable. The emotional vulnerability is a risk factor for gambling. What I heard in the group was something stronger: the emotional suppression is the primary disorder, and the gambling is a symptom. The distinction matters for treatment planning. If you treat the symptom without treating the disease, the disease finds a new symptom.

What the Group Revealed About Mixed Pathways

When I presented the three pathways, every member identified with more than one. One described starting through the conditioned pathway, gambling socially with friends, before access to online platforms accelerated the behavior into something he could not control. But he also recognized impulsive tendencies that predated the gambling. Another identified the emotionally vulnerable pathway as central but could see how conditioning maintained the behavior once it started.

This matches what Milosevic and Ledgerwood (2010) found when they tested the pathways model empirically: the three pathways are not discrete types but overlapping dimensions, with most problem gamblers endorsing features of multiple pathways. The clinical value of the model is not in producing a clean diagnosis but in identifying the dominant maintaining mechanism. For the member who described emotional suppression as his core difficulty, the maintaining mechanism is not cognitive distortion about odds (pathway one) or impulse control deficit (pathway three). It is the absence of any other strategy for managing affect.

Rogier et al. (2019) provided empirical support for this specific mechanism, finding that alexithymia, the difficulty identifying and describing emotional states, predicted gambling severity through a pathway mediated by emotion dysregulation. The suppressor does not gamble because he misunderstands probability. He gambles because he cannot do the thing that would make gambling unnecessary, which is to feel what he is feeling and say it out loud.

The Fatherhood Trigger

His account of onset deserves its own attention. The birth of his first child, an event the culture codes as unambiguously positive, activated everything he had suppressed about his own childhood. He described growing up in a household organized around addiction, surviving rather than experiencing childhood, arriving at fatherhood without models and without having processed what the absence of models meant.

Dempsey et al. (2021) found that adverse childhood experiences predicted gambling disorder onset in a dose-response relationship: each additional ACE category increased the odds of developing a gambling problem. But what this member described was not the adversity itself triggering the gambling. It was the life event that made the adversity impossible to keep suppressed. He had managed, for years, to function by not looking at what had happened to him. Becoming a father made not-looking untenable.

This is the mechanism that Fonagy and Target (1997) described in their work on intergenerational transmission of attachment: the transition to parenthood activates the parent’s own attachment representations, including unresolved ones. A man who survived childhood by suppressing his emotional responses to an alcoholic household arrives at fatherhood with a suppression strategy that worked for survival but cannot work for parenting. The gambling did not cause the crisis. The crisis was already underway. The gambling was the emergency exit from a building that was already on fire.

The Workplace as Exposure

Another member described working in an environment saturated with gambling talk. Customers discussed bets openly. Screens showed live sports. Someone asked his opinion on a wager during a major tournament. He reported no urge to gamble. What he described instead was a kind of retrospective recognition: watching the customer sweat the outcome of a bet produced not desire but memory. He recalled the helplessness of hoping for outcomes he could not control and losing money when they did not arrive.

This is closer to what Marlatt and Gordon (1985) described as an abstinence violation effect operating in reverse. The exposure to gambling cues did not activate craving. It activated the aversive memory of what gambling felt like at its worst. The literature on cue reactivity in gambling (Potenza et al., 2003) would predict arousal in response to gambling-related stimuli, but this member’s response was not arousal. It was something closer to grief, recognizing a version of himself he no longer wanted to be.

The clinical question this raises is whether certain recovery environments produce this kind of spontaneous aversion learning, or whether it requires the kind of reflective processing that group therapy provides. He was able to narrate the experience with clarity, to name the feeling as “flashbacks” and the conclusion as reaffirmation of his recovery. That narrative capacity may be doing more clinical work than the exposure itself.

What Suppression Costs

The member who identified suppression as his primary difficulty said something near the end that I want to hold onto. He said that every time he releases something, talks about it, lets it out, he feels lighter. He knows this. He has experienced it repeatedly. And he still finds it hard to do.

This is the paradox that Gross (2002) identified in his process model of emotion regulation: suppression is effortful, cognitively expensive, and associated with worse outcomes across nearly every measure researchers have examined, and people keep doing it. The reason is not mystery. Suppression works in the short term. It prevents the immediate social and psychological cost of emotional expression. For a man who grew up in a household where emotional expression was dangerous, the short-term logic of suppression was not distorted. It was accurate. Expression was punished. Suppression kept him safe.

The problem is that the strategy outlives the context. He is no longer a child in an alcoholic household. He is a man in a therapy group where people listen. The suppression persists not because it is rational but because it is automatic, installed in childhood and running in the background for decades. The gambling was one consequence of the suppression. The difficulty in his marriage is another. The suppression itself is the keystone process that, if addressed, would reduce the load on every downstream behavior it currently maintains.

He said he had not yet forgiven his parents. He said it the way people say things they have been thinking about for a long time and have not found a safe enough room to say out loud. This was, perhaps, the room. The group did not applaud or advise or interpret. Someone else started talking about their own week, and the session moved on, and the thing he said sat in the space between them, acknowledged by its weight if not by explicit response.