#PGAM2025: Liz’s husband helped her to see how much she was gambling

The EPIC team has a big role to play in helping the public to understand problem gambling, with that focus intensified during March’s Problem Gambling Awareness Month.

With this year’s theme of ‘Seeking Understanding’, it’s an ideal opportunity for EPIC’s people to do what they do best and help to explain the concept, honing in on how they came to understand what gambling-related harm was doing to them, how their loved ones came to terms with the issue, and what they now do to try and right the wrongs of their past.

Illinois-based consultant Liz Thielen is the first to speak in support of a weekly feature that we’ll be sharing throughout #PGAM2025, talking us through what life was like for her at the moment she realized the harm she was experiencing.

Speaking of the point in life at which she started to understand how frequent casino visits were having a negative effect on her life and her finances, she explained:

“My circumstances changed, and started to be incompatible with gambling. I got engaged and became a mom, not conducive to long hours in the casino. But ultimately it came down to frequent use of my casino comps to treat my friends and family to many meals and it starting to be noticed.

“My husband turned and looked at me and said ‘just how much do you gamble?. It caused me to self-assess, and it truly floored me to examine something I had compartmentalized so well. 

“It was my husband noticing and causing me to examine it that brought it to light. My finances being a wreck made more sense once this realization happened. It didn’t help – or it did, since it contributed to me quitting – that a pawn shop employee came to the house asking if I had any more gold to sell, since I hadn’t sold any for a while.”

The majority of the team at EPIC with lived experience of gambling-related harm sought treatment following the sudden realization of the condition that was having such a profound effect on their life, but ironically, it was a role in addiction counselling that Liz already had in mind that helped her to seek a resolution of her own accord, and continues to have benefits for others to this day, as she uses the experiences of her former life to increase awareness for those she engages in the present day.

“I didn’t seek treatment or support,” she explained. “I just shut it down quietly and shamefully. It was ironically working towards becoming a gambling counselor that helped me to better understand what I myself had experienced for so many years.

“It means everything to be able to turn my understanding of problem gambling into a positive in my role now. I feel like I didn’t have a fighting chance, not knowing anything about disordered gambling as I had actively sought to protect my self from addiction.”

Alongside panel appearances and conference presentations to audiences with an interest in preventing gambling-related harm, when Liz hits the road for EPIC, she principally delivers her story to audiences at NCAA colleges, with student-athletes and staff finding a connection with her background as a former leading boxer, before injury and addiction issues struck.

Long hours at the wheel or in the air see her traveling the width of the US to help others avoid a repeat of her experience, but it’s something she takes great pleasure in doing, no matter what the journey. She continues:

“Making sure that the people I get to meet with at the very least know of the potential risks in itself is worth the discomfort and sometime draining experience it can be to share my story repeatedly. That some many will also come away better equipped to make intentional and informed decisions about gambling makes it all worth it.

“I’ve had a number of students speak to me after a session about their own struggles, or those of someone they care about. I hear over and over again ‘I thought I was the only one’. This is a feeling I know all too well, like you are unique in the endless cycle of compulsive behaviors.

“Knowing that we aren’t alone, that there are reasons this happened to us, can turn something that is otherwise so lonely and painful into something hopeful.”

Though with every passing year, the issue of problem gambling moves further into her past, Liz’s work in this field ensures that she never stops learning about the issue and the ‘seeking understanding’ mantra that is being shared so widely this month is a reflection of what every day in this job looks like to her.

“I swear its every day I learn something new about my own experiences and those of others,” she concludes.

“People are so complicated and, though we have a lot of common experiences, we all have unique histories and contexts that factor in. Finding the commonalities among those, having those moments when you think ‘that makes so much sense now that I hear someone else say it’, just really helps to demystify a complex phenomenon.”

EPIC exists to help demystify the issue of problem gambling and offers a wealth of services to organizations who are committed to preventing this form of harm from befalling the people in its care. Visit our Safer Gambling portal to better understand how some of these options can be of considerable benefit to your workplace and gain the understanding that Problem Gambling Awareness Month wants everyone to take in.