Write the actual total down first, on paper, including the debts you have been rounding down. Then pick one person, and open with a single sentence that contains the number. "I've been gambling and I owe £4,200." Everything after that is easier than everything before it, and the written figure stops the conversation turning into a slow drip of new revelations.
Why the secret is the expensive part
You already know the money is bad. What is less obvious is how much work the concealment is doing to keep the gambling going.
Hiding it requires a second account, a story about the overdraft, a reason you cannot go out this month, and a running calculation of who has seen what. All of that is effort, and all of it is spent maintaining the conditions in which you can carry on. The lie is not a side effect. It is the infrastructure.
Lying to conceal the extent of gambling is one of the nine DSM-5 criteria for gambling disorder, which tells you it is a symptom rather than a character defect. It also tells you it is treatable in the plainest possible way. You say it out loud once and the machinery stops working.
Do the arithmetic before the conversation
The single most common way this goes wrong is telling somebody a number that turns out to be wrong three days later. Not because you lied again, but because you genuinely did not know.
So do this bit first, alone, with a pen and about forty minutes.
- **Every account, every card, every app.** Log in to each one and write the outstanding balance next to its name. Overdrafts. Credit cards. Buy now pay later plans. Loans. Money borrowed from people.
- **Anything owed to a person.** Your brother, a friend, a colleague who was told it was for a car repair. These are the ones people leave off and they are the ones that detonate later.
- **Add it up.** Write the total at the bottom and look at it for a minute.
- **Write the monthly figure too.** What has to leave the account each month to service all of it. That number is usually the one that makes the situation legible to somebody else.
This is unpleasant and it is finite. Forty minutes, once. Most people find the total is smaller than the shapeless dread they had been carrying, and the ones for whom it is bigger at least now know.
Who to tell
Not necessarily the person you owe. Not necessarily your partner, and not necessarily tonight.
Tell **one** person whose reaction you can survive. A sibling, a friend, a parent, someone from a meeting, or the National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133, which is open 24 hours a day and which is a legitimate first person to tell. Practising it once with a stranger who has heard it a thousand times makes the second telling significantly less frightening.
If the person who needs to know is a partner, tell somebody else first anyway. Going into that conversation having already said the sentence out loud once is worth more than any amount of rehearsal in your head.
Say it in one go
Three rules, and they are all about not stringing it out.
**Lead with the number.** Not the context, not the explanation, not how it started. "I've been gambling and I owe £4,200" and then stop talking. People can absorb a number. They cannot absorb twenty minutes of preamble that they can tell is heading somewhere terrible.
**Tell them all of it at once.** Staged disclosure, where a bit more emerges each week, does more damage to trust than the original amount ever did. This is the reason for the written list. You are reading from it, so nothing gets forgotten and remembered later.
**Say what you have already done.** "I registered with Gamstop on Tuesday and the bank block is on" changes the conversation from a confession into a report. If you have not done those yet, do them before you talk. They take ten minutes and they are [set out in order here](/guides/gambling/gamstop-bank-blocks-and-blocking-apps).
Then let them react however they react. Anger is not a failure of the conversation. It is somebody finding out about a real loss in real time, and it is not the last conversation you will have about it.
What to ask for
People want to help and mostly do not know how, so tell them.
The most useful ask is usually about money rather than feelings. NICE's guidance for clinicians lists "methods to limit access to money, for example, agreeing that a family member will take control of finances" among the practical tools, and it works precisely because it does not depend on your willpower at eleven at night. Handing over a card, moving wages into an account you cannot reach alone, or asking somebody to hold a savings password are all versions of it.
The second most useful ask is a standing arrangement rather than a promise. "Can I text you on Friday nights, which is when it happens?" is easier to keep than "I'll never do it again".
Then get free debt advice, not more credit
The instinct after telling somebody is often to fix the number fast, which is how a gambling debt becomes a consolidation loan and then a gambling debt again.
**StepChange** is a debt charity and its advice is free and impartial: 0800 138 1111, Monday to Friday, 8am to 8pm. Ring them before anybody who advertises. There is a proper order to which debts get dealt with first, and paying the loudest letter is usually the wrong move. [We have set the order out here](/guides/gambling/gambling-debt-what-to-do-first).
If what you actually want to know is whether somebody else is liable for what you owe, that is a question for an adviser rather than for a web page, and it is exactly the kind of thing StepChange will answer on the phone for nothing.
If the thought of the conversation is unbearable
NICE tells clinicians to recognise gambling harms as "a dominant risk factor for suicidal ideation and suicide attempts, even in the absence of other risk factors", and that the risk may be highest immediately after a gambling episode.
If tonight is that kind of night, Samaritans is **116 123**, free, any hour. In immediate danger, **999**. Tell them about the money. It is exactly the sort of thing they are there for.
Common questions
**Should I tell my partner about my gambling debt?** Eventually, almost always, because the concealment is part of what keeps the gambling running and staged discovery hurts more than disclosure does. Tell one other person first, get the real total written down, and have the blocks already in place when you do it.
**What if they leave?** They might. That is a real risk and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What is also true is that the alternative is not "nothing changes", it is "they find out later, from a letter, having been lied to for longer".
**Do I have to tell them the full amount?** Yes, and in one sitting. Disclosure that arrives in instalments is the single most reliable way to destroy trust that could otherwise have been rebuilt. That is what the written list is for.
**Who can I tell if there is nobody?** The National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133, 24 hours a day. Gamblers Anonymous UK is on 0330 094 0322 and its meetings need no appointment. Both are used to being the first people told.
Sources
- [DSM-5 gambling disorder criteria (Connecticut DMHAS reproduction)](https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/dmhas/pgs/dsmdiagnosispdf.pdf). Lying to conceal the extent of gambling as one of the nine criteria.
- [NICE NG248, Harmful gambling recommendations](https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng248/chapter/recommendations). Limiting access to money as a recommended practical measure, and gambling harms as a dominant risk factor for suicidal ideation.
- [StepChange Debt Charity](https://www.stepchange.org/). Free and impartial debt advice.
- [Gamstop, About](https://www.gamstop.co.uk/about). What registration blocks, and that it cannot be cancelled during the period you choose.
