Gambling and Process Addictions
Why can’t I stop gambling?
One of the hardest things to say out loud.
You have probably already tried to stop. Maybe you told yourself you would stop after the next win, or after you got even, or on the first of the month. Maybe you told somebody else. The gap between meaning it and doing it is the part nobody explains, and it is the part we start with.
The first conversation is free and it lasts 55 minutes.
Open seven days a week.
Gambling addiction therapy, anywhere in Oregon
We see clients for gambling in person in Tigard and by video anywhere in the state. Bend, Medford, Pendleton, the coast. If you have a private room and an hour, we can help.
Our clinical team includes a Certified Gambling Addiction Counselor (CGAC II), a credential very few clinicians in Oregon hold. He has twenty years in behavioral health, fifteen of them credentialed. That matters here for a specific reason: gambling is not a smaller version of something else, and it does not respond to being treated as one.
What actually happens in the first hour
Nobody is told what to do. Not in the first session, not ever.
The hour goes into understanding what the gambling is doing for you. Not what it is costing you, because you already have that number and reciting it back has never helped anyone. What it is doing. When it started being the thing you reach for, what it quiets, and what happens on the days you do not.
That is slower at the start than a plan would be. It is also the reason any of it holds.
By the end you will know whether this is a fit, and so will we. If it is not, we will tell you where to go instead.
Sports betting, slots, online casinos, cards, the lottery
People sometimes wait to call because the thing they do does not look like the picture in their head of a gambling problem. So, plainly, all of these:
The app that opens itself. Checking odds through a workday, live betting a game you did not care about, the parlay that was going to fix the week.
Oregon has them in more places than most states, and they are engineered by people who are very good at their jobs. Losing hours to a machine is not a character flaw and it is not unusual.
The version that never closes, never asks you to drive anywhere, and never sees your face.
The one people are least likely to say out loud, because it sounds small until you add the year up.
Sometimes this is investing. Sometimes it is a slot machine with a ticker, and the person doing it usually knows which one it has become.
What they share is the machinery underneath. A near miss reads to the brain as almost winning rather than as losing, so the behavior gets reinforced by the losses as well as the wins. That is built into the design and it is a large part of why stopping on your own is so much harder than it sounds from the outside.
Prediction markets, which is the newest of these and the one people are least likely to call gambling. An account where you buy a position on an election, a rate decision or a match reads as trading, and the app is built to feel like it. If you are checking it the way you used to check a betting slip, it is the same machinery under a different name.
Video gaming sits with the other process addictions further down this page, because the work is the same and the pattern is the same.
The other process addictions
Named separately, because grouping them is a way of not saying them.
- Gaming. When the hours stopped being a choice and the day organizes itself around getting back to it.
- Shopping and spending. Packages you hide, an account your partner does not know the balance of, the relief that lasts until the box is open.
- Pornography and compulsive sexual behavior, which has its own page because it is its own problem and deserves more than a paragraph.
All of them run on the same machinery as gambling. Something gets managed, briefly, at a cost that arrives later. The work is the same shape, and so is the first hour.
Am I actually a problem gambler?
There is a screening questionnaire we can go through together.
Most people have already answered the question before they take it. The ones who ask tend to be the ones who have hidden a balance, borrowed to keep going, promised somebody they had stopped, or gone back after a stretch away. If any of those are familiar, the label matters much less than the pattern does.
You do not need a diagnosis to book a consultation, and you will not be given one in the first hour.
If you are a physician, an attorney, or an executive
Then a process addiction is not only a health question. It is a licensing question, and you have almost certainly done the arithmetic on that already.
We see this often enough that it does not need explaining to us. Sessions are private pay if you prefer, which keeps them outside any insurance record. No diagnosis is filed anywhere for a client who pays directly. You do not have to build up to telling us what you do for a living, and you will not be handled carefully when you do.
Confidentiality is not a feature we are advertising. It is the reason some people are on this page instead of a phone call to a program.
If it is your husband, wife or partner who gambles
You are welcome here as a client in your own right, and you do not need them to agree to anything first.
Two things are usually true at once. You have lost money, and you have lost the version of the relationship where you knew what was happening. Those are separate injuries and they do not heal on the same schedule. We work with both, and we work with couples together when both people want that.
Two of our clinicians take couples work, and both are Gottman trained. Couples and marriage counseling If gambling has become the only thing the two of you talk about, that is a thing that can change before the gambling does.
Oregon has a free program, and it is worth knowing about
Oregon funds problem gambling treatment through the Oregon Health Authority, and it is free to any resident. The helpline is 1-877-695-4648, staffed around the clock, and it covers family members too.
It is a different system from this one. That funding runs through community mental health programs, most of them Medicaid centered. If that is the right door for you, use it, and we would rather you heard it here than found out later.
People come to us instead for reasons that tend to sound like this. They want evenings or a Sunday, because the thing they cannot afford is a boss noticing a pattern of Tuesday mornings. They want the gambling and the marriage and the twenty-year-old trauma held by one clinician rather than referred in three directions. They want no record anywhere that a program creates and a private practice does not. Or they simply do not want to wait.
What this costs
Published, because the practice publishes its fees.
| Licensed clinician | Supervised associate | |
|---|---|---|
| Individual | $205 | $180 |
| Couple | $230 | $205 |
| Family | $245 | $210 |
In network with Kaiser, PacificSource, Cigna, Aetna, and United Healthcare and Optum, and with Medicare, both Open Card and in-network Advantage plans. Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield is expected from 1 October 2026 and Moda from 15 October 2026, both for associates as well as licensed clinicians. For the Oregon Health Plan we can bill Open Card, but not the coordinated care organizations, and most OHP members are enrolled with a CCO rather than Open Card.
There is no sliding scale. We would rather tell you that on this page than in a phone call after you have got your hopes up.
Questions people ask
Am I actually addicted, or do I just gamble too much?
That distinction matters less than it sounds like it does. If you have tried to stop and could not, that is the thing worth bringing, whatever it turns out to be called.
Does gambling counseling work?
It works better than willpower does, which is what most people have tried first and alone. Nobody can promise you an outcome, and any clinician who does is telling you something they cannot know. What we can describe is the work.
I stopped for months and started again. Is that the end of it?
No. Returning to it after a stretch away is ordinary in this work and it is information rather than failure. It usually tells us what the gambling was doing that nothing had replaced.
Can I do this without my family finding out?
Yes. What you tell a clinician is confidential, with the narrow legal exceptions we will go through with you in the first hour. If you pay directly, no claim goes to an insurer and no diagnosis is filed.
How fast can I be seen?
Usually within days. We are open seven days a week, and inquiries are answered the same day.
Do you work with the family instead of the person gambling?
Yes, and often that is who calls first.
Book a free 55 minute consultation
An hour, at no cost, with a clinician who has heard this before.
Book online · Seven days a week · In person in Tigard, by video anywhere in Oregon