You can help without starting
the conversation you are dreading.
Two ways to put the right words in front of someone who is gambling — including one where you never have to say it was you.
Most people who want to help never do anything, and it is almost never because they do not care. It is because there is no good moment, no right sentence, and a real fear of making it worse. So the conversation gets put off another week, and another, and the person carries on alone in the next room.
A Small Gift exists for that gap. It is a letter and a set of wallet cards you print at home, for one pound, and there are two entirely different ways to use it.
You hand it over
For when you are ready to say something, but not sure how to open it. You print it, you write one line on the front in your own hand, and you give it to them. The letter does the opening for you, so you are not stood there trying to find the words.
The page for you at the back covers the hard part: do not stand there while they read it, do not ask what they thought, and do not expect an answer that day.
You leave it, and never say it was you
This is the one nobody else offers, and for a lot of people it is the only route they will actually take.
You print it and you leave it somewhere they will find it on their own — a coat pocket, a bedside table, the kitchen worktop, the van. You write nothing, or you write one line and do not sign it. They read it in their own time, with nobody watching their face, and they never have to admit to anyone that they read it at all.
Nothing in the letter names you. Nothing in it says who bought it. It is written to them by someone who lost fifteen years to gambling, and it asks for nothing except ten minutes of not deciding anything.
You get to help without starting a confrontation you are dreading. They get to be approached without being cornered. That is the whole point of it.
One page, written to them rather than about them, by someone who came back from it.
Bank-card size with the cut lines printed on. One goes in the wallet, behind the bank card, for the sixty seconds before a decision gets made.
The National Gambling Helpline, Samaritans, GAMSTOP and GamFam on one page, large enough to read at three in the morning. Nobody looks up a helpline at 2am — they ring one that is already on the table.
How to hand it over, what not to do afterwards, and where to get support of your own. Do not give that page away.
Because the point is that somebody gives it, not that I sell it. A pound means price is never the reason you did not. Print it as many times as you like, forever — and if you know two people who need it, print it twice.
Instant PDF · nothing is posted
What this is not
It is not treatment, it is not an intervention, and it will not make anyone stop. It is a way of starting something, written by one person in the UK from experience rather than from a template.
If tonight is bad — for them or for you — the National Gambling Helpline is free on 0808 8020 133, 24 hours a day. GamFam supports families and partners, and your own recovery is not a side issue.