Books & Resources
All Bets Are Off: Facilitator’s Guide
The Making Bets In A Burning House Podcast
Join us in conversations about the ways that gambling addiction affects family and friends of compulsive gamblers. We share personal experiences and insights, speak with professional counselors and leaders of 12-step programs, and gather resources to help Affected Others find hope and healing in their lives despite the many fires individuals affected by gambling set. Trigger Warning: Language, Abuse, Suicide
Available on Spotify and most places where you can listen to podcasts.
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All Bets Are Off:
A Workbook to Achieve Hope & Healing
for Kids Who Love A Compulsive Gambler
When I discovered that my husband had a gambling addiction, it wasn’t just the picture frames throughout my home that shattered--my entire world did, too. It was hard enough to find support for myself, but it was all but impossible to find anything to teach me how to help my children understand and navigate the crisis. So, after a year of extensive research, participating in counseling and support groups, and drawing on my more than 20 years of teaching experience from middle school through college Bronsten wrote this narrative workbook.
Weaving together personal experiences and activities designed to help middle-years readers (8-14 years old) understand gambling addiction in an age-appropriate way, this book brings children into treatment and recovery, a rare experience in current gambling addiction intervention programs, despite its essential need. I hope that this narrative workbook will empower young people to find hope and healing when their lives have been affected by a loved one’s gambling disorder. Published in an easy-to-use workbook-style, 8.5” x 11” layout, this book is made for children—and their facilitators—to break through the chaos of their loved one’s addiction and write out loud.
Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble
Click HERE for free online resources to enhance the workbook.
In this book, I give adult facilitators the tools they need to lead their kiddo(s) through a learning journey about compulsive gambling. Complimenting her narrative workbook, All Bets Are Off: Hope & Healing For Kids Who Love A Compulsive Gambler (for 8-14 year olds), this guide will give you the confidence to lean into the challenging conversations about gambling addiction and its emotional impacts on children and early adolescents in the gambler’s world.
Drawing on my more than 20 years of teaching middle school through college and extensive research and work in mindfulness, pedagogy, and gambling addiction, I aim empower facilitators to welcome kiddos into recovery, perhaps even alongside their own.
Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Shards of Self: Cycle Breaking to Live Out Loud
When you’re in hell, perhaps the first question to ask yourself is: how did you get there...again? My last living hellscape emerged in the discovery of my husband’s gambling addiction, which nearly levelled the family business and was threatening to do the same to my household. With that revelation, my world shattered alongside the picture frames I hurled to the floor.
In this memoir, using the long-standing tradition of hero-journey literature from my more than 20 years teaching English courses in the U.S. and the U.K., I ask this question and more while examining the cycles of abuse, betrayal, and disordered eating that have shaped my life since childhood. In doing so, I share how I learned to shatter the recurring cycles of harm in my life for myself and my daughters to, above all, live out loud.
Forthcoming in 2025.
My Shards of Self Workbook: Writing Out Loud
Using the longstanding tradition of hero-journey literature, this workbook—a companion piece to my memoir, Shards of Self: Cycle Breaking to Live Out Loud—shows readers that they can write themselves into their story, reimagine their stories, and in all ways learn to live out loud.
Through guided exercises that include self-reflection, mindfulness, art and music, and more, I use my 20 years in the classroom to help you learn to live out loud. This workbook will
Give you new ways to look at your life experiences and understand the stories that have shaped you.
Reveal the power of writing to identify, heal, and encourage self-growth.
Demonstrate how you are a true hero in every sense of the word, and that you deserve to take up all the linguistic space available to you.
Forthcoming in 2025.
Writing Out Loud:
Language Freedom and Authentic Writing
2020 was rocked by not one, but two pandemics: COVID-19 and the inability to deny any longer the extent of police brutality perpetrated against people of color in America. Not long before both emerged, I entered recovery for a life-long eating disorder. As it turned out, I learned that my ED and the world’s health and racial crises were connected. All 3 were either caused or perpetuated—some both—by patriarchal, racist, sexist, elitist, and ableist systems that were harming individuals and society.
Refusing to cause harm to myself or my students any longer, I threw myself into the research, spending the next 5 years seeking a deep and nuanced understanding of America’s education system and its racist, sexist, and ableist foundations in order to find ways to dismantle it. Focusing on white English language supremacy and the deeply flawed system of assessment and grading, this book is my call to arms and demonstrates how it is not only possible to reject the oppressive systems holding individuals back from achieving their academic and, by extension, their life’s goals and dreams, but that it is easy to do so. The time for bandages is over. It’s now time to rewrite the entire system.
Resources for Education Equity: Destandardizing Standard Written English and Its Assessment.