[This post is excerpted from Why Smart Teens Hurt. To learn more, please take a look!]
The thing that we’ve come to give the name “addiction” to is a powerful phenomenon. How powerful is the gravitational force that keeps the earth orbiting around the sun? How powerful is the force of a tsunami as it hits the shore? Addiction is like that. It grabs you by the throat and leads you around by the nose.
Why has evolution made us this susceptible to being hijacked by alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, gaming, sex, adrenaline, or designer brands? This is another one of those areas where we are completely entitled to ask of nature, “Couldn’t you have done better?” Maybe nature had it in mind that the ability to productively obsess would produce inventions and masterpieces, forgetting how easy it might be for that same smart person to obsess about speed and vodka. Since nature refuses to be interrogated, we will just never know the why of it.
The fact of the matter is that we are susceptible and we really mustn’t permit our naturally large appetite to transform itself into gluttony, our naturally high energy to turn us into an adrenaline junkie, or our natural thrill-seeking desires to produce a compulsive gambler. We mustn’t let that happen. There will be abundant warning signs, some as subtle as changing friends so as to get closer to the users, some as clear as drinking bourbon in the morning. There will be signs—and a smart teen had better be watching.
Any teen is susceptible. But a smart teen is likely more susceptible, by virtue of the constellation of original personality traits with which he comes into the world and that amount to fertile ground for addiction. If a child comes into the world with high energy, a large appetite, existential restlessness, and a hunger to taste everything, how is that child not a candidate for addiction? In childhood, that may look like an obsession with sports facts or the exploits of superheroes. But as the years go by, those cravings change. One day, a smart teen find himself much more interested in a pack of cigarettes than a pack of Batman cards.
If you add to those attributes that a smart child is born with a society-wide hunger for meaning substitutes and quick anxiety fixes, an open-door drug policy from psychiatry, deepening existential dread, and the special anxiety and despair that comes with intelligence, you get a kind of recipe for addiction and for those related states known as craving, dependence, obsession, and compulsion.
Who wouldn’t want to deal with modern life with the help of pills? Indeed, it is commonplace nowadays for a smart teen to virtually demand a psychiatric diagnosis so as to get his hands on psychiatric chemicals. The pressure to addict oneself is everywhere and the things to which one might addict oneself are legion. You—whether you are the parent or the teen—had better be watching!
For parents
How can your lovely child have become an addict? It is just about incomprehensible. And yet, how close do each of us come to succumbing to powerful cravings that arise in us? Who might not find it easier to meet the challenges of daily life with the help of painkillers, inhibition relaxers, or endorphin releasers? And if there is also some biological or genetic component, some particular susceptibilities or vulnerabilities, that would be influential, too, wouldn’t it?
You must be watchful, which means that you must train yourself about what you are watching for. Are you catching your teen in lies that make no sense to you? Is your teen more secretive than you would expect an average secretive teenager to be? Has your teen’s clique changed and moved in a direction that you maybe can’t quite name but that feels off? Is your teen stealing, keeping weird hours, or seeming devious? Chances are, the signs will be obvious, if you have trained yourself to look.
And if you have your suspicions? Voice them. It will not pay to make accusations but it will pay to communicate that you are confused and worried. Don’t play cop but don’t play the fool, either. Lead with your heart and be the concerned parent. You are concerned and you should be. There is a vast addiction and recovery literature and innumerable resources available to you and your teen. Use all of that. Make no mistake about it: the threat is real.
For teens
It won’t do to have you pull out a ledger and list the pros and cons of drinking vodka in the morning or shuffling off to find pills for the weekend. It won’t matter if the cons outweigh the pros by a ton. Such a reckoning won’t lead you to conclude, “I get it, addiction is bad for me.” Something very different from a balance sheet is needed.
In order to “just say no” to whatever substance or behavior may be threatening you, you must first “say yes” to a vision of yourself that refuses to include addiction. If you try to “just say no” into the void, the void will beckon you and seduce you. You need to take a step to the side of those incipient cravings or that already-in-place dependence and say, “I am not that person.” Why do this? For the sake of your whole future and so that you get to live a life of purpose.
This stepping to the side wouldn’t work if addiction was really a “disease.” You can’t just say, “No, thank you, cancer.” It is customary nowadays to describe addiction as a “disease” but that metaphor is no more helpful than calling despair “clinical depression.” Rather, think of it as a marriage made in hell between physical dependence and psychological dependence. The body wants what it wants; the mind wants what it wants; every cell, fiber, nerve and muscle wants what it wants. This is a demand, not a disease; and since it is not a disease, the following is available to you: the logic and language of recovery.
Recovery is a beautiful word, a beautiful idea, and a beautiful reality. Millions of human beings have made the calculation that their addiction is not a good thing and that they are going do something about it, every day, in a disciplined and devoted way, because they do not want to be “that person,” an active addict. They may see themselves as someone who will always be under threat, not because they are weak but because life conspires to bring back their cravings. If that threat is forever, well, then, so be it—because you can meet that threat, every day, one day at a time, using your smarts to augment the solid ideas of recovery.
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[This post is excerpted from Why Smart Teens Hurt. To learn more, please take a look!]
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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