The Most Critical Mistake We Make With Teens (on talking about alcohol and drugs)
I can’t begin to say that I know what I am about to write is absolutely “true” in that I’m not a teen today, it’s been a long time, and I think we should listen to them first and foremost. Nor is this possibly the only “mistake” in how we communicate with them. But what I can state with great confidence is that this is critical — as teenagers and those in their early 20s are evolutionarily hardwired to be at their height of risk acceptance in their lives. Which presents, among other things, as experimenting with drugs and alcohol for the first time. Statically, 62% of teens have abused alcohol by grade 12, and 47% have tried illicit drugs.
I’m greatly influenced by the lifetime work of Dr. Gabor Maté, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, who I interviewed for our podcast, and former NBA player, addict, author, and now tireless public speaker (200+ high schools a year) Chris Herron, whose story can be heard with podcaster Rich Roll here. Are they (and many others) right? Ask for yourselves.
Your teenager comes home acting “off.” Different. And you soon suspect it might be alcohol or drugs. What is the reaction? You ask, “Who gave this to you? Who were you with? What precisely have you done, and do their parents know about this?” All understandable questions, of course. They are not just fact-finding; they could be life-saving for anyone in the group. But what do you fail to ask? What is the one question that most often never gets asked? “Why did you do this?”
The “who, what, when, where” have nothing to do with the future. If this is a one-off experiment or sadly and slowly grows into a lifelong addiction. But the “why” has everything to do with it. Is it insecurity? Guess what, we all have them. When I speak on mental well-being to college and high school students, this is a leading fact I really hope to drive home. We all have insecurities. To quote Dr. Maté: “You're going to look at all your confident classmates, and you're going to go in there with all manner of self-doubt. You're making the big mistake of comparing their ‘outside’ with your ‘inside.’ You have no idea what their inside is like. And believe me, you're not the only one.” Are they trying to escape a trauma they have been living with? In my upcoming book We’re All A Bit Messy, I posit that we all have trauma, be they “capital T”s like abuse or multiple “lowercase t”s like the many times we have experienced things as children that are significantly less than nurturing. That our young brains do not understand and that, as measured not just by observation but in fMRI machines, overwhelm our coping mechanisms and quite literally change our brains. Fear of rejection and abandonment? Highly likely part of the equation — we have a deep-rooted need to “fit in” with the pack. For much of human existence, staying alive meant just this; if you were kicked out of the pack, you die.
We focus deeply on the “rock bottom” stories of addicts. “What a shame…” the story oft begins, and then quickly talks about all the MOST shameful stories of the addict, leading to their arrest, stint in rehab, overdose, or death. Think about this for example — how absurd is that? What if, rather than pouring gasoline on the fire of shame, we talked more about the “why?” What did this celebrity who seemingly had it all feel so unlovable? The recovery rests in the “why.” I recently, before his sudden death, read Matthew Perry’s memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Great Big Lie. This was the theme driven throughout the book — despite seemingly having it all, Perry mistakingly felt completely unlovable.
In the end (or at the beginning, as it were), Chris Herron, I think, has it right. We as adults are too afraid to share our own vulnerabilities with children. To ask “why” means that your teen’s answer might be all too familiar to you. YOU are or were insecure, felt unlovable, needed to escape, feared rejection. I know for a fact the fear of rejection was a driving element of my teens and early twenties and beyond. It’s only in the last 10 years, with a ton of work, that I have been able to look at the early roots of this with compassion. To say these two things: “The abuse I suffered was not my fault,” and,“As an adult, I cannot be abandoned; I can only be left.” The greatest thing you can do is exactly that: ask both yourself and your teen to look inward. Not outward at the people and objects. Asking and uncovering the “why” is the more difficult, by far, approach than demanding the “who/what.” But it’s also the only path to prevention if this isn’t just experimentation but the result of something more deeply seeded. And, for anyone who passes from experimenting to using — it is always about something more deeply rooted.
We are our own griefs. We are our own happinesses. We are our own remedies.
– Mike Spivey