How alcohol and drugs stunt the emotional growth of adolescents

As I have previously written, there is a great difference between festive alcohol and drug consumption and the use of them as chemical crutches to make difficult emotions "go away" for instant gratification/relief purposes.

In the first case, the use of them is close to the pleasure of sharing fine foods with people who you feel connected to, and in the second case, it's all about making yourself forget that your life is not as you would like it and removing those difficult emotions (which are actually there to remind you that you need to change these things that are giving you those unpleasant feelings).

During adolescence, the problem is unfortunately compounded. It is a difficult time of life, where the skills you're meant to learn are actually to adapt to new and changing circumstances; alcohol and drugs can interfere severely with the process.

How? Well, imagine being faced for the first time with a break up. You can either go through the suffering, eventually coming out on the other side having learned that even heartache is a temporary condition, or have numbed your feelings with alcohol and or drugs, in which case the only thing you learn is that alcohol and drugs have helped you and hence are necessary to deal with life's vicissitudes.

Or what if you failed an exam? If you feel the shame and pain of that failure, odds are that you will realise that you'd rather work harder to avoid it happening again. Or you could just instantly make yourself feel better by drinking or drugging those pesky feelings away - and probably failing the next set of exams as well...

You get the gist.
But for adolescents, the learning process of dealing with emotions and the difficulties of life is on-going, and if instead they learn that alcohol and drugs is all it takes to make themselves feel ok, guess what they will turn to as soon as the going gets tough? Yep, alcohol and drugs.

One of my questions to a client consulting me about their addiction issues is to ask them at what age they started with their addiction - because there is a rule of thumb in psychotherapy, that whatever age you start "using" is the emotional age at which you're stuck. So if you first used alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex or whatever it is that you discovered made you instantly "feel better" at age 14, then you will be stuck with the capacity of a 14-year old to deal with difficult emotions.

Because (unfortunately) pain is the only thing that feels harder, more awful than change. So if you remove the pain, you also remove the intrinsic motivation to change and adapt.

Please have the chat with your teenager.
Please have the chat with yourself if you recognise this pattern in how you deal with life's difficulties...
And please, don't hesitate to reach out.