Read Time:5 Minute, 25 Second

Brain Failure at Puberty

The onset of addictions follows a catastrophic failure to reach adult maturity at either the appointed time (12-13 years of age) or when demands of adulthood arrive prematurely. The essential difference between child maturity and adult maturity is moving from an individual to a group identity. When a young adult fails to form a working group identity they become a mutant isolated individual or part of a group that uses and abuses rather than satisfies. Failure to reach adult maturity always includes the failure to form a life giving group-identity and to be able to satisfy oneself and others at the same time. This failure comes because the required brain training is missing when a teenager needs it.

Deep in the brain are centers that must be trained before we can mature properly. Many spiritual people talk a good talk about training their children but it turns out that the crucial structure (that looks like a banana) gets trained by experience and not by what people say.

There are three crucial levels of training needed to prepare for the strain of puberty, a time when the brain will lose many of the features that kept it calm until then. This early adolescent change is produced by programmed brain cell death as well as the addition of sex hormones. Teens without proper training in these three areas (three strikes) will be at a very high risk of developing addictions. People with addictions must train these three areas if they are to stay sober and thrive.

Untrained Brains Fail

Learning what satisfies is not the only missing training that can cause a catastrophic failure to reach adult maturity. The earlier problems enter a child’s life, the more severe and far-reaching the consequences. There are three major levels of untrained brain failure that produce increasingly deeper levels of additive problems. If we start with the time when addictions become active and work backwards, these three levels are:

1) Failure to learn the childhood skills of:

taming the nucleus accumbens and,
learning what satisfies.

Taming the nucleus accumbens means facing the brain’s pain and cravings center. This small cluster of nerves screams loudly that “we are surely going to die” if we do not get what we crave. Learning to tame the nucleus means learning to delay gratification, resist our appetites and withstand our drives. Disciplines like fasting and moderation in our eating and pleasures teach us to tame the nucleus accumbens. If children tame their cravings before puberty they have a much easier time learning because once sex hormones start to affect the nucleus accumbens, they make it much more irritable and hard to control.

Knowledge of what satisfies is a personal, empowering knowledge. It allows one to set goals worth pursuing. It allows one to work hard towards satisfaction, and see work as a gift instead of a drudgery to be avoided. It allows one to feel accomplished when the goal is attained. Being disconnected from knowing what satisfies is to wander lost and aimless in the wilderness, always seeking, never finding.

2) Failure to learn the infant tasks of returning to joy from the big 6 feelings

Confidence is essential to the sobriety of any addict and this confidence begins in childhood. It is a confidence in one’s own ability to restore oneself to stability. At the heart of this stabilizing process is the learned ability to calm oneself and restore relationships that have been disrupted by the six major negative emotions. These six emotions are: anger, fear, shame, disgust, sadness and hopeless despair.

Mastering self-quieting and relational repair under these six emotional conditions develops the skills needed by confident, powerful adults. They can reconnect with a loved one, resynchronize when there has been tension and restore a broken friendship. We call this capacity to recover from tension and restore quiet rest to a relationship, “returning to joy.”

The capacity to regulate emotions, and emotional intensity is what healthy adults use to regulate intimacy with another adult. The ability to form close attachments is the cornerstone of all adulthood, let alone adult sexuality.

The capacity to leave one’s parents emotionally and join to another is predicated on this skill of returning to joy. Without this ability to rediscover mutual joy, the individual is forever locked in a painful adolescent immaturity, and will find it increasingly difficult to form lasting intimate sexual bonds.

3) Failure to learn the early infant task of attachment and resolving attachment pain

This, above all, is the most crucial factor – the capacity to attach to another human being, without becoming overwhelmed with the fears of being connected. The fears accompanying attachment can run the spectrum from the fear of being engulfed, controlled or consumed by the other, to the other extreme of being abandoned, rejected, or humiliated by the beloved.

Attachment patterns develop early in life. The infant orients towards the parents for purposes of safety and survival. The avoidance of danger, essentially the threat to one’s existence is foundational for the child’s development of self-soothing, and self-regulation. This capacity to self-regulate creates good self-esteem and self-preservation, two of the capacities present in healthy adults but lacking in addicts.

Quite significantly the brain structures of the deep limbic system involved in attachment are also central to consciousness and reality. Consequently, attachment joy and pain are closely tied to the processes that create, distort or cause us to hallucinate our reality.

Disconnection from a secure attachment to loving and personally meaningful people insures the growing child will become frustrated, and bored. Disconnection pulls the seeker on with a false hope that satisfaction, the elusive butterfly, is just over the next hill, or the next, or the next, but never arriving at the promised destination. In addiction communities we refer to this as “chasing the first high, or chasing the pink cloud.” Disconnected people are never satisfied and fail to grow a working group identity as well. Knowing what satisfies is the key ingredient to peaceful negotiations, straightforward communication, and assertive living.

With these three major areas of their brains untrained during childhood and infancy it is easy to see why people would be set up for a catastrophic failure to reach adult maturity at age 12-13. The brain skills needed to successfully form a life-giving group identity are missing or woefully underdeveloped leading to a system failure when the stress of adolescent change arrives.