Capstone: The Real Problem

Most people identify “THE” problem as the drug abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, or chemical dependency. These labels are definitely problems within their own right, however, to portray them as THE problem is a setup for major failure. It’s like having an infection in the blood stream, staph for instance. This inside-the-body blood infection causes outside-the-body sores on the skin. Identifying addiction as THE problem is like identifying the skin sore as THE problem. You could treat the sore with hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin until it healed only to have new sores re-emerge other places on the skin – and they continually get worse. The real problem is in the blood. The only way to stop the outside sores is to cure the inside infection. So let’s look at some possibilities for what’s going wrong inside your son.

First, if you haven’t read the section on Capstone Core Concepts please do so now and pay particular attention to the part on Learned Instinct. That section will help you in understanding what’s going on inside your son. In the Discovery Phase of our program (see the section on Program Phases) we create a picture that answers the question, “What makes ________ (your son’s name) make sense?” We call it his Theme.

I’m going to list examples of themes from boys who have been at Capstone. Remember that the actual themes are often a combination of several themes. A simple way of describing this is to just ask the question “Why is he doing this?” Also remember that Satan is at the root of every single one of the themes. Ultimately he is the real problem.

We use a phrase - “the drug culture” - to describe the big picture of what’s going on in the lives of the boys we work with at Capstone. It is much more than drug use and it can look very different than classic drug addicts. If I had used the term “drug culture” in the sixties and seventies it would have been referring to a group of people that were “stoners” or “druggies” or “pot heads” in their appearance, attitude, and behavior. Today however, the drug culture includes kids from all pieces of the social pie. We’ve have boys who were straight A students, all-state athletes, college scholarship material in athletics or academics, youth group members, preps, country boys, Goths, pot heads, stoners, and etc. Our boys mostly come from Christian homes that are simply under spiritual attack. So conceptualizing the real problem is more complex than it seems on the surface.

What all of our young men have in common is that something has gone wrong in life that has led them down the road to, what we call, The Wasteland of Ruin. All of our residents share some flavor of a Learned Instinct that leads them to the drug culture and keep them in it. In their distorted reality, their connection to the drug culture is solving problems that they haven’t been able to solve any other way (remember, from their distorted Learned Instinct perspective). As adults, parents, and professional therapists we know that their membership in the drug culture is worsening their problems and creating new ones. One secret to winning this battle is to start with creating doubt in the mind of the resident that his problems are solved in the drug culture and lead him toward a total exposure of the truth.

Here are some examples:

Acceptance Theme: The resident has experienced so much rejection or perceived rejection from school because of some type of attention deficit, or something else that they feel like a failure or a reject. In the drug culture they can be accepted as a success simply by being in it.
Failure Avoidance Theme or Performance Based Acceptance Theme: Our American culture has a performance based acceptance in which the resident feels like he can never “perform” good enough so he just quits trying. In the young man’s mind, he’s not good enough so if he tries he’ll fail, subsequently he stops trying to avoid failure.
Pleasure Theme or Passive Brain Theme: The resident has a passive oriented brain and seeks the rise and fall of human emotional experience vicariously. In other words, they want the feelings of a full life without the work and activity it takes to get them. This was probably begun by so much television / video games when they were little that they actually trained their brains to be passive oriented instead of active oriented. So they go to the drug culture to experience the instant gratification thrills in drug / alcohol abuse, sex, pornography, defiance, and etc.
Escape Theme: The resident has something going on at home that is so difficult for him to deal with that he will run to the drug culture to escape being at home. This includes difficulties in the home environment that make home so difficult that in their minds, they need to escape.
Boredom Theme: The resident has lived such a life of overindulgence that unless they are having sensationally fun experiences they are bored to death. This usually happens because good intentioned parents, with the noble goal of giving their children more than they had, will have provided experiences and/or “things” that are aimed at creating a world of constant happiness for their child. This stimulates the pleasure center or dopamine neurotransmitter sites and actually trains the brain to seek out this feeling. And because that feeling happened because of what was given to them or provided for them they didn’t learn how to kill boredom without instant gratification.
I Am Bad Theme: In America today, 1 out of 5 boys is sexually abused by the age of 16. Early exposure to pornography produces some of the same side effects as being sexually abused. The Learned Instinct that develops, to some degree or another, is that “I am bad, dirty, unworthy so the only place I belong is in the drug culture.”
Pain Theme: The resident has experienced pain in their lives from the death of a parent, sibling, or close relative or friend; the divorce of their parents, physical or sexual abuse, isolation from moving too much, and etc. The drug culture offers multiple avenues of pain relief.
Rejection Theme: We’ve worked with a lot of boys who were adopted. They were all adopted by parents who choose them and love them. However, the fact remains that their birth parents gave them up for adoption. In the mind of an adopted child, the only reason a birth parent would give their baby away is that the baby isn’t worth keeping, thus the Learned Instinct “Since I’m rejectable I must be a reject.” There are multiple scenarios where the resident would have developed a Rejection Theme from his experiences in life. The drug culture is made up of people who believe they are rejects from somewhere.
Sexual Pleasure Theme: Many boys have their first drug-like experience in their brains when they masturbate to pornography. There is a burst of a dopamine release that mirrors the dopamine release in drug use. When the boy gets to adolescence, he can get that same dopamine release with sex. The drug culture provides more opportunity for sex than any place on earth.

There are other themes and combinations of themes but these will give you an idea. One of the strengths of Capstone is that we have no ego. We don’t care what a resident’s theme is we just care that we discover it. This is vital to victory. His theme is already set before we ever even hear about him. Our job is to expose it and develop a plan to change it.