Most people identify the “one and only” problem as the alcohol/drug abuse, drug addiction, or alcoholism. These are definitely major problems. Once addiction is developed it is an irreversible condition of the brain that most of the counseling field calls a disease. It is something similar to diabetes and a person must accept their addiction and learn how to live a life that is healthy, fruitful, and fulfilling. However, to portray an addiction as THE one and only problem is not only inaccurate but also a setup for relapse and a continued decline in quality of life.

Capstone’s therapy approach is based on the premise that there are two sides of treatment for every resident: (1) the addiction(s) and (2) the psychological-emotional-relational-spiritual problems. These two sides work against each other to make both worse. When a person with an addiction is actively using it makes their psychological-emotional-relational-spiritual problems escalate and visa versa. Therefore all residents have a treatment plan that identifies the problems that are hurting their psychological-emotional-relational-spiritual health and making them more vulnerable to relapse.

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?” At the core of these struggles is a spiritual battle. We use the 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”, “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 had 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 residents mostly come from Christian homes, 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, usually, “I am not good enough” that leads them to the drug culture. This Learned Instinct, and often their acquired addiction, keeps them there in sort of a downward spiral. In their distorted thinking, 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 theme examples from young men who’ve been to Capstone:

Most of our residents have developed one or more addictions.  When this is the case the themes below become more significant. The addiction is a complete battle front within itself.  Understand that the addiction will make the themes “worser”, as one of my coaches used to say, and the theme left unresolved will make relapse to the addiction more likely.  In other words they feed off of each other in a negative spiral.

• Acceptance Theme: The resident has experienced so much rejection or perceived rejection from school, peers, church, or family that he feels like a failure or a reject. In the drug culture he can be accepted simply by being in it. The strongest pull of the drug culture is a total absence of rejection and expectation.
• 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, ultimately 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. If he has a mood or feeling that he doesn’t like, for instance, boredom, lonliness, hurt, etc., he wants something to take it away and replace it with something pleasant instead of him taking action to change his mood by healthy activity. In other words, he wants the feelings of a full life without the work and activity it takes to get them. This probably began with such extensive amounts of television/video games when he was little that he actually trained his brain to be passive oriented instead of active oriented. He goes to the drug culture to experience the instant gratification thrills in drug/alcohol abuse, sex, pornography, defiance, etc.
• Escape Theme: The resident has something going on in his environment that is so difficult for him to deal with that he runs to the drug culture to escape. This includes difficulties in the school, home, extended family, church, and neighborhood environments that make the situation so difficult that, in his mind, he needs to escape. Of course, this is based on his perception which may or may not be factual in reality but it is how he is experiencing his environment.
• Boredom Theme: The resident has lived such a life of overindulgence that unless he is having sensationally fun experiences, he is bored to death. This usually happens because good intentioned parents, with the noble goal of giving their children more than they had, 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. Since that feeling happened because of what was given to him or provided for him, he 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 his life from the death of a parent, sibling, or close relative or friend; the divorce of his parents; physical or sexual abuse; isolation from moving too much; 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 chose 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 other scenarios from which a rejection theme can develop. The drug culture is made up of people who believe they are rejects.
• Sexual Pleasure Theme: Many boys have their first drug-like experience in their brains when they masturbate to pornography where the burst of dopamine release 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 hear about him. Our job is to expose it and develop a plan to change it.

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