In one of my favorite books on addiction, Unbroken Brain, author Maia Szalavitz does a great job of laying out how the addicted brain is much like the adolescent brain. If you haven’t had the privilege of hanging out with a teenager recently, I’ll refresh your memory. They’re moody, generally oblivious about responsibilities or chores that need to be done. They’re easily offended, hopelessly self-oriented, grandiose, and thrill-seeking. Szalavitz invites us to think about who our high school class elected for homecoming queen and king. Likely, we picked the class cool kids or rebels. Adolescents are magnetically attracted to rebels and dangerous behavior. It’s not as if teens don’t realize risk and consequences exist. They simply don’t think they will be affected. They’re invincible. In part, they need this confidence to move out into the world and begin their own lives. Humans naturally abandon this way of thinking, though, when development is normal.

90% of all addictions begin in adolescence. In fact, the way adolescents and addicts weigh risk and reward is eerily similar. If you think of the impact made to a person’s learning and development when addiction is introduced during adolescence, it’s terrifying! It’s long been known that addiction stunts emotional development. It’s easy to see how, instead of learning to problem solve, regulate negative emotion, pick up crucial knowledge, or how to collaborate with others, addicts simply escape, thereby missing the chance to expand those crucial skills for success. They get artificial, momentary confidence or peace from their drug. Addicts are escaping reality and the real world of relating while everyone else is engaging. Addicts are left with an emotional profile of a teenager. Anyone married to an addict is all too familiar with the profile: entitled, selfish, volatile, lazy, magical thinking, cocky, petulant. Healthy adults work as partners and don’t get swept away by things that take them away from their responsibilities and relationships.

M. Scott Peck said, “Mental health is a commitment to reality at all costs.” Sound reality testing is an important indicator of one’s mental health. Once the addicts private behaviors come to light, it’s devastating and frustrating for partners to learn their spouse’s thinking is so far from mature. Partners have been working hard to keep their conduct in line, while their addicted spouse has been acting like a child.

Whether I’m talking to my teens about money and responsibility or to my husband about sex and relationships, I often feel like the lady in this commercial “That’s not how this works…” Addicts are given to magical and fantastical thinking. And just like a teenager, they think they’re the smartest person in the room. Real adults don’t get their sexual education from the sex industry. “But the two low-lifes at work lust over young women on apps. And they told me you don’t even have to sign in to see the pictures.” “Well if your friends jumped off a cliff would you want to do that too?…” Yep, sounds familiar. Dave Ramsey says you shouldn’t take money advice from broke people. Classic, right? We shouldn’t take sex and relationship advice from sex addicts. (But that doesn’t stop them from trying to gaslight us….)

“Leading a fantasy double life is a distortion of reality… An essential part of sanity is being grounded in reality. So in the sense that addicts distort reality, the sexual addiction becomes a form of insanity. … The relationship is with sex and not with people. It doesn’t hurt anybody because…. Sincere delusion is believing your own lies. … It is evidence of seriously impaired thinking. …. His lies and his sincerity become fused. Ironically the addict knows that he is not trust worthy. …. It is the pursuit, the hunt, the search the suspense heightened by the unusual, the stolen, the illicit, the forbidden that are intoxicating to the sexual addict. For a moment the addict recognizes that he cannot continue, but the impaired mental process blurs reality with euphoric recall of sexual successes. … The addict’s lifestyle becomes a violation of his or her own values, compounding the shame. The impaired mental processes result in faulty problem-solving in all areas of the addict’s life.

There are also those who have episodes of compulsivity. Those who study the middle age transition, the famous “middlescents” note the [sexual] binging that can occur at that time. Adolescents struggle with the emergence of their budding sexuality. Experimentation and exploration are part of identity formation.” – Out of the Shadows by Patrick Carnes

In part two of the series we talked about how sexual addiction is different than other addictions. Two addictions consist largely of fantastical thinking: sexual addiction and compulsive gaming/internet addiction. Sexual addicts slip into fantastical thinking when reality becomes too much to handle. This is a slippery slope that makes the addict less and less able to deal with his real life. They come to prefer fantasy. Via fantastical thinking, they sexualize real people around them when they’re uncomfortable, when they’re excited, when they’re bored, etc. This is very hurtful and concerning to their spouse, when they find out later.

I highly recommend Doug Weiss’ video Unstuck for partners. Weiss does a very good job explaining to partners how this fantastical thinking profoundly changes the addict’s mind and approach to reality. He compares sexual addict’s handling of life similar to a person who plays a video game but then continues behaving in real life as if they were still in the video game. Just imagine if a person drove a real car like we drive virtual cars in video games. And this is precisely what has happened to many partner’s hearts and lives. In real life, car crashes kill people and destroy property. In real life, breaking sexual norms and marriage vows causes a lot of pain and relational destruction.

Addicts must face this constant tendency to “tap out” of reality by dropping through the trap door of sexual stimulation. Jim Wilder says that addicts must encounter a pain lab – a boot camp of sorts – to learn to deal with the challenging stuff of reality. Addicts’ main goal is to flee pain and numb out from difficult realities. This can stop today. God will help you.

Once the habit has turned into an addiction via mood altering, those pathways in the brain never go away. However, they can be weakened! I’ve heard it explained this way: Think of addiction as an addition onto your house. You can’t remove the addition, but you can stop going in there. You can stop heating and cooling it. You can make it inhabitable. You can take good care of other parts of your home and spend your time elsewhere. Over time the ignored addition will be cold, dark, over run with bugs and vines, until it’s dilapidated. Whatever you do – don’t go into the addition to clean it and spruce it up a bit! Before long, you’ll be spending all your time there.

Growing is automatic. Growing up is a choice. Choose reality at all costs. “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” James 1:8