The AfterMeth: Gay Men Recovering from Crystal Methamphetamine and Chemsex Addiction

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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/foundation
This episode of The AfterMeth Podcast is unlike any other. Instead of a clinician or author, Dallas Bragg hosts a panel of three people connected to the LGBT Foundation in the UK, each with a direct, lived relationship to chemsex, brought together with help from Reese, the Foundation's sexual health coordinator, whom Dallas met at the chemsex conference in Belgium. Hugh moved from Derry to Manchester alone and watched crystal meth take his jobs, his housing, and nearly his life before spending two and a half years finding himself again. Patrick, also known as Kitana, came from Barbados at 17, was diagnosed with HIV at 20, survived a devastatingly abusive relationship that left him with a rare early-onset dementia, and used meth to block it all out before becoming a leading HIV and dementia advocate. Luke runs NeuroQueers, a community for queer neurodivergent people, and brings a more sporadic history with meth and cocaine alongside a longer battle with alcohol.
What follows is raw, funny in places, and relentlessly honest. The panel talks about sexual assault while on chems and the shame that keeps men from asking for help, what comes flooding back once the substance is gone, why therapy is essential and why it can also trigger relapse, and how recovery differs for neurodivergent people who have to break both the addiction and the routine of using. They share what sober sex has actually been like, the importance of being honest with a partner about what you have been through, and why the way someone responds to "I relapsed" can change everything. Running through it all is a single thread: tell someone, face what you were numbing, find the people who get it, and take responsibility so you can finally forgive yourself. A supplemental study guide is linked in the show notes.
Contact:
Reece Boulton Email:  reece.boulton@lgbt.foundation
Website: https://lgbt.foundation/
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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/decide
In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg challenges one of recovery culture's most rigid ideas: the day one. He shares that the date he publicly uses isn't when his recovery began. It began on a hotel bed, when sunlight broke through the curtain and a voice cut through the static to say, "I'm done." He used many times after that morning, but each time felt worse and more disconnected. Dallas uses the story to introduce Prochaska and DiClemente's Stages of Change: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. He then points to a gap in the model. It jumps from doing it to having done it, with no name for the stretch in between where most men actually live.
Dallas names that gap Stage 4.5: The Becoming. In this stage a man is taking action and still using. He is building new patterns by hand, leaning on unreliable willpower, and hitting plateaus that invite shame every time the counter resets to zero. Dallas reframes relapse here as contrast and data rather than failure, and offers a mantra: "This is something I do until it's something I am." What carries a man across to maintenance, he argues, is three things:
A visceral, five-senses prophetic vision of the man he is becoming.
A heart-led why rooted in identity rather than consequences.
A daily anchor practiced regardless of mood or relapse.
The episode closes with a reminder that the timeline belongs to no one else and that each man is the executive of his own recovery. The study guide linked in the show notes includes a downloadable Stages of Change document with Stage 4.5 added.

Study Guide Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cCvwZ6v8NOYF9gPwtn0G-egNeDm6xzeX/view
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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/dynamics
Dallas Bragg has been asked one question more than almost any other: what do I do when someone I love is using? In this episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, he finally sits down with someone equipped to answer it. Charlie Bray is a counselor, former treatment center clinician, and family and loved ones recovery coach with 18 years in recovery, years of facilitating family intensives alongside Mell McCracken, and lived experience on both sides of addiction in a family. Dallas opens with his own story: a mother who thought his drug arrest meant marijuana, made every mistake in the book, and eventually did the right thing. Charlie's central point reframes the whole conversation. Family dynamics exist long before anyone picks up a substance, and the using is usually a symptom of how the family already operates.
The conversation is packed with practical wisdom for parents, partners, and friends. Charlie and Dallas redefine "help" as something other than convincing and managing, unpack why fear so often shows up as anger, and walk through Pia Mellody's framework for codependency and where real self-worth comes from. They tackle the hardest scenarios head on: lending money ("I won't give you cash, but I'll pay for treatment"), refusing to let someone use in your home as an act of love, what to say at the emergency room, and the partner who keeps disappearing on binges. Running through it all is Charlie's insistence that loving someone does not mean funding their slow death, and that a held boundary tells your loved one, without words, that you believe they are capable. This is part one of two, and it previews the Holiday Healing webinar series for addicts and the people who love them, launching in November.
Contact Charlie:
Instagram: @family.recovery
Email Address: charlie@cbbrecoveryservices.com
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YouTube: The Aftermeth Podcast
X: https://twitter.com/Drdallasbragg
Free online course to End the Relapse Cycle: https://www.drdallasbragg.com/offers/e7c2Eo22/checkout
Meth-Free Blueprint EBOOK: https://www.drdallasbragg.com/offers/o8qFhK5i/checkout

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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/fbuddy
In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg opens with a story from his earliest days of recovery, when finally settling into a home with his kids set off cravings and a deep fear of sex. Drug tested several times a week and told in 12-step rooms to wait a year, he made his own plan. He invited a non-attached fuck buddy, a friend also in meth recovery, to live with him for a few months. That arrangement kept him off Grindr, helped rewire his brain, and put him on the path to enjoying sober sex. Dallas is clear that this is not a prescription. Many men need to start slow and start alone, with a porn detox, sober masturbation, and careful attention to what triggers cravings. He also stresses that there is no universal timeline for returning to partnered sex.
From there, Dallas lays out the art and science of using a fuck buddy for sexual reintegration. Drawing on Jack Morin's The Erotic Mind and its love/lust conflict, he explains why a low-pressure, non-romantic partner helps men get out of their heads and into their bodies. He walks through the preparation step by step:
Define "ready" as radical honesty rather than horniness.
Build a safe container and involve your recovery team.
Write an if-then plan for before, during, and after sex.
Set a clear exit and safe word.
Name your sober sexual values.
Set boundaries without turning them into expectations.
Choose on purpose which kinks come forward into sober life.
Design a sensory scene that tells the nervous system this is different and safe.
He also covers interviewing a potential partner, treating a partner's "no" as low-stakes shadow work around rejection, and considering a sober sex worker as a recovery tool. The study guide linked in the show notes includes his Sober Fuck Buddy Planning Sheet.
The AfterMeth:
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Dallas Bragg
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YouTube: The Aftermeth Podcast
X: https://twitter.com/Drdallasbragg
Free online course to End the Relapse Cycle: https://www.drdallasbragg.com/offers/e7c2Eo22/checkout
Meth-Free Blueprint EBOOK: https://www.drdallasbragg.com/offers/o8qFhK5i/checkout

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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/realwork
Host Dallas Bragg sits down with Danni Pomplun, a men's coach and men's work facilitator based in San Francisco, whose message — "I quit the drugs, but the addiction stayed" — cuts to the heart of what happens after the substance is gone. Danni traces his own path from leaving home at seventeen and managing gay bars in Southern California at twenty-one, through losing his first partner at twenty-five, to a second bottom years later when meth entered the picture hard and fast. What finally moved him wasn't talk therapy alone, which he says kept him stuck in his head, but somatic and embodiment work, trauma therapy, and men's circles where he was met with what he calls "sharp love" — brothers who cared less about his stories and more about his integrity. He and Dallas name a pattern the gay community rarely talks about: enormous freedom of expression with very little containment, and the "leaky energy" that follows when there are no boundaries around it.
The conversation turns to why unspoken emotion is so often the real trigger. Dallas describes a client whose unspoken workplace conflict built until chemsex became the exit; Danni frames every relapse as "the moment we choose to leave ourselves." They explore how men are conditioned out of two feelings in particular — grief and celebration — and how learning to sit in stillness, converse with the body, and name what's actually there (anger under sadness, anxiety mistaken for sexual charge) is the work that white-knuckling can never replace. Danni also speaks to touch and the fear of being held, especially for men carrying chemsex trauma, and closes with a call for community care over self-care alone: "It's amazing that we get to laugh and dance together. It's a shame if I don't get to see you cry." He shares his free and donation-based online men's circles and a meditation album, From Pain to Peace, releasing on Spotify at the end of September.
Contact Danni:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dannipomplun/?hl=en"

Website: https://www.dannipomplun.com/
The AfterMeth:
Join our Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/theaftermeth/
Dallas Bragg
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drdallasbragg/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drdallasbragg
YouTube: The Aftermeth Podcast
X: https://twitter.com/Drdallasbragg
Free online course to End the Relapse Cycle: https://www.drdallasbragg.com/offers/e7c2Eo22/checkout
Meth-Free Blueprint EBOOK: https://www.drdallasbragg.com/offers/o8qFhK5i/checkout