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

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In this short solo episode, Dr. Dallas Bragg shares one of the most effective tools in his coaching program: the post-relapse video. He traces its origin to his own bottom — returning home after an arrest to find his house ransacked by the men he'd been using with, no car, no job, eviction looming, and no one left to call. With nothing else to do, he propped his phone on the dresser and recorded himself in that moment of raw despair. Rewatching it later, sober, was excruciating — and that was exactly the point. The video became a way to interrupt euphoric recall, the powerful pull he describes as the midbrain hijacking the prefrontal cortex, telling every convincing lie ("I'm just getting on Grindr to look around," "I'm just taking Friday off") until using feels inevitable. Safeguards like blocking apps or handing over car keys create a pause; the video is what wakes you up inside it.
Dallas then walks through the practical protocol. Record before you sleep, while the crash is still on you and nothing in you wants to use — three to five minutes, answering seven prompts: what do I see, how does my body feel, what actually happened in the last 24 to 72 hours, what am I feeling, what's on my phone, what did this cost me, and what does my future self need to know. Making the video isn't enough; the real work is watching it sober, with full attention, every day for 90 days — the step where most men fall short. He also suggests recording a second video from the opposite state: the grateful, resolved version of yourself a few days out, when you realize what you didn't lose. A free companion form is linked in the show notes, and Dallas invites listeners to try the protocol and report back, with deeper episodes on euphoric recall coming soon.
Tool Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NplnE58He_wnpuOrmuFtj4m4CdSIie1U/view?usp=drive_link
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In this returning-guest episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg welcomes back Dr. Patrick Lockwood for a wide-ranging conversation that opens with an unscripted reflection on connection itself. The two men explore how easy it is—especially for busy professionals and entrepreneurs—to let productivity crowd out relationships, and how a simple weekly text can chip away at isolation. Dallas is candid about his own instinct to distrust kindness and question people's motives, while Patrick shares the opposite reflex of gratitude, and together they land on the familiar recovery truth that the opposite of addiction is connection. It's a warm, meandering start that sets an emotionally honest tone before the episode turns to its central idea.
From there, Patrick unpacks a framework he developed with a colleague, Mel, for understanding the different core motivations behind chemsex: numbers, who use drugs and sex to numb intolerable psychological pain and shame; connectors, who chase euphoria and a sense of belonging; and dissociators, who use to escape the self entirely, often in the wake of severe trauma. He draws a careful distinction between numbing—dulling a pain one is still in contact with—and dissociating, a total flight from the self, and both men stress that these categories are meant to help people feel seen rather than to pathologize or pigeonhole. They discuss how someone can shift between types over time (a connector becoming a dissociator after trauma, or after an HIV diagnosis) and why identifying one's underlying motivation can point toward the right support, including trauma therapy when the injury runs deep. Dallas closes by floating the idea of building case studies so listeners can recognize themselves in someone else's story, and reminds listeners of the supplemental study guide accompanying every episode.
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In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg lays out the three pillars he considers essential to chemsex recovery: consistency, proactivity, and certainty — three overlapping circles whose intersection is a chemsex-free life. He opens by naming the strange, uncomfortable stretch of time that follows quitting, the liminal space where a man suddenly has hours, energy, and attention back and no idea what to do with them. Chemsex, as Dallas frames it, was never just a drug; it was a culture, a subculture, an identity. Leaving it means living in between selves for a while, and the boredom so many men report in that gap isn't laziness — it's the absence of a compelling enough vision of who they're becoming. This episode is for the man who has quit and feels like he's buffering, and equally for the man who keeps getting almost all the way there before relapsing every two weeks, every month, every six months, and can't seem to clear that last hurdle.
Practically, Dallas builds each pillar into something a listener can act on this week. Consistency means committing to one daily action and one daily communication — journaling, the gym, a check-in, whatever feels like the path of least resistance — and treating the first missed day as a red alert rather than a small slip, because the miss itself is data about a subconscious pattern already in motion. Proactivity means running recovery like a business: sitting down on Sunday, putting on what Dallas calls the meth thinking cap, and mapping out exactly when, how, where, and with whom you would use this week, then building safeguards, blocks, and unbreakable plans around that danger zone before motivation drops. He extends the same audit to the calendar year — anniversaries, breakups, holidays, Pride, birthdays — and ties it back to re-entry planning for the weeks after travel or a partner's absence. Certainty is the hardest of the three: the reframe that life is happening for you, that a use is a data point and a learning episode rather than a verdict on your worth, and that the spiral of lost days and disappearing after a relapse does more damage than the relapse itself. Dallas points listeners to his free Reframing Relapse course, notes that the supplemental study guide for this episode — along with journal prompts, exercises, and a full topic archive — lives on the blog at recoveryalchemy.org (drdallasbragg.com now forwards there), and invites questions and reactions in the YouTube and Spotify comments or by DM.
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Episode 3-41, "Breakthrough Moment," of The AfterMeth Podcast welcomes London-based DJ and harm reduction advocate Dom (known online as Dom Topics), whom Dallas first met through the interconnected web of chemsex advocacy on Instagram before sharing coffee together in London. Dom brings a distinctive vantage point shaped by more than a decade volunteering with Impulse, an organization working globally to engage, connect, and support gay men across the pillars of substance use and harm reduction, sexual health, mental health, and social justice. Rooted in his own experience moving through London's nightlife and chemsex scenes, Dom frames harm reduction not as an instruction to stop but as meeting people where they are, offering balanced information and education rather than judgment. He and Dallas explore why gay men have built an entire subculture around chemsex, what that subculture reveals about what may be missing from mainstream queer life, and why telling someone simply to quit so often backfires.
At the heart of the episode is Dom's account of the "breakthrough moment" that turned a summer of reclaimed fun into a decision to get sober. Having found that his work, finances, social life, and confidence remained intact even while using, he began to wonder what his life could look like without substances at all. The turning point arrived at an after-party where every marker of a "successful" night was present, yet he found himself drifting room to room, sensing there was nothing there for him, and chose to leave by taking one deliberate action at a time despite his body screaming to stay. Dallas reflects this back through the image of trying to milk a dry udder, the futile effort to recreate a peak experience that never returns, and the two dig into the practical wisdom of sitting in discomfort, playing the long game, and rebuilding community rather than forcing isolation. They close on the steadying role of consistent, non-judgmental friendships, including the women who quietly held space through the chemsex years, and Dom's advice for returning to nightlife sober by finding a trusted anchor for the night.
Contact Dom: https://linktr.ee/domtopics
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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/reentry
In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg tackles one of the most overlooked triggers in chemsex recovery: re-entry, the fraught return home from a trip, whether vacation, business travel, or even treatment. Drawing on his own lived experience and his work with clients, Dallas explains why this transition catches so many men off guard. After a week riding a "dopamine drip" of novelty, the brain crashes as the plane descends into a familiar, predictable environment; stack sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and a prefrontal cortex knocked offline on top of that, and cue reactivity fires before conscious reasoning can intervene. That's the moment the "meth brain" kicks in, the still small voice that whispers "let me just text the dealer" or "let me fit one in before real life begins." Dallas frames re-entry as a form of shadow work, urging listeners to observe over a full year the triggers they run past on autopilot, and to build safeguards before the moment arrives, so that willpower, a finite resource, is never left to carry the load alone.
The heart of the episode is Dallas's free Re-Entry Plan, a four-phase Google Doc tool (linked in the show notes) that he walks through step by step. Pre-departure covers preparing a clean, stocked home and blocking apps from the phone rather than merely deleting them; in-transit focuses on checking in with the body and team, calling out fleeting thoughts to use, and visualizing a proud, meth-free homecoming while still on the beach or the plane. The plan then details the first 30 minutes, first 48 hours, phone safeguards, and emergency protocols, including scheduled video check-ins with an accountability partner, arranging a ride home rather than an Uber, and having a friend stay over, boundaries that feel extreme but are often exactly what early recovery requires. Throughout, Dallas returns to the deeper question beneath the logistics: this isn't ultimately about mechanics but identity. Echoing Mel McCracken's reminder that the phone itself is paraphernalia, he invites listeners to move the "why" from the head into the heart and ask who they want to show up as. Grounded in his program's three pillars of consistency, proactivity, and certainty, the episode is a practical, compassionate roadmap for returning home safe, proud, and at peace. A supplemental study guide accompanies the episode.
Form: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oqP8szYxn94281iy2g6uRtOT7v-ESVX0/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=113725342648816625666&rtpof=true&sd=true
The AfterMeth:
Join our Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/theaftermeth/
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