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/bargaining
In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg continues his serialized series applying the five stages of grief to chemsex recovery, turning the lens on stage three: bargaining. Dallas frames bargaining as the most dangerous stage — not because it feels the worst, but because it feels the most reasonable. Unlike denial's numbness or anger's volatility, bargaining arrives dressed in logic, self-awareness, and apparent progress. It is the mind making one final offer — a negotiated middle ground between the old life and the new — and Dallas unpacks how that offer is always, ultimately, a trap. Drawing on his own three and a half years of active use, he shares with striking honesty the many iterations of bargaining he attempted: using only once a month, only on vacation, only with certain people, only after a stretch of sobriety. Every single bargain, he reflects, ended the same way. Tina always wins the negotiation.
Dallas goes deeper into the specific voices bargaining uses — voices that sound like maturity, earned insight, and measured wisdom — and identifies the most insidious form: staying meth-free on the surface while remaining embedded in the ecosystem of chemsex. Staying on the apps, texting the guys, keeping the dealer in your phone, returning to familiar places. This, Dallas argues, is not recovery — it's the antechamber of relapse, because the scene and the substance are not separable. He traces how most relapses he has witnessed in his coaching work originate here, in men who have done real work but are quietly running scenarios and engineering circumstances that make use feel accidental or justifiable. The way out, he insists, is not to argue with the bargaining mind — it will win — but to declare, out loud, in writing, with witnesses, that there is no loophole, no exception, no version where any of it gets to stay. That declaration, and the grief it opens, is the doorway into the next stage: depression — and ultimately, surrender.
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Supplementary Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/integration
In this episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas sits down with Malu, a yoga teacher with twenty years of experience who specializes in working with gay men in recovery. Based in Hawaii, Malu discovered yoga in college and spent years building a practice before recognizing how deeply it supported his own sobriety journey — one rooted in alcohol use and a high-pressure career in New York City. Drawing on the teachings of his mentor Rod Stryker and a therapeutic approach to yoga rooted in Tantric Alchemy, Malu explains the difference between abstinence and true sobriety, and how the mat can become a bridge between what's learned in therapy and what's actually lived in daily life. His framework, which he calls Sober Embodiment, offers gay men in recovery a structured, body-based pathway for transforming not just their behaviors — but their identity.
Malu walks Dallas through his three-pillar approach: tapas (the heat of discipline and sitting with discomfort), self-study (exploring the addiction story and frequency), and identity work (stepping into the authentic self through Yoga Nidra, sankalpa, and visioning). The conversation dives into how yoga rewires the brain through unfamiliar movement, unwinds deep-seated patterns called vasanas, and trains the nervous system to tolerate difficult emotions — including the cravings and triggers so central to chemsex recovery. Dallas and Malu find powerful alignment between their respective frameworks, particularly around the concept of "frequency," building a prophetic vision of the self, and using consistent daily practice — even just seven minutes — as an act of identity reclamation. This episode is a rich, practical, and spiritually resonant conversation for any gay man in recovery who is ready to embody his sobriety, not just endure it.
Contact Malu:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/malulaniyoga/
Email: malu@malulaniyoga.com
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Supplementary Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/angerstage
In this solo episode, Dallas Bragg continues his series on the five stages of grief in chemsex recovery, picking up where last week's episode on denial left off. With honesty and hard-won perspective, Dallas introduces Stage Two: Anger — a stage he describes as hot, loud, and often misunderstood. Rather than framing anger as a sign of emotional failure or ingratitude toward sobriety, Dallas reframes it as a legitimate, necessary response to real loss. He draws on his own story — including a moment of rage directed at the very family members who kept him alive during active use — to illustrate how anger misfires when it isn't understood, punishing the people closest to us instead of naming what was truly taken.
Dallas walks listeners through the many faces anger takes in this stage: fury at dealers, at the men who introduced them to the scene, at the gay community that both welcomed and endangered them, at recovery itself, and at a world that made their sexuality a source of shame before the scene ever offered false belonging. He identifies two dangerous pitfalls — suppression, which festers into depression and relapse, and weaponization, which leaves destruction in its wake — before offering a third path: moving anger through the body. Running, boxing, screaming into a pillow, writing unsent letters, and speaking rage aloud to a calm witness are among the tools Dallas recommends. The episode closes with a powerful reframe: channeled correctly, this anger isn't an obstacle to recovery — it's the fuel that builds a new identity and keeps men out of the scene for good.
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Dallas Bragg
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Supplementary Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/chemstories
In this episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg welcomes Patrice St-Amour and Bradley Hampton-Wallis, the research coordinator and Toronto host respectively of Chemstories — a bilingual podcast series produced out of the University of Montreal's School of Public Health that gives gay, bisexual, queer men, as well as trans and non-binary people a platform to tell their chemsex stories in their own voices. Patrice brings both lived experience and academic grounding in sexology to his role coordinating the project, while Bradley draws on his background as a social work researcher and his own history with drug use to create deeply human, non-judgmental space for conversation. Together, the three hosts explore the origins and evolution of Chemstories, its community-based participatory methodology, and what it means to center the voices of those with lived experience rather than filtering their stories through a clinical or academic lens.
The conversation digs into the transformative power of storytelling as a tool for dismantling shame — both for those who share their stories and those who hear them. Dallas and his guests discuss the internal hierarchies and stigma that persist even within the gay community around drug use, the nuanced distinction between problematic and non-problematic chemsex, and how hearing someone else's story can unlock self-compassion in men who have long vilified their own pasts. The episode also explores sober sex, sexual reintegration, and the surprising universality of the chemsex experience across borders, cultures, and genders. With a combined library of nearly 60 episodes and 25+ hours of content between the French (Chemstory) and English (Chemstories) versions, listeners are pointed toward a rich, diverse resource — and encouraged to consider how curiosity, community, and radical honesty continue to be among the most powerful forces in recovery.
Explore the Project:
Listen & Learn: Chemstories podcast https://qollab.ca/en/chemstories/
Read the Background: Understanding the realities of PnP  (CATIE Blog) : https://blog.catie.ca/2026/04/01/understanding-the-realities-of-pnp-with-the-chemstory-chemstories-podcast/
Get in Touch: chemstory@espum.umontreal.ca
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Dallas Bragg
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Meth-Free Blueprint EBOOK: https://www.drdallasbragg.com/offers/o8qFhK5i/checkout

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Supplementary Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/denial
In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg opens the first installment of a five-part series exploring chemsex recovery through the lens of the five stages of grief. Drawing on his own lived experience, Dallas reframes the recovery journey as a process of allowing the old self to die in order to reveal the man who was always there beneath the addiction. This episode focuses on denial — the first and often darkest room men enter when confronting their relationship with meth and chemsex — and challenges the common impulse to treat it as a moral failing or a choice.
Dallas unpacks denial as a sophisticated survival mechanism, not a character flaw, explaining how the subconscious filters out unbearable truths to keep a person functioning. He walks listeners through the many quiet voices denial uses — comparison, minimization, rationalization — and shares a raw personal account of being evicted from his home while his mind refused to assemble the evidence in front of him. He distinguishes between the body's unavoidable truth-telling and the mind's persistent protection, and offers a compassionate call to action: you don't have to dismantle years of denial in a single afternoon — just let one truth in today. The episode closes with a preview of the next stage, anger, and reminds listeners that if they've made it this far, part of them is already ready to see.
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