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/grief
In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas makes the case that recovery from chemsex is unlike recovery from any other addiction because what's being left behind isn't just a substance — it's an identity, a community, a culture, and a hard-won sense of freedom from the weight of being a gay man in a world that demands so much. Walking away means grieving the version of yourself who found shameless pleasure, kink, connection, and escape inside that life, even as that same life began to cost more than it gave. To help men name what they're moving through, Dallas maps the recovery journey onto Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — sharing his own raw experiences of each, from standing on the street after being evicted in a fog of denial, to the white-hot anger turned on the people who loved him most, to the bargaining with Tina that always ended the same way.
Dallas walks listeners through what each stage actually sounds and feels like in the chemsex recovery context: the minimizing self-talk of denial, the righteous fury of anger, the loophole-hunting of bargaining (which so often masquerades as relapse), the crushing finality of depression, and finally the quiet power of acceptance — the moment you stop keeping one foot in the doorway and fully step into the 2.0 version of yourself. He reminds listeners that grief doesn't move in a straight line, that camping out in one stage or spiraling between them is normal, and that simply noticing where you're living right now is itself the beginning of moving through it. This episode kicks off a deeper series, with future episodes unpacking each stage in depth alongside practical tools for processing what arises. A supplemental study guide is linked in the show notes.

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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/shadow
In this Season 3 episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg sits down with Jamie Willis — a Gestalt therapist, clinical specialist in chemsex, addiction, and LGBTQ+ mental health, and the former manager of London's Antidote service who was published in the British Medical Journal in 2015 calling for chemsex to be recognized as a public health issue. With 22 years of frontline practice spanning London, Northern Thailand, Uganda, and Malaysia, Jamie brings a rare depth of lived and clinical experience to a topic Dallas has been waiting to feature: Jungian shadow work. Together they cut through the TikTok-era misconceptions of shadow work as something "spooky" or "evil," reframing it instead as the internal repository where we exile the parts of ourselves — femininity, rage, neediness, masculinity, sexuality — that were shamed, invalidated, or forbidden as we grew up. As Jamie explains, those exiled parts don't disappear; they lead a semi-autonomous life of their own and quietly drive behavior, including the very patterns that show up inside chemsex.
The conversation moves through the practical mechanics of doing this work safely — why shadow exploration requires ritual, containment, and aftercare; how therapy, art, group work, and even structured kink communities can serve as containers; and why "shame dies on exposure" when these parts are finally met with curiosity instead of contempt. Dallas and Jamie examine how projection and projective identification reveal the shadow in everyday life, how emasculation and internalized rejection often hide beneath chemsex behavior, and why the goal is never to kill the shadow but to invite it back into relationship. The episode closes on one of the most powerful reframes Dallas offers on the show: that having lived through chemsex is not a sentence of brokenness but a rare starting point — an opportunity for self-knowledge that most people walk through life never accessing. For anyone curious about shadow work, this is an episode to rewind, slow down, and listen to twice.
Contact Jamie: 
Jamie Willis
http://www.jamiewilliscounselling.com 
Mbl/WhatApp: +44 (0) 7579 819217
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-willis-4b234620b/
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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/amends
In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg explores what he calls "next level amends" — a practice that goes beyond the traditional apology process to address the deeper beliefs driving our conflicts and resentments. Drawing from his own lived experience, Dallas shares the story of a former restaurant manager named Kyle, whom he despised for being "arrogant," only to discover through Byron Katie's The Work that Kyle was a mirror reflecting Dallas's own unexamined arrogance.

This realization became a turning point, illustrating the alchemical principle that nothing in our outer world is wasted — every trigger, every conflict, every difficult person is raw material for transformation, holding up a mirror to the parts of ourselves we haven't been willing to face.
Dallas walks listeners through the practical framework used in his Foundations group coaching program, guiding them through Byron Katie's four questions and the powerful turnaround process that reveals how the people who hurt us are often pointing us toward the ways we've been hurting ourselves. 

He emphasizes that real freedom in recovery comes not from white-knuckling distance from a substance, but from becoming integrated and whole — making amends with our own shadow parts so that our changed presence becomes the apology. For anyone caught in cycles of resentment, replaying old conversations, or finding the same painful dynamics resurfacing under different faces, this episode offers a compassionate roadmap for transmuting conflict into self-knowledge and lasting peace. 
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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/ACE
In this episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas sits down with Kit Morgan, LCSW — a licensed clinical social worker and creator of The Liberated Porch — for an unflinching conversation about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their direct line to chemsex and methamphetamine dependency. 

Kit, who specializes in religious trauma-informed therapy for queer people, opens by sharing his lived experience as a queer trans man who grew up in fundamentalist Baptist environments, offering language like "stealth" and reflections on embodiment that broaden the podcast's ongoing commitment to diverse voices. 

From there, the conversation moves into the heart of ACE work: how early emotional neglect, unmet attachment needs, and pre-verbal experiences of abandonment lay the neurological groundwork for the "skin hunger," pleasure deprivation, and intimacy starvation that meth so effectively — and tragically — counterfeits. Dallas and Kit dismantle the moral-failing model of addiction, reframing relapse as a signal pointing toward unhealed wounds rather than evidence of personal weakness, and emphasize that shame is what got us into addiction, not what gets us out.
Listeners will walk away with concrete tools, including Kit's "60 days of gentleness" protocol — a deliberate detox from high-impact activities like intense BDSM dynamics, punishing workouts, or chronic overwork, replaced by pleasure-receiving experiences, nourishing food, rest, and safe non-sexual touch. The conversation also explores meaning-making as a core component of sustained recovery, the difference between releasing resentment and forcing forgiveness, and alternatives to journaling like the empty-chair exercise for processing childhood neglect. 

Dallas shares a deeply vulnerable personal moment about a non-sexual cuddle experience that broke open decades of touch deprivation, modeling the kind of healing intimacy that becomes possible when we slow down and let safe people in. Whether you're newly sober, deep into shadow work, or supporting someone you love, this episode is a reminder that recovery isn't just about putting down the substance — it's about finally tending to the child inside who never got held.
Find Kit here:
TikTok, Substack, and YouTube: @theliberatedporch
Website: http://www.theliberatedporch.com
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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/sobers**x

In this solo episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg confronts one of the most common struggles men face in chemsex recovery: the belief that sober sex is somehow broken, vanilla, or impossible to enjoy. Rather than validating that fear, Dallas reframes it entirely — the issue isn't that sobriety took something away, it's that the ruler being used to measure sex was rigged from the start. He traces how pornography carved neural pathways oriented toward performance, how hookup apps turned intimacy into a transactional marketplace, and how the queer community's hard-won fight for sexual freedom has, over time, calcified into a new kind of obligation. What gets called liberation, he argues, often functions as conformity to a script written by industries that profit from disconnection.

From there, Dallas invites listeners into a different question altogether: what if good sex has nothing to do with duration, positions, or intensity, and everything to do with presence, safety, vulnerability, and being fully oneself? He names the uncomfortable truth that much of the sex people mourn losing in recovery wasn't intimacy at all — it was dissociation wrapped in intensity, ego wrapped in orgasm, conquest masquerading as connection. The episode closes with a reflective prompt for the week: what would sex and intimacy look like if you stopped trying to meet anyone's expectations, including your own? It's a grounded, shame-free challenge to stop following someone else's map and begin drawing one's own — where real desire, real presence, and real connection actually live.
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