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

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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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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.
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Supplemental Study Guide: https://www.recoveryalchemy.org/newsletters/blog/posts/intimacybegin
In this deeply personal episode of The AfterMeth Podcast, Dallas Bragg explores what intimacy truly means—and why it has nothing to do with sex. Joined by his close friend Thr33 (also known as Tucker, a therapeutic yoga instructor based in the Asheville area), Dallas traces the years-long evolution of their friendship as a living case study in building real connection. From their first awkward exchanges on a dating app to the moment Thr33 set an early, gentle boundary that Dallas initially read as rejection, the two unpack how vulnerability, repair, and commitment became the foundation of a bond that has reshaped how Dallas relates to himself and others. Dallas shares the raw story of sitting with a wave of jealousy and abandonment in the middle of a restaurant—letting the trigger move through his body rather than acting on it—and the profound breakthrough of lying beside a naked friend with clear, agreed-upon boundaries and no sexual expectation, finally understanding that someone wanted him simply for himself.
Throughout the conversation, Dallas and Thr33 offer a practical roadmap for gay men navigating sexual reintegration and the fear of sober intimacy after chemsex. They emphasize that intimacy is a practice, not a destination—built slowly through honest communication, clearly defined "containers," and the willingness to name a "charge" before resentment takes hold. Thr33 speaks to his journey from people-pleasing toward stating his needs up front, while Dallas reframes triggers as messages pointing toward growth rather than evidence that a relationship is failing. The episode lands on an encouraging invitation: intimacy doesn't have to begin with sex or a hookup. It can start with one hard, vulnerable conversation with a friend or family member—the first step in learning, as Dallas puts it, that "into me, you see."
Contact Thr33: 
Instagram: @tuck3r_yoga
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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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Dallas Bragg
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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/
The AfterMeth:
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Dallas Bragg
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Meth-Free Blueprint EBOOK: https://www.drdallasbragg.com/offers/o8qFhK5i/checkout