In this personal‑help video, Dr. Dallas Bragg— a former crystal‑meth addict turned sobriety coach— explains why many gay men involved in chemsex repeatedly relapse and offers initial steps to break the cycle. He begins by describing the meth subculture slang ("Tina" for crystal meth and "Gina" for GHB) and how these drugs are used together in party‑and‑play (PNP) settings, noting his own experience of using GHB for its "love‑potion" effect. Bragg then outlines four core avoidance patterns that keep clients stuck in relapse: (1) unaddressed cravings, which he advises to "finish" by attaching negative memories to the craving; (2) suppressed emotions, which should be fully felt and expressed, e.g., through journaling; (3) intrusive thoughts, which reveal underlying self‑beliefs and can be neutralized by observing and writing them down; and (4) avoidance of difficult conversations, which erodes personal boundaries and leads to internal misalignment. For each, he offers brief practical tactics and promises deeper coverage in future videos. Throughout, he emphasizes confronting the underlying void of love and trauma that drives drug use. He promotes his six‑month one‑on‑one coaching program, "Recovery Alchemy," inviting viewers to apply for two open slots, and encourages comments and engagement to discuss personal avoidance issues.
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Okay, in this video I'm going to share with you 4 reasons why you are trapped in the relapse cycle and some beginning steps to break free. Hey, my name is Dr. Dallas Bragg. I'm a recovered crystal meth addict, now sobriety coach, and I share from my own experience in hopes of helping you break free from addiction as well. Speaking of crystal meth, do you know Tina? Tina is the street name meth is known for, primarily in the gay community. If you know Tina, then you also must know Gina. Gina stands for gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, or just G. These girls, Gina and Tina, are thick as thieves in the meth scene. Tina and Gina are often taken together during Parties with a capital T, which is where men who have sex with men get together for chemsex, which is getting high on these drugs and having sex for long periods of time. Gina is a downer to counteract the upper of Tina. It acts like kind of like a liquid ecstasy. I didn't take Gina for the downer though. In my active addiction, I took her because of the love potion effect she seemed to have on the men that I used with. The substance added really a sense of sensuality to the meth experience that was difficult to find otherwise, if you're familiar at all with the crystal meth scene in the community. So can you, can you relate to this so far? I help gay men break free from the grips of crystal meth so that they can become the best version of themselves. If you're interested in working with me one-on-one as your coach, simply click the link in the video description. All right, so back to Gina. Any guy who took her with me fell in love with me, and often that was really the only time in PNP party scene— PNP stands for party and play— that I could get affection. Gina experiences were when I was told things like, be my boyfriend, and, I think I love you. And being told I love you was actually my biggest fetish and turn-on. So if you can think about that, I was typically way out of place in a meth crowd where men were treated like objects. Typically, the popular turn-on in a crystal meth scene was the opposite, like, tell me what a bitch I am, or treat me like a piece of trash. One could really infer by my personal turn-on that It was born from a place of deep trauma. There was a void of love. I was not getting love like I wanted it. There was a void that I was avoiding. My guess is that you found your way into meth because of a void that you were avoiding as well. So how do we fill that void? By facing life head on. By not avoiding the work that needs to be done in recovery. So what is the work? In early recovery, everything's the work. So, but let me narrow this down here. Here are the 4 major avoids that I see in my clients that keep them in the relapse cycle. Number 1 is cravings. We cower in fear and we use cravings to embrace this victimhood mentality instead of taking control of their outcomes. There's gonna be more on this in a video coming next week. If you want to see more of my videos, just, Like and subscribe down below. So avoiding a craving means that we don't, what I call, finish it. So the subconscious gives us a craving, and then it's our responsibility at that point. But when it gives us the craving, it's not ours. It came— if you've had a craving, you know it can come at any time, spontaneously. It comes from the subconscious. But when it's given to us, then it's our responsibility. So we can finish that craving out by attaching negative memories from our active addiction to the craving so that our subconscious associates drug use with pain instead of benefit. But avoiding the craving allows it to grow, and often it becomes a relapse. Again, I help gay men locate this void and I equip them with the skills needed to fill this void on their own through my 6-month one-on-one coaching program. It's called Recovery Alchemy. That sounds something like something that you might be interested in, just click the link in the description and apply for opening slots. I have 2 coming up. So anyway, number 2, emotions. We desperately seek to feel better because we are taught not to show emotion. I don't know about you. I know when I was crying when I was little, my dad would say, stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about. Right? But those emotions, they become suppressed in the body and they, what I call, ferment in the psyche. So when we try to make ourselves feel better, which in that sense of feeling better would be, let me distract myself and let me Try to put music on, or let me ignore that this negative emotion and smother it with a positive emotion. Or look at the bright side, or the silver lining, and those kinds of things. And there's a place for that, but when we are feeling these emotions, instead of leaning into the emotion, we avoid it, which adds to the pressure of it. It suppresses it back down instead of expresses it. And when you do that, it's going to explode. Later. You can journal or you can speak, but allow the emotions to take over your body and they will crest like a wave. They come up. Allow them in. Really feel that emotion. Let it take over your body. And in only a few seconds, it will subside. When you're journaling, you're going to start writing, I feel angry and this is why. When you're journaling, that's also a way to express that emotion. Again, we're going to go into more of these in detail in future videos. So number 3, intrusive thoughts. So when we have intrusive thoughts, about ourselves, something like, I'm not skinny enough, I'm not hot enough, I'm not smart enough. When those come in, a lot of times we want to avoid them by switching our minds to happy thoughts, or we give in to the disempowerment energy that they bring. So we start to follow them in terms of, this is right. Like, I— because of the way that I feel about myself, I can't do recovery. I might as well relapse. Right. So instead, we want to observe them and to find their source. Be in the thought. Let them come all the way through their body, much like an emotion. So when you do that, there are messages within these intrusive thoughts that point out to the beliefs you have about yourself. Those beliefs are the source of your addiction. So what you want to do when those intrusive thoughts come in, just like the emotions, start writing them out. I am not pretty enough because blah, blah, blah, blah. And what this is is shadow work. When you allow those thoughts to fully develop, you're shining light on them, you're shining awareness of them. And when you shine a light and awareness on these intrusive thoughts, it takes their power away. But when you avoid them, they just, again, just like an emotion, they get suppressed and they ferment in the body. Number 4, we avoid difficult conversations. We aren't comfortable with discomfort because we haven't learned to regulate our nervous system. So in this, when we avoid difficult conversations, our boundaries suffer and so do our relationships, but mostly our relationship with ourselves. We say yes to going to the party when we really say no, or we won't tell that guy how we really feel about them, so we ghost them. Or we just won't speak our truth of how we feel and what we want, even down to what you want for dinner, right? All of this avoiding leads to internal misalignment with our authentic selves, and it leads to depression and unhappiness. So, did I leave any out? Leave a comment below with your thoughts on what I have to say, and is there something that you know that you're avoiding That's inhibiting your recovery process, and let's talk about it. I reply to all comments and all DMs. You know, talking about our addiction, voicing our needs, speaking our truth— this is all liberating. It's not easy, but it's liberating. But we're used to having all of these different personas out there. We have our drug self, our family self, our partner self, our work self, our friend self, you know, our sober self, and they're all vying for their life. They're all trying to hold on to Their existence. And so we're used to that spreading thin and not really knowing how we feel and not really dealing with our life head-on. So instead of being consistent with our authentic needs, we don't even know who our authentic self is. Avoiding creates more voids. These voids get filled with the most accessible temporary fix we know, and for us, that fix is crystal meth. All right, are you ready to work? I have 2 slots open this month for new clients. If you are interested in one-on-one coaching, click the link in the description to apply to be one of my clients, and in 6 months, your life could look a whole lot different than what it does right now. See you guys in the next one.
