Dallas Bragg describes his chemsex addiction and the internal "bad boy" part that craved secrecy and risk. He argues that suppressing this part in recovery backfires, and instead proposes channeling that need for edginess into safe outlets that don't involve drugs.
My early days of Chemsex were so exciting for me because I would be out at 4 AM making a drug deal, doing all the things, and then by 9 AM I would be standing in front of a board making a presentation in an executive boardroom with a cock ring and a jockstrap on underneath my suit, and it felt invigorating. It felt alive. It felt like I could feel something that made life so spicy, right? Until it brought my entire world down and there was no spice left. What happens with high-performing gay men in this situation is that there is a part of you— it's a bad boy part— it wants the thrill. It wants that Secretiveness, that seediness. You just imagine him in like this black leather smoking a cigarette, you know, and just fucking all the guys and doing everything you want to do. And, you know, it, it adds something to your life that you don't have already. That part of you gets ridiculed, it gets judged, it gets hated, it gets blamed, it gets so mistreated in recovery. We call it the bad guy. When it's just a part of you. The reason you stay in the cycle of relapse is you keep demonizing and vilifying that part of you. And the more you try to isolate him, the more you try to keep him quiet and lock him away in the closet, and you think recovery means he can't ever come out again. Wrong. And the more you keep him locked away, the more he's going to want to get out. What you want to do is find other ways to be racy, to be edgy, to, to have that wild side fulfilled. Give him something. Give him what he wants, but in a new way. All he knows is crystal meth and chemsex. All he knows is that. So give him a new But totally avoiding him and saying he's the enemy and he's doing push-ups in the parking lot, the monkey on my back, and, you know, all these like negative ways of viewing him— the more you do that, the more defensive he's going to get, and the more he's going to try harder and harder and harder to come out and get his needs met. You're just putting fuel on the fire when you take a negative stance stance against the part of you that just wants to have a little fun. So I want you to really consider this today. If it resonates with you, tell me in the comments, what are some ways you can give that bad boy something bad that isn't meth?
