EP 3:22 Chemsex Recovery: Bargaining Stage
22 Jun 2026 · 20 min
In this solo episode of the Aftermeth Podcast, host Dallas Bragg explores the bargaining stage of the five‑stage grief model as it applies to chemsex recovery. He defines bargaining as the mind’s attempt to negotiate a compromise with addiction after moving through denial and anger, describing it as the most dangerous and deceptive stage because it feels rational. Bragg outlines common self‑deceptive narratives—such as “I can use only on weekends,” “I’m different from other users,” or “I’ll stay in the community without the drug”—and explains how these bargains create a false sense of control while keeping the individual vulnerable to relapse. He shares personal anecdotes of his own bargaining attempts over three and a half years of meth use, illustrating how each “rule” collapsed when the substance re‑entered the body. The episode warns that bargaining can persist covertly even when outward recovery behaviors appear successful, especially when the person remains embedded in the chemsex social ecosystem. Bragg offers concrete strategies to break the bargaining loop: naming the bargains aloud, writing them down, declaring no exceptions to oneself and to a trusted witness, and performing a physical ritual (e.g., closing a door) to cement the decision. He emphasizes that confronting bargaining is necessary to move into the next grief stage—depression and eventual surrender—while acknowledging that depression will be the hardest phase. The episode concludes with a call to listeners to engage with the supplemental study guide, share the podcast, and reach out for feedback.
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Chemsex, sexualized drug use among men who have sex with men, typically involving methamphetamine, mephedrone, and GHB, among others. Chemsex misuse is a worldwide epidemic that needs attention, dialogue, and hope for those lost in it, which is the purpose of the Aftermeth Podcast. Please note the views expressed by the host and guests on this podcast are not to be taken as medical advice, and the content around sex and drug use can be triggering. All right. Welcome back to the Aftermath Podcast and this solo episode. Don't forget that there is a supplemental study guide that goes along with this episode. The link is in the show notes. Please remember to like, subscribe, and rate the podcast. Share it on your social media if you can. I don't really see a lot of that. So we can get the algorithm to place it in the ears and the eyes of those who need it most. All right. I hope you are enjoying this series on the 5 stages of grief. As they relate to chemsex recovery. So we've walked through denial, we've walked through anger, and as you begin to move through these stages, you're going to feel a shift. So that filter that we talked about in denial has loosened, your rage has softened and quieted, and you are seeing more clearly than you were. So Especially, especially while deep in the denial stage, you are pretty much blinded. Now you're kind of being enlightened. And now your mind, that same mind that built the denial in the first place, is going to make you one last offer. It's like a game show. You can have a chemsex-free life here, or what's behind door number 1? What's behind that door is called bargaining. This is the most dangerous stage in the grief of chemsex recovery. And it's not because it feels the worst, because it's not going to. It actually feels the most reasonable. That's what makes it dangerous. So bargaining is where most relapses live. Bargaining can get us stuck in a loop of trying to find solutions other than the ones in front of us. Bargaining to me is a measure of how well you lie to yourself. You manipulate yourself, right? You gaslight yourself. The conversation in your head during this stage can be a great reflection of what has kept you in chemsex misuse in the first place. This is the perfect time to observe, And take notes of the conversation that happens up here. So let's take a deep dive into bargaining. Okay? What bargaining actually is, is part of the grief where your mind, finally accepting that something has to change, tries to negotiate the terms. So this is the ingrained pattern fighting for its life, right? This is the pattern of addiction saying, I need life. I need to stay. I need to stay here. I need to stay here. I'm gonna do what I can. To live. So you have moved through enough denial to admit there's a problem. You have moved through enough anger to feel the cost of what you're giving up, but you are not ready to let it all go. So your mind, in a final act of self-preservation, offers you a deal. Maybe you can keep some of it. Maybe not everything has to change. Maybe there's a version of you who can have one foot in the scene and one foot in your new life. Maybe the rules of Consequence and chemistry do not apply to you the way they apply to other guys. Maybe you can be the exception. That is bargaining. So it is the search for a loophole. It is the attempt to keep some piece of chemsex identity while cherry-picking parts of your new identity. It is your mind terrified of full surrender, trying to broker a peace treaty between the old life and the new one. And it's gonna feel a little bit desperate, right? But listen, there cannot be a peace treaty here. That is the part you have not learned yet. The old life and the new life cannot coexist. They are mutually exclusive operating systems. You cannot run both at the same time. That's what causes buffering, right? Too much capacity, too much in the bandwidth. But your mind does not believe that yet. So it spends this stage running every possible scenario, looking for the exception. And during that search— You are exquisitely vulnerable to relapse. So how did bargaining show up for me as we walk through these stages? I'm gonna tell you. I was in the bargaining from pretty much day one, right? To be honest, I called my sister after my first use and I told her I had used meth. And I distinctly recall I was standing in the backyard minimizing her concern and I assured her, look, I can do this once in a while. It wasn't that bad. It was great, right? I bargained with Tina for the full 3 and a half years that I used full-time. And after my first attempts at stopping, after I had moved through denial about the severity of my use, after I had raged at everyone and everything, I came up against this voice that would not be quiet, right? The voice that said, you are different. You are white and privileged. You can handle this. Other guys cannot, but you can. You're an executive. You're a professor. You have learned enough. You have grown enough. You can use this the way it was meant to be used, like I see other guys using it. I tried every variation. I tried using only once a month. I tried using only on vacation. I tried using only with one specific person. I tried using only on certain holidays. I tried using only with certain rules, right? No injection. Yeah, right. No more than a certain amount. Yeah, right. No more than a certain number of hours. Yeah, right. I tried using Only after I had been sober for a certain number of weeks, as if accumulated sobriety, you know, somehow earned me like a free pass. But none of that worked. Every single one of those bargains ended the same way, either immediately in a session that blew through every rule I had set, or very slowly in a creeping escalation that within weeks or months had me right back where I started, usually worse. Tina always wins the negotiation every single time. The bargain looks reasonable on paper, but it cannot survive contact with the substance itself. The moment the substance enters your body, the rules dissolve. The mind that made the bargain is no longer in the room. A different mind is, and that mind has only one rule. Which is more, more, more. Look, I'm not saying this to shame myself or to scare you. I say this because I want you to understand that the bargaining stage is not a phase you pass through quickly. If you are not paying attention, you can be walking in a, a autopilot mode this whole time. It's a phase that will quietly extend itself for as long as you let it. It will let you call it recovery. It will let you tell yourself you are doing work and underneath it will keep negotiating behind the scenes. So here are the voices you might hear, right? Like denial. Bargaining speaks in a vocabulary that sounds very reasonable. So I want you to listen for this. It sounds like if I just stay friends with these guys but do not use, I can keep the community. The community is really what I wanted. The chemicals, eh, that's incidental. It sounds like if I just see my dealer one more time to say goodbye, I really like him. He's a good guy. I wanna give it closure to end things cleanly. I can keep my word and be done with it. It sounds like if I just go to one party sober to prove to myself I have control, then I know I'm free. Then I will know not need to do this again. The proof is in the point, right? The proof is the point. It sounds like If I can use just on weekends, just on special occasions, just when I'm traveling, just when I'm with a certain person, just under certain conditions, then I can keep the parts I loved without paying the full price. It sounds like if I can be one of those guys who has it under control, who can take it or leave it, who uses recreationally without becoming the man I was, then I do not have to give it up. I don't have to give up. Right? Because this felt so alive. This was my life, right? Remember, it's gonna be all these voices. And it sounds like if I just take a break, maybe for a month, 6 months, a year, and then come back, my body will have reset. I will be able to handle it then. Wrong. It also sounds like other guys cannot do it, but I'm different. I have done the work. I have grown. I have insight now that I did not have before. That insight will protect me. Every one of these sentences and everything like it is a trap. Every one of those sentences sounds like wisdom. It's actually still some denial. This is the part of bargaining that a lot of men will miss. They think bargaining is obvious, that they'll recognize it, that it sounds desperate or it sounds pathetic, but it does not. Bargaining sounds mature. It sounds measured. It sounds like a man who has done the work and earned the right to a more nuanced relationship with crystal meth, monkey dust, or mephedrone. There is no nuanced relationship available here. That is the lie at the heart of every bargain. So let's look at this. Underneath all the specific bargains is a single underlying belief, the belief that you specifically can find a loophole. This belief is one of the most stubborn structures in the addicted mind. It outlasts denial. It outlasts anger. It will outlast bargaining too, unless you confront it directly. The belief says, "I am different. The rules apply to other men, but I have an exception to my case. I have studied this. I have suffered enough. I have done the inner work. I have changed. The man who cannot use again." But I am no longer that man. I am somebody new. The new man can have a different relationship with the substance. This is the most seductive lie that your addicted mind will tell you. And the longer you stay chemsex-free without dealing with it directly, the more convincing it gets. Because here is the cruel paradox. The longer you are chemsex-free, The more your body recovers, the more your life rebuilds, the more confidence you accumulate, the more your mind begins to believe that you have somehow earned the right to use again safely. You have not. Sobriety does not earn you a future relationship with the substance. Sobriety earns you a future, period. They're not the same thing. Every man who has tried to test the loophole has discovered that the loophole was never real. It was a story his mind was telling him because his mind could not bear the finality of complete release. The mind would rather imagine a flexible future than accept that closed door. But the door has to close. That is the whole work of this stage, closing the door on the negotiation, letting your mind grieve the loophole it cannot ever have. There is a specific form. Of bargaining that is the most dangerous of all because it disguises itself as healthy recovery behavior. Looks like this. You stay meth-free. You do not use. You go to your meetings or your sessions or your coaching. You journal. You exercise. You look from the outside like a man doing all the right things, but underneath, you are still in the scene. You are still texting the guys. You are still on the apps having the conversations. You are still going to the same bars where you used to meet, used to meet guys for sessions. You are still hanging out with the dealer, even if you say it's just to catch up. You are still in conversation, in proximity, in orbit. You have not actually left, even if it's mentally. You tell yourself you are practicing. You tell yourself you are learning to be in those spaces. You're testing yourself. You tell yourself you are demonstrating your strength. You tell yourself the people in your life still I need you. You tell yourself, it would be cruel to cut off my dealer and my friends. What you are actually doing is bargaining. You are trying to keep the world of chemsex intact, minus the chemical. You are trying to be the man who belonged to that scene without the cost of belonging. You are paying the social dues without taking the substance. But listen, that is not going to hold. The scene is the chemical. Your relationships is the chemical. The chemical is the scene. They are not separable. The men in your phone are not separable from what you did with the men in your phone. The places are not separable from what happened in those places. The rituals are not separable from the substance that created the rituals. If you are meth-free but still inside the ecosystem, you are not in recovery. You are in the antechamber of relapse because you are bargaining. The hardest part of this stage is letting go of your community, letting go of the guys, letting go of the places, the apps, the rhythms, and most of all, the rituals. If you're somebody who does it in, has solo chemsex, if you go and isolate yourself, that ritual is very important to you. Because the chemical was easy compared to the world that it came with. The chemical was the surface. The community was the depth. The ritual was the depth. And grief, real grief, is going to ask you to release the depth of everything, not just the surface. So almost every relapse I have witnessed in my work as a coach lives here. In the bargaining stage. The relapse does not come from a man who is still in denial. He's too numb to make a clear decision. The relapse does not come from a man who is still in anger. He's too volatile, but he is also too aware of what he's angry at, right? The relapse comes from the man who has accepted the problem, processed the rage, and is now quietly running scenarios in his mind that are subconscious. The man who is telling himself he has earned the right to test a theory, the man who is engineering a situation where the use will look accidental, situational, justifiable. He meets up with an old friend, right? He tells himself it's just to catch up. He goes to a place, he stays a little too long. The friend offers, he hesitates, he uses. Then he tells himself that this was not really a relapse. This was just a one-time thing. It's a slip. He's still in recovery. This does not change anything, right? That's what you're telling yourself. But it does change everything because you're still one foot in that world and one foot in the other. Because once the door has been reopened even slightly, the bargaining has confirmed its own thesis. It grows in strength. The mind says, see, you can do this. It was not that bad. Look, we're okay. And then the next session is closer, and the session after that is closer still. And within weeks or months, the architecture you spent so long building has collapsed. This is why bargaining has to be confronted directly, not waited out, not assumed to resolve itself. Confronted. You have to make a conscious decision in writing with witnesses, That no exceptions exist. You are chemsex-free or you're chemsex-free with caveats. The door has to close. You have to not audition for a flexible future with the substance. You have heard your mind's offer and now you're officially declining it. And until you do that, you're not gonna move into the next stage. You are still here in bargaining. And stage 3, the bargaining stage, is where men tend to disappear. They go off track. So bargaining is the longest stage for a lot of you. It can stretch out for months or years if it's not confronted directly. It can hide inside what looks like successful recovery. It can lay dormant. It can survive intact even while you appear to be doing all the right things. Based on your ability to compartmentalize or even disassociate from your authentic self, this voice can whisper in the background for a very long time. The way out of bargaining is to not argue with your mind. Your mind will win that argument. Your mind has been running negotiations with you longer than you have been conscious of them. You cannot outthink the part of you that has built the bargains in the first place. The way out is to declare, not in your head, out loud to another person, in writing with finality inside your heart, except there is no loophole. There is no exception. There is no version of this where you get to keep any of it. Close the door. When you say that, And you mean it, something in you will break. That breaking is the doorway into depression, which is where we're going next. Depression is the hardest stage to write about because, yeah, it's the stage where the temptation to use is the strongest and the fewest tools seem to be working. It's that stage where you feel hopeless, helpless. But depression is also where the actual surrender happens. And surrender, total surrender, we're not there yet, is the threshold to your new life. So for now, look at the bargains, name them out loud, write them down, close the door, like physically close the door as a ritual if you want. Let it hurt inside. It's time to go. It's time to stop. You're doing the work. This work can feel brutal. The work is also the only thing that's going to set you free. All right? I hope this helps. If you have any comments, suggestions, feedback, you can comment on Spotify, you can comment on YouTube, or you can DM me directly on any social media platform. I'm everywhere at all times. All right? See you next week.
