EP 3:58 Chemsex Recovery: Asking For Help

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 to the Aftermath Podcast. I'm your host, Dallas. Thank you for being here. There will be a supplemental study guide with every episode for right now. We are changing things up a little soon, announcement to be happening, but the Monday podcast will turn into a livestream podcast with availability for open Q&A after. So really excited about offering that, just figuring out the technology part, which Yes, I'm figuring out the technology part. So thank you for being here again. Did I say that already? Be, be sure to like, subscribe, and rate the podcast, please, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Really appreciate that because that gets it to the algorithm. The algorithm is getting it there. More and more and more people are coming to this podcast from ChatGPT and Claude. So thank you, artificial intelligence, for fueling the podcast. Appreciate that. But you, um, and there's your, there's your 5 minutes of fame. So, okay. Thank you. All right, let's go here. Um, let's talk about the words, I need help. Um, these are probably for most, um, gonna be very difficult, difficult 3 words that you say in recovery. Um, but they're also gonna be the most liberating. So for me, I was somebody who left home at 18, barely 18. I never asked my parents for anything, even when I was in high school. I paid, I bought my car, I paid for my insurance. I worked too much and bought everything I needed. I prided myself in taking care of my life. I wanted to prove, I wanted to prove to my family, I wanted to prove to the church, I wanted to prove to the bullies, to anybody in West Virginia that I was strong. I was a man and I was self-sufficient. Um, and I needed the world to know. That no matter how they tried to keep me down, I would always rise. I think some of that probably came through in my recovery too. But of course, you know, that pride kept me also in the closet for 36 years. It kept me trapped inside a life that wasn't mine, kept me struggling, and kept me dying inside. You know, I didn't wanna ask for help. I didn't wanna admit it. I didn't want anybody to know. So when it came to me and my relationship with meth, I finally had to wave the red flag. Red flag. Red flag too, but the white flag as well. Finally, surrender, right? That was really fucking hard for me. Vulnerability is never easy, but it is always freeing. So for clients that I work with who are high-functioning gay men, they're always excelling outwardly. And so asking for help often feels like admitting they're weak. Look, after all, we are men. Men in general don't like asking for help. That's a broad stroke, but it's proven. And they don't like talking about their feelings, right? But my guess is that they're also trying to prove something, just like I was. So look, not asking for help is— not asking for help is actually the weak, the weaker thing. It shows weakness to keep it all inside because it's the easy way out until it isn't. But it also keeps you in bondage. And like all other facets of recovery, this behavior of— Asking for help can be very valuable to your growth as a whole person. So today we're talking, we talking about silence, secrecy, containment, and really the importance of using your voice in chemsex recovery. So if you think about a friend who texts you, their name lights up on the screen, hey, been thinking about you. What is your answer? Your thumb might hover over a second before thinking about, should I tell them how I am? But you type, I'm good, crazy busy week, how are you? You know, that deflective type text. Like it's just deflection, choosing to remain in misery, just choosing to not ask, not tell. Don't ask, don't tell, right? But meanwhile, maybe you haven't been sleeping for 3 days. You've been scrolling in bed till 1:00 AM. That old number of that user buddy saved somewhere in your phone. It's been secretly calling out to you, but you're not telling anybody. And why aren't you honest? Maybe it is you don't wanna be a bother to your friend. Maybe they have their own problems, right? You don't wanna seem like an ongoing mess. Maybe this has been going on for years and you're like, you don't wanna talk about it anymore and you assume your friends don't either. Okay. Or are you holding it all in To give yourself a secret plan to use. There's that too, right? But what I see over and over is men who can't ask for help, they're usually, not all the time, but they're usually the one everyone else asks for help, right? He's gonna be the listener. He's the one that always shows up. He's the friend who remembers your birthday, checks in after your breakup. He's cool, chill, like he's the rock. He's very fluent at giving support. He's just not very fluent at receiving it. And where does that come from? Comes from a billion places. But for a lot of us, it goes back a long way, all the way to that secret spot from 0 to 7 years old, right? You grew up in a house maybe where needing something felt dangerous or wrong. You know, the safest thing for you to do is to be low maintenance, no trouble. You wanna be easy to love because the ones that are giving you that love, that security, that safety, maybe they told you things like you're too much or any other, or even neglect, or nobody talked about anything, right? My dad used to tell me, you need to be seen and not heard. I'm surprised it wasn't not seen and not heard, but maybe he did say that sometimes. And that worked for me. It kept me safe, right? But that costs me now. As an adult, it's gonna cost you. 'Cause underneath it is usually some version of, I am not enough. So for somebody who's a helper, it usually sounds in their mind like, my needs are too much. Or if they saw the real version of me, they'd probably leave. And then there's a sneakier piece to this. That's the meth part where all that extra niceness All that extra showing up for everybody, all that extra service is just a way of building up your credit. So if you are the reliable one, nobody's gonna ask you questions when you go quiet. Nobody's gonna go looking for you or assuming, or they even think, or it'd occur to them that something's wrong with you. That's an insidious way that meth can work. So we have to remember here, we talked about this a lot here, secrecy is the fuel. For chemsex, especially meth. A craving that you keep to yourself in the dark will slowly build a charge. It builds momentum. It graduates, right, to euphoric recall when you're thinking about it. Euphoric recall loves to grow in the darkness of your subconscious. Fantasy. And you begin to plan, and you think about some good time you had. Shame works that way too. Shame needs silence. Shame needs isolation. Shame needs secrecy to keep its grip on you. So when you put something into words, you're putting it into the light and the brain is gonna respond differently to that. It's cuz when you name a feeling out loud, it's going to turn down the emotional charge of that feeling. And oftentimes when you bring down the emotional charge of that feeling, it brings your brain back online. It interrupts that autopilot pattern you're in. So the thing you don't say, it gets to keep its power and that power grows. The thing you say out loud, that will begin to lose power. And you don't wanna discount this. Don't sleep on it, as the kids say. This is how it usually unfolds. So like first you, you don't say what you need. Mm-hmm. Somebody asks you how you are. You don't say that either. You're just saying, I'm fine. Then the craving shows up. You don't say that either. Then something happens that accelerates that craving and you don't say that. Each of those silence levels makes the next one even easier. Or you could say harder to make, to bring forth. It's like they, they stack. So I've come to believe after a lot of years of doing this work and a lot of years of doing work on me, that the using is rarely what does the lasting damage, right? It's the hiding it is. Hiding fuels your meth use. Hiding is how one night turns into a weekend, weekend turns into weeks. The people who love you cannot help you with something they don't know about, especially those who aren't familiar with chemsex. So one of my clients tried this. It was something that I'll tell you about. Whenever that subtle pull showed up, even the first fleeting thought to use, he would pick his phone up, turn the camera on himself, and say it out loud. It was kind of like the post-relapse video, but pre-relapse video. He said it out loud and exactly what he was thinking. He went into the details, the fantasy. This is what I'm planning. Right? This is what he wanted to do next. This is the person I wanna text. There wasn't any editing or keeping it silent, just saying it all out loud. And like the first time he did that, it felt very cringey and it's going to, very uncomfortable. But by the third time he did it, he would begin to hear how it was sounding. It was beginning to sound like ridiculous. And then by that fifth time or whatever, the craving was gone because you've expressed it. You've gotten it out of here, even if it's just to yourself. And think about this, that same phone that he used to hide on had now become the place where the craving died. It's reclamation. And that's the point. Using your voice, using your voice is a, it's like a muscle, especially if you're not used to asking for help. It has to be built over time and stretched. To build. So one trip to the gym's not gonna give you the body you need. One-time sharing isn't gonna be enough to shift over into, I'm an open book, total vulnerable, right? You have to build that muscle. And you're not— the thing that men get blamed for, and I've done it before, I've blamed men for this too, they're not silent because they're trying to be dishonest. They're silent because somewhere along the road somewhere, saying the truth brought them shame, brought them some kind of persecution, brought them something that said, I'm not enough. And it's that, and then it becomes self-rejection. So sometimes you're not saying it, not out of I'm lying, just, it's just so wrapped up in trauma and shame that the part of you who was honest caused trouble at some times, at some point. So you rejected it, you shoved it down, and it became a shadow. And shadows operate in the background subconsciously. We've done a lot of podcasts on that. You will be dishonest oftentimes without even considering it. It's just natural. And at some point you experience that feeling of having made everything worse. By opening your mouth. That's another reason why. It's stored in your body. Your body says, don't be honest. I'm trying to protect you. Remember last time? Or whenever it was. There are 100 other scenarios. Look, there's 1,000 scenarios. And maybe you grew up in a family where you were told that you were too much or too dramatic or your feelings didn't matter. It didn't care. Don't bother me with it, right? That's how shame gets built too, because you're rejecting the parts of yourself. And shame is what keeps that silence going. It takes the grip. It keeps a grip on it. So I also see men shut down because of recovery groups who made them feel even more shame for continuing to use or making the same mistakes. I can't believe you're doing that. And they get— at some point, that walk of shame they have to do becomes so unbearable that they hide it. They sit there and lie about their days or they don't come back. So let's talk about how we can create this safe container. With your recovery team. And even if your recovery team in this case is just one person. All right. So number one is set the container first. So before you tell them what's going on, you want to tell them how you need them to receive it. You can say something like, before I say this, I need you to know something about how to hear it, how to receive it. I'm going to share something very vulnerable. 'Cause sometimes people that don't understand addiction or especially chemsex, you tell 'em I'm having a craving, they fucking panic. They panic. And when they panic, it makes you panic, right? So you tell them that maybe you're gonna, might hear some things here that sound shocking to you, but please do not react right away. Don't try to fix it for me. Don't try to tell me what to do. Don't look scared. Just stay with me. Can you do that? So sometimes this could be over text. Sometimes it could be over FaceTime if you're looking at them, Right? If you're telling them. And even over text, people can still, you know, express dramatically. But you're just asking for one thing, that they don't make a face or they don't react, right? Because if they do flinch or grimace or whatever, or gasp, you know, or panic, or start to tell you what the solution should be, your brain may read that as proof that you should never have said anything in the first place. That's the shame. And shame is what's gonna send you right back into hiding and isolation. All right, number 2, tell them what a flinch does. A flinch, a grimace, a reaction. I've had a lot of men come to my program who try to tell their therapist something about chemsex and they got a reaction on their face. They were done. Look, when these people do flinch, they're not trying to be cruel. They're not trying to be dramatic. They just don't know. So tell them, like prepare them. Look, if you react in a big way, I'm going to shut down. I'm going to wish I hadn't said it and I'm not going to come back to you. This is how this works for me. So I need you to keep your face calm. I need you to stay calm, even if what I'm saying is a lot for you. And many people can do this if they are prepared for it. Many people want to help you. They just don't know how. This is again, you becoming the executive of your recovery. You charge of it, you training those people around you. They don't understand that some slight facial expression can make you scurry away in early recovery, right? And when you first started doing this. All right. So tell them what helps instead. Give them an option, right? Give 'em something to do because don't react. You know, it's too vague a little bit. They're not gonna know what that means. So you could say something like, if you want to help While I'm talking, maybe you can say something like, thank you for telling me, or, that must feel difficult, right? Those 2 things will keep you talking. Advice will stop me. Advice will stop me. There is nothing worse than unsolicited advice. I'm telling you, in my world, I don't know about you, I fucking hate unsolicited advice. If I need advice, I'll ask for it. This is the rule that I have with my kids. They do not ask me for advice. Unless they want it. I do not give them advice unless they ask, period. This has been the same way since they were teenagers because there's— I'm wasting my breath, right? They're gonna do what the fuck they're gonna do. But if they ask me for advice, that means they're looking for it and they're open to receive. All right, anyway, rabbit trail. You can also tell them, if all else fails, you don't know what to say, ask me a question. Or how can I support you? Or something like that, right? Or tell them it's okay for you to say, I don't know what to say here, but I'm here for you. That's good enough too. All right, the next one is tell them how— tell them why you're telling them. Tell them why you're telling them. This is— so it might be a little difficult to say. It might be a little too vulnerable for you, but I do feel it's necessary when you're ready. You can say something like, I'm telling you this. Because you're the person I trust with it, and I need you to know how to hold it in this container. So don't, please don't take away the one place I feel I can be honest. People will rise to the occasion if they feel they're being needed. People wanna help you. So frame it in a way and frame it that way, right? And it stops sounding like this list of demands. This is— this stops sounding like you're trying to be bossy and high maintenance. I trust you with this. I need this container. I'm asking you, right? All right. Number 5, give them a way to come back to you. So because this container has to work over time, you can also say, if I shut down anyway, no matter what you do, I might go quiet anyway. That is not me punishing you. That is not me running. That's just me protecting myself. I'm protecting myself because this is like walking through a fucking landmine field and anything in me feels like it might explode at any minute. If you notice I go quiet, just say, you know what? You don't have to tell me everything. Just know I'm not going anywhere. One little text is fine. That will bring me back. And look, you can tailor these, tailor these to yourself. And the same thing for the person on the other end, right? If somebody, you can tell if you're listening and you're the loved one, Or you wanna tell somebody else, if somebody you love is struggling and you want them to be able to talk to you, then you can say something like this. Like, you can tell me the hard stuff. I won't fall apart. I won't lecture you and I won't make it weird. And even if I get quiet, all that means is I'm thinking, but I am not judging you. I am doing the best I can with what I have. Right? That's how you build a vulnerable, strong container that does not lead to shame. It's not hoping the other person knows how to hold it and then bitching when they don't, right? This is you being very clear about boundaries. By saying the true thing, you're saying all this out loud and saying how to receive it. So here's 5 ways. To say it out loud, by the way. So you don't have to do all of these. You can just pick one. But here's some advice. Say what you need. So you begin this by asking for very small needs. If it's a struggle for you, if it literally hurts your body to ask, say what you need, start very small. This is how you build the muscle. You start with a little weight. Right? So that the muscle builds over time. You're starting small so that when the needs get more urgent, it's going to be easier for you. It's not a heavy lift. What do you need today? Maybe it's a hug. Who could you ask? What's stopping you from asking for a hug? I don't know. Maybe it's actually speaking up about what you want to eat for dinner, right? Okay. Next, say how you are. So the next time somebody asks, how are you doing? Give something that is a little more true than I'm fine. Something. You wanna move beyond I'm okay, I'm fine today, and then deflecting back to them. Give a little more detail, something that feels just a teeny bit more uncomfortable, but doesn't shock your system. All right. So say the craving. Name it out loud. Okay? You can when that craving comes up, if you're not ready to say it to somebody else, say it to your phone. Say it to yourself. Say it out loud. I'm in it right now. I'm I am experiencing a craving. That's enough sometimes. That window of that craving building is very small because the craving. Is a thought. A thought is energy. That energy will grow quickly if added more energy, more panic, more thoughts. We wanna take the charge out of it. So as soon as you have a fleeting feeling to use or plan to use, get it out of your body as soon as possible. Okay. Say what happened. If you use, tell somebody within 24 hours of that use or when you can. Tell people right away, not at your scheduled call with them or not when you're going to see your therapist. Once you've pulled yourself together enough in the comedown, the sooner the better. The sooner it's one night instead of the start of a binge. Tell on yourself. And also say this to somebody who is trained, who won't react, who won't do the flinching. The wrong listener, untrained, is going to make this worse. Pick somebody who can hear the real version without falling apart and without telling you how to fix it without being asked. And if you're not sure how to ask for that, use some of these words I gave you, some of these scenarios, right? And then, and tailor it to yourself. But you wanna ask before you're in the middle of euphoric recall, because then, then you're not gonna ask, right? Listen, you don't have to tell everybody everything right away. You can start with one sentence to one person. Once a week. So the next time somebody texts you, that light comes up on your screen, and you're feeling like shit. You know what you'd normally type? How about something that's a little more true? I am not okay. And you can even say, "I don't want to go into detail." I love you, but I am not okay right now. There is something about this culture right now where it's not okay to be not okay. You have to be fucking Pollyanna all the time. And you're not going to be that way in chemsex recovery. Your emotions are all over the place. Your brain is scrambling to heal. You're exhausted all the time. You're trying not to use, and that's a big bulk of your energy every day. You are not going to be okay sometimes. But you need, you need a space where you can say that. You need a nonjudgmental space where it's safe, psychologically safe to say, I am not okay. Not feel shame about it, not feel guilt about it, not have somebody fucking go crazy. And go and make it all worse, right? Now, you may have to ask for somebody. If not okay means you have a text ready to send to the dealer or something like that, you may have to ask for somebody to come over, or you may have to ask them to have you over. All of that, everything that I've ever said, yes. But sometimes it's okay to say, I am not okay. And that could be one step closer to you being more transparent, more honest, and asking Asking for help. 'Cause the next text, the next time could be, I'm not okay. Could you help me? Could you support me? Could you talk to me? Could you come over right now? Some of you, asking for that feels like fucking torture. But you have— you can't go from where you are to that overnight. All right. Hope that helps. Love you guys. Have a great week. Bye. Week.