Meth’s Shame Cycle (How to Escape)

Hey there, Dr. Dallas Bragg here, recovery coach for gay men who want to break free from the addictive patterns of crystal meth and live their best and highest life. Today we're talking about breaking free from the approval addiction and specifically meth's shame cycle. That's a tongue twister. And how to interrupt the cycle. If you feel trapped in the cycle of shame and external validation, keep watching till the end of the video. On this channel, you're gonna find lots of resources to help you break free from Tina and attain your best and highest self. Also, don't forget to look for my podcast. It's called The Aftermath Podcast here on this channel as well. I drop a long-form video just like this every Saturday, so please turn on the notification bell so you don't miss any and subscribe to the channel. By the way, if you're interested in my one-on-one coaching program, it's called Recovery Alchemy. The link to apply is in the show notes. Through weekly one-on-one sessions, weekly group sessions, and daily accountability, your life could look much differently in 6 months than it does right now. So today is part 2 of a 4-part series. You can find the link to part 1 in the show notes. The 4-part series is called Breaking Free from the Approval Trap. So next week, we're going to explore how our client Marcus learns to work with his need for validation instead of against it. Today, we're ...about his story. He's the perfect gay son. Marcus was 8 years old when he learned that love comes with conditions. Might sound familiar to you. His mother had just finished bragging to her sister about his report card. Straight A's, perfect attendance, teacher's favorite, right? Marcus is such a good boy. You know, she beamed into the phone. She's smiling, she's looking at him, her hands running through his hair with all this affection. He never gives us any trouble. But later that same week, when Marcus came home crying because kids at school called him a pansy for not liking sports, his mother's warmth and affection evaporated. Stop being so sensitive, she said, turning back to her television. Boys don't cry over something like that. That also might sound familiar. But that night, during that time, that one little 30-second comment, 8-year-old Marcus made a decision that would shape the rest of his life, especially the next 24 years of it. I am only lovable when I'm perfect. I feel safe only when people approve of me. So he didn't have the words, of course, for it then, but his nervous system had just learned the most dangerous lesson a child could learn. That is, his worth was conditional on his performance. So let's look at this prison that Marcus is in. What Marcus experienced is not unique. Actually, it's an epidemic among the queer population. Most of us who struggle with approval addiction can trace it back to childhood and moments exactly like that one, where we learned that love, safety, and belonging— are conditional on being what others wanted us to be. In our Recovery Alchemy program, we call this the decomposition phase. That's breaking down the stories that built our prison so we can understand why we're so desperate for validation. Because here's the truth, you weren't born needing everybody's approval to feel okay about yourself. That desperation was taught to you. So let me show you how this typically unfolds, because understanding your origin story is very crucial to you breaking free. So there's 3 foundations of approval addiction. Foundation 1 is emotional neglect. Most parents aren't intentionally cruel, right? Marcus's mother was not evil. She was overwhelmed. She was probably carrying her own unhealed approval addiction. But what Marcus needed was someone who could see his emotional world And validate it. It sounds like those kids really hurt your feelings. That must have been hard. What kind of change could it have made in Marcus's life if his mother had responded that way? Instead, he learned that his emotions were inconvenient, his sensitive— sensitivity was wrong, that he needed to perform happiness and strength to maintain the connection with his mom. where he needed the love. His emotional needs went underground, and he began that exhausting performance, that work of managing everyone else's comfort with his feelings, hiding them. This is emotional neglect, not the absence of care, but the absence of emotional attunement. It's parents who provide food, shelter, education, but they can't see or validate their child's inner world. It creates children who become experts at reading the room, looking at expressions, and reading everyone else and making sure all the strangers are okay with him. Foundation 2, conditional validation. Marcus learned early that he got attention and praise for being smart, well-behaved, perfect, high-achieving, but he got withdrawal, criticism, Or indifference when he was sad, angry, scared, or simply just trying to be his authentic self. He didn't like sports. He became what I call a perfect doll, right? Perfect to look at, impressive to show off, but not actually seen for who he was underneath the porcelain. His parents loved the version of him that made them look good, that fit their fantasy of the ideal child. Many gay men know this very intimately. We learn to be charming, accomplished, aesthetically pleasing, anything to distract from the growing awareness that we were fundamentally different in ways our families might not accept. Foundation 3, the coming out wound. For Marcus, the approval addiction intensified exponentially When he came out, when he was 19, the message from his family was very subtle, but it was very clear. We love you, but we're disappointed. We love you, but this isn't what we wanted for you. We love you, but... Even families who try to be accepting often carry grief, their own fear, their own shame about having a gay child. And kids absorb that energy like a sponge. Or adults. Marcus learned that his authentic self, his desires, his attractions, his way of being in the world was somehow less valuable than the straight version that they had bought into. So he developed compensatory perfectionism. That's the belief that he could just, if he could just be successful enough, attractive enough, accomplished enough, that maybe— He could earn back the unconditional love that felt lost when he came out. By the way, if this sounds familiar, I help gay men break free from the addictive patterns of chemsex and become their best and highest selves. My one-on-one coaching program is Recovery Alchemy. It's a 6-month intense program that can literally change your life, and I accept 2 new clients per month. Apply in the show notes. All right, so let's go back to Marcus. So there's 2 paths that children usually take, right? There's children who don't get consistent validation for who they are. They unconsciously choose, right? There's 2 survival strategies that usually come up. One is the invisible child. Some children decide the safest thing for them is to just disappear. Don't be seen, don't be heard. They suppress their needs. They become self-sufficient. They develop these rich fantasy worlds. They think, if I don't need anything from anyone, I'm safe. I can't be rejected. These children become very mature very quickly, very independent. They're easy, but they're paying a price. They're learning that their authentic self is too dangerous to reveal, that connection is going to require Hiding who they really are. They're never truly authentic. And then there's part 2, the insatiable child, right? Like other children like Marcus, they go the opposite direction. They develop that hungry ghost type of behavior, insatiable hunger for approval and attention, recognition. They become performers, people pleasers, achievement addicts. The wound is the same as the invisible child. But the strategy is different to feel safe. If I can just be impressive enough, charming enough, successful enough, noticed enough, maybe I can feel worthy of love, even if it's just for this one moment. So how does crystal meth or any other substance come involved, right? It became Marcus's solution. So by the time Marcus discovered crystal meth, he was 26. He was exhausted from a lifetime of performing. He was successful. He was a marketing executive. He had a nice apartment, an impressive social media presence, his BMW. But inside, he felt like a fraud, running on empty, constantly anxious about whether people around him approved. Crystal meth changed everything for him, at least temporarily. He would say to me, the first time I used, I finally felt like myself. Sounds familiar. Not the version of myself that I thought people wanted, but actually myself. Confident, sexual, free. For the first time in my life, I wasn't seeking approval because I felt like I was approved by everyone. But here's what was really happening. Crystal wasn't revealing the true self. It was numbing the approval addiction so completely that he felt free from It's prison. He felt free from that prison. The drug became his solution to a problem that started when he was 8 years old. So guess what? When you take that meth away, that approval addiction still exists. So when Marcus was high, he didn't need his mother's conditional love, right? His boss's recognition, strangers' validation. He felt complete. But when the drug wore off, the original wound was all there. And often deeper, often more painful, and a reminder that he's just still not enough. And to numb that, he would go back to meth. It's the cycle, right? The shame spiral, right? So here's how it gets really insidious. After each crystal-fueled night where Marcus felt powerful and desired, he crashed back into shame. about his authentic self. The drug gave him a taste of what confidence felt like, which made his sober anxiety and the need for approval feel even more intolerable, even more confronting. The cycle deepened, right? It's shame about needing approval, crystal to feel confident, a crash into deeper shame, more desperate need for validation. More crystal. The drug wasn't just medicating his anxiety. It was medicating a wound that went back to childhood, a wound that told him his authentic self was not good enough to be loved. So here's how you break that generational pattern. In our Recovery Alchemy program, we help men understand that their approval addiction didn't start with them. Marcus's mother was likely carrying her own unhealed validation wounds. His father, who checked out emotionally when life got difficult, which was all the time to him, was probably running from his own shame too about not being enough, not being the best father. This isn't blaming your parents though. Most of them are doing the best they can with what they have. This is about understanding that you inherited a pattern. And patterns can be changed. You're not stuck with it. So the second phase of the Recovery Alchemy program is called purification. It's about diving deep into those original stories, not to stay stuck in the past, but to understand how your young nervous system learned to equate approval with survival, validation With safety. Marcus is learning. Marcus is learning his desperate need for his boss's recognition isn't really about his job performance. It's about that 8-year-old boy who learned that love could be withdrawn at any moment when he made a mistake or was inconvenient, who decided he had to be perfect to be safe. So the most important realization for you is that your approval addiction is not bad. It was your young mind's brilliant attempt to solve an impossible problem: how to get love and safety in a world that felt conditional and dangerous. How do I do that? Marcus's approval seeking wasn't weakness. It was strategy. It was his way of trying to control other people's responses so he could feel secure. It wasn't his way of trying to earn back the unconditional love that felt lost either. Every behavior, no matter how destructive it seems to you now, originally served a positive function for you. It has helped you survive up until now. Your approval addiction was your survival mechanism. It kept you connected to people when disconnection felt like death. Disconnection from your mom feels like death. The problem isn't that you developed the pattern. The problem is that now you've outgrown it, but your nervous system doesn't know that yet. So here's a breakthrough moment that Marcus had. He had the profound realization— we were working through a childhood memory where his father ignored him for hours after Marcus had interrupted his important phone call. 8-year-old Marcus sat on the stairs, convinced he was bad, wrong, unlovable, in the way. Marcus says, wait, I can see him so clearly. He started to cry. This little boy who just wanted his dad to see him. He wasn't asking for anything unreasonable, just wanted to feel important to somebody. And like that, he mattered to somebody, especially his father. And for the first time, Marcus felt compassion for his approval addiction instead of anger or shame about it. He could see that his desperate need for validation was not pathology. It was love. It was love. It was that little boy's refusal To give up on being truly seen and valued. He needed to feel seen and valued, and that's the best way he could come up with. That's the big beginning of the real healing of this is when you can see that your patterns, you see them with compassion, you become the compassionate observer instead of judging yourself for it. When you can understand that you developed these addictions, you developed these patterns for a good reason. So what's coming next for you is understanding your origin story. Where did this come from? It's crucial, but that's just the beginning. In our next part, in part 3, we're gonna explore the integration paradox. Why trying to eliminate your need for approval usually backfires. You're focusing on the wrong goal. How you can transform that pattern Use that pattern, transmute it into something else instead of trying to fight it or trying to eliminate it. We're gonna dive deeper into Marcus's journey as he learns that the solution isn't to stop caring what people think. That is not the answer. It's to care more consciously, more intentionally from a place of choice rather than compulsion. I want you to remember something. Your story makes sense. Your patterns develop for good, sound reasons, and understanding these reasons is Is the first step toward rewriting them. All right, love you guys. See you next week.