Understanding Loneliness

Hey there, Dallas Bragg here, recovery coach for gay men who want to break free from the addictive patterns of chemsex and live their best and highest life. Today we're tackling a very hot topic in chemsex recovery. It's called loneliness. I'm sure you've heard of it. My bet is that you are treating your loneliness all wrong. You might not even really be lonely, and you may not have a clear understanding of what loneliness is. So stay right here and listen to this whole video if that's something that interests you. On this channel, you're going to find lots of resources to help you break free from chemsex 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 one every Saturday, so please turn on the notification bell and subscribe to this channel so you don't miss anything. By the way, if you're interested in my group coaching program called Recovery Alchemy, the link to apply will be in the show notes. Through weekly group sessions, weekly Not weekly one-on-one sessions, some one-on-one sessions with me and my team, your life could look much differently in 12 weeks than it does right now. All right. So there's a story we tell ourselves in recovery that the loneliness will go away once we build a new social circle, once we find a sober community, once we get back into dating or back into the world or back into our own life. So we wait for the outside to change. Sometimes it does, but then the loneliness is still there, sitting in the same place it always has. It's quieter now, maybe, but it's still there. Here's the belief I want to challenge today. Loneliness is not caused by who is absent from your life. It is caused by who is absent from yourself. I felt lonely, so I Fill in the blank. Got on the apps. Went to the bar. Went to the sauna. Texted a past user buddy. Bet staring at my text messages. Scrolled through deleted numbers. Posted a thirst trap on social media. I've noticed these statements, similar ones from my clients, mostly right before relapse. But what I've come to understand is these guys aren't lonely. They're fragmented. They have rejected so many aspects of themselves that they are left internally isolated, and no amount of external connection, especially chemsex, will remedy their feelings. So here's a lie that loneliness tells you. Loneliness has a signature move, MO, I guess you could say. The moment it shows up, it points outward. You don't have enough people around you. You're the only one who feels this way. Everyone else has somewhere to belong. That outward pointing is the first lie, and it's a convincing one because— It's partially true. Loneliness does show up in our external world. In the hours after a hookup left you feeling emptier before in a room full of people that you feel out of reach in the silence of an apartment that used to hum with the noise of the, the using life, the chillouts. But here's what almost nobody tells you. The reason the external world feels so distant is because there's already so much distance inside you. That's where you look first. Loneliness at its root is not a social problem. It's the experience of internal separation, the accumulated space between you and the parts of yourselves that you've taught to exile, as they call it in Internal Family Systems. And the more fragmented you are on the inside, The more fragmented mirror, the outside, the external reality becomes the internal. It's the internal first. The internal is the cause. The external is the effect. As above, so below. So you can be surrounded by people who love you and still feel completely unreachable because the part of you that knows how to receive love in that circumstance has been locked away and rejected. So here's how it happens, this fragmentation. We're not born lonely. We're born whole. And we contain every polarity. Tenderness and rage, need and independence, darkness and light, sexuality, innocence, all of it present before anybody told us which parts were acceptable and unacceptable. That's when the socialization begins, what we call conditioning. A parent disapproves, even by a look. A community goes silent, turns their back. A religion draws a line, an arbitrary fucking line. Gay culture hands you a new set of rules about which version of yourself is desirable and which version of yourself is not going to get you in the clique. And each disapproval even might be well-intentioned. They're not malicious, but those disapprovals register in the nervous system, not as correction, registers as a threat, a threat to our life, because as humans, we have to be connected. So here's what we understand. We understood even as children, connection is survival. It's not a luxury. It's not a preference. Survival. So for a human being, belonging to others is essential It's like food and it's like water. Watch somebody in the depths of grief, like through a breakup, the wreckage of a breakup. They can't eat, they can't drink, they shut down. That's how primary connection is. So when someone who matters to us, who provides us love, who provides us safety, who provides us protection, turns away from a part of us, Our nervous system doesn't register that as just feedback. It registers that as danger to our survival. And it does what any threatened organism's going to do. It adapts. And when it adapts, it splits. You split away from that part of yourself. The part that caused disapproval gets cut off or exiled, buried somewhere below the surface. Where it can't threaten the connection we need to survive. For instance, a parent making a comment about your weight, your effeminate nature, your bad grade. Immediately we reject that part of ourselves because it appears that it stands between us and receiving love from the one person we need it most from, our parent. And here's the mechanism that makes this so painful. You cannot push something away without creating space between you and it. That space, that internal gap between you and your exiled parts, that's loneliness. Not the symptom of loneliness. That's the source of it. And the more splits, the more loneliness. The more loneliness inside, the more it shows up outside. So for gay men navigating chemsex recovery, This list of exiled parts is very long. It's very particular. That's the part that was— there's the part that was queer before anyone had language for it, in a world that responded to that queerness with silence, shame, rejection. That part learned very early that its very existence is the problem. That's the part that— there's the part that needed tenderness, right? Real, like unhurried, non-transactional closeness. In a subculture that often traded intimacy for performance, that part learned that need, needing something, was weakness, or worse, that it would never be met anyway. There's the sexual self, which many for us became entangled with shame long before meth came along. Sexuality, we were told, was wrong, then later welcomed in spaces that celebrated it, but often on certain terms, right? Only the right body, Only the right role, only the right kind of desirability. There's the part that carries grief, grief for the years lost, hidden in the closet or whatever, for the community, our community decimated by AIDS, for these relationships that didn't survive using, for the version of yourself you were before all this shit happened. That grief often has no container. In a recovery space. So it gets exiled too. It's already exiled. You're not allowed to be sad. You're a man. And there's the part that's angry, rightfully, righteously angry. What was taken from you, oftentimes your whole childhood, what was done, what was withheld from you that you deserved. That part often gets labeled dangerous, dramatic, too much. So it gets buried underground. Each of these exiles. was an act of survival for you. And each one added another layer of internal fragmentation where loneliness lives. So let's talk about what meth was solving. Meth didn't cause your loneliness. For most of it, it was our most sophisticated solution to it. Because in a high, that exile ended. The fragmentation dissolved. Every part that had been locked away, the sexual self, the tender self, the part that wanted to be desired, desired exactly as it was, the gay part, the part that had been told it was too much. Suddenly, everybody has permission to exist. Come on out, guys. Nothing matters right now. I'm high as fuck. And all at once, without any apology. That experience is what you're addicted to. That experience of sudden wholeness is what the high is actually delivering to you, not dopamine. Not just dopamine. Stop being so addicted to the science of it. This high was not just delivering dopamine. It's delivering a reunion of all your parts. You felt, maybe for the first time in years or ever, like all of you was welcome somewhere. Like the loneliness had finally, mercifully stopped. That feeling was not manufactured, okay? It was real. The need underneath it to integrate the parts, to be whole, for all the parts to be met with acceptance is one of the most fundamental human needs there is. That's what we're all doing. What wasn't sustainable, though, was the cost in doing it without the work. Getting high is doing it without the work. So the cost is the crash that followed. It wasn't just chemical withdrawal. It was every exiled part flooding back at once, louder and desperate than before because they had a taste of being let in, and now the door was slammed shut again. Loneliness after a meth high isn't just the absence of the drug or the dopamine receptors or any of that bullshit. It's amplified fragmentation. It's all those parts Shoved back in exile, now more agitated than ever. This is why in early chemsex recovery, loneliness often gets worse where it gets better. You've lost the one thing that temporarily made you feel whole, and the exiled parts haven't gone anywhere. What well-meaning people tell us when we're lonely in recovery: get out of the house, go to a meeting, Build a routine, find your people, put yourself out there. Nothing wrong with any of that. Community matters. Structure matters. But here's what none of it addresses: the internal fragmentation that makes genuine connection feel impossible, even when you're physically present with other people. Think about it. If you're in a room full of people, but you've exiled the vulnerable part of yourself, You can't actually be authentic. You cannot actually be met. You could be seen performing, but not seen. If the part of you that carries grief has no permission to exist, you will feel alone in that room. No matter how many people love you, you're not whole. We tend to treat loneliness in recovery as a problem of subtraction. Something's missing. So we add, we add, add community, add connection, add meetings, add more, add more, add more routine. But the real medicine isn't addition. It's the reunion, reunion with the parts of yourself you've been running from. Not fixing them, not transcending them, not positive thinking your way past them, turning toward them, giving them the attention, the inclusion, the unconditional love, bringing them in. So what does that look like? This is where it gets practical and uncomfortable. The parts we've exiled are the ones we've been taught are dangerous, that stand in the way of Between me and surviving. Your subconscious, your nervous system thinks your life's in danger. Getting close to them feels like it will cost you your life. Connection and safety, it feels like life-threatening to your nervous system. The carefully constructed version of ourselves we've managed to hold together is there, and it is trying to survive. That fear, though, is old information. All of that made sense before to keep all of that together, this version of you, but it doesn't serve you now. This is the gift of Chemsex. The gift of Chemsex is to you to find, to experience what it's like And it's not even as good to let your guard down and bring all your parts in and to feel whole. Turning toward an exiled part means getting curious about it instead of suppressing it. It means asking it what it needs rather than shoving it away and silencing it. It means understanding why it exists, where it came from, what's it protecting you from. What's it trying to get for you? When you find the part of you that turned to meth for closeness, the question isn't, how do I get rid of this part, this craving? The question is, what does this part of me actually need? What is this craving longing for? It's not the meth. Usually the answer is something entirely legitimate: desire, safety, belonging, to be known without— to be known without condition, love without condition. The craving is a messenger. The loneliness is a messenger. Both are pointing at something that deserves your attention. You. It's all you. Something that needs to feel validated and included. You. It's all parts of you. But you've created this internal, internal turmoil. And nobody wins because it's you against you. Every time you turn toward an exiled part, You get curious. You invite it in, ask it what it needs. Hello, rejection. What's underneath you? It's the part of me that's gay. Let me witness you. Let me let you know what it's like to feel safe. What's it like to be expressed, validated for who you are? Then that internal distance decreases 'cause you're pulling it in. That's what healing loneliness actually looks like. Not filling the gap with something external. You close it from the inside. So one thing I want you to try this week— you don't need to integrate all of your exiled parts at once. It's not how this works. You start with one. Think of a part of yourself you've been most ashamed of, most quick to suppress, most practiced at hiding. The one that surfaces when nights get long and you can't quite explain why you feel so far from yourself and from everyone else. Don't try to fix it. Don't try to resolve it. Don't try to psychoanalyze it. Don't reframe it. Don't rush. Don't rush it. Just ask it, what are you trying to do for me? What is it that you want? And then stay with that. You might not get an answer right away. And there is no right answer. Just being curious is all you need to do. That's the beginning of coming home to yourself. Coming home to yourself is the only cure for loneliness that actually holds up. I hope this helped this week. Tell me in the comments if it did help or if something I missed, something you wanna add. I appreciate it. Reach out for help. Thanks.