A man in recovery from chemsex describes how societal pressure to avoid vulnerability pushes emotional needs into the unconscious, creating a buildup that drains life force and leaves him feeling persistently unfulfilled. This repression makes it harder to ask for what he actually needs.
If we think about in chemsex context, you know, actually what one of the manifestations there can be, things like sort of needing intimacy, you know, being vulnerable, those things, particularly for a man. I'm massively generalizing here, but particularly for a man, those things can get pushed into the shadow because it's not allowed. Men aren't vulnerable. Intimacy is wrong. To need intimacy, to need sex even. Yeah. it's wrong, so it's all bad, it gets banished. So what happens there is because the repression holds a lot of energy, okay? So it's all there sort of fermenting in the background. Now the price that we pay for doing that is a sense of not really feeling fulfilled in life, you know, 'cause it takes a lot of like the life force, if you wanna put it in that context, away. So we feel that our lives can be a little bit kind of grayed out in a sense. Mm-hmm. You know? We're not able to ask for what we need.
