There are two reflections I remember from early recovery.
The first one is the morning after one of my benders. Sometimes I would be for over a week. The fluorescent light was causing my skin to look gray, my eyes sunken, my arms bruised from botched slams, and my jaw sore from clenching.
I would stand there and take inventory of everything wrong with me. Liar. Weak. Disgusting. Back to zero. Horrible father. Then the crying would ensue. In that mirror, I saw a reflection of all my negatives leading to self-flagellation.
The second mirror showed up around day 90. Fresh haircut, color back in my face, a little gym pump under the t-shirt. I might have tears in my eyes, but they were an overflow of gratitude.
Look at you. You beat it. You are better than the guys still out there circling Grindr at 3am. In that mirror was a reflection of all my positives leading to self-indulgence.
Here is what took me years to understand.
Both of those mirrors were lying.
Both of them showed me half a man.
And you cannot love half a man.
The Pendulum
Most of us in chemsex recovery live on a pendulum. We swing from flagellation to indulgence, and many variations between.
On one end, we puff ourselves up. The pink cloud. The savior energy. The quiet superiority we feel scrolling past the profiles of men still using. We become conscious of our upsides and blind to our downsides. This is where a lot of over-confidence comes from.
On the other end, we collapse. One using episode and suddenly we are the hopeless case, the chronic relapser, the man who will never get it. We become conscious of our downsides and blind to our upsides, which is where the shame comes from.
Notice something about both ends of that swing.
Neither one is you.
They are personas, masks, exaggerations in opposite directions. And you know we love extremes. And as long as you are living in the extreme, you are not being your authentic, true self.
If you cannot be your authentic self, then how can you be loved for who you are? Not by a partner, not by your brothers in recovery, and definitely not by yourself.
The pendulum gets pushed by comparison.
You meet a guy with five years substance-free and you shrink.
You hear about a guy who used last weekend and you quietly grow taller.
Every time you put another man on a pedestal, you dig yourself a pit. Every time you put him in a pit, you climb onto a pedestal. Up and down, all day long, and you wonder why you are exhausted.
Love Is Not an Emotion
We have been sold the idea that love is a feeling.
The rush, the infatuation, the warm flood in the chest. But think about where that logic leaves us. If love is the rush, then meth was love. The slam, the hit, the man on the other side of the door at 2am, all of it flooded the chest.
We chased a feeling and called it connection, and we know exactly where that road ends.
I want to offer you a different definition.
Love is the willingness to observe all aspects of a person, the light and the shadow, at the same time, and accept what you see.
Love of another man is the willingness to see both sides of him.
Love of yourself is the willingness to see both sides of you.
Simultaneously. Unconditionally.
There is a word for that state: equanimity.
It is the level place between the pedestal and the pit.
Studies show that equanimity, the capacity to stay even in the presence of pleasant and unpleasant experience, is associated with fewer problematic addictive behaviors, and that training the mind to observe cravings and emotions without judgment measurably reduces craving itself.
The research is catching up to what the mystics always knew. The balanced observer heals. The judge stays sick.
If you have followed my work, you already know this observer.
He is the compassionate observer I talk about constantly, the consciousness behind the voices, the one watching the craving instead of being the craving.
Equanimity is what the compassionate observer feels like when he finally puts down the gavel. Finally stops keeping score of rights and wrongs, with himself and others.
Relapse Through a Level Lens
Now bring this to the moment that breaks most men: the return to using.
When you judge a using episode as pure catastrophe, you are back at the first mirror, all downside, and shame floods the system. And shame, as every one of us knows in our bones, is jet fuel for the next episode.
You use because you feel worthless, then feel worthless because you used. The pendulum becomes a wrecking ball.
The level lens asks a different set of questions.
What was that episode doing for me?
What need was it meeting, what pain was it numbing, what information is it carrying?
And on the other side, what did it cost me, honestly, without melodrama?
When you can hold the benefit and the drawback of the same event in the same moment, the charge drains out of it. The episode stops being a verdict and becomes a chapter.
You stop being a failure and go back to being a student.
This is where recovery deepens. Abstinence keeps the drug out of your body. Equanimity keeps the war out of your mind.
Three Ways to Reach Self-Love
1. Balance the ledger on other men first. Self-love begins with shadow work. The practice of understanding that everyone is a mirror for your growth. In that process, you see that everyone has upsides and downsides, including you. Equanimity emerges.
Think of a man you resent, maybe an ex, a sponsor who shamed you, the guy who introduced you to tina. Name the specific trait you cannot stand in him. Now find the moment you displayed that same trait, somewhere, to someone.
Then flip it.
Think of a man you idolize, the one with the long recovery and the calm voice. Name what you admire. Now find where that trait already lives in you.
Every pedestal and every pit is a mirror you have not claimed yet. Claim enough of them and the playing field levels, and standing on level ground with every other man is what self-respect actually feels like.
2. Catch the swing in real time. Pride and shame are your two alarm bells.
The moment you feel superior, pause and ask: what downside of mine am I not looking at right now?
The moment you feel worthless, pause and ask: what upside of mine am I refusing to see?
You are not trying to talk yourself out of the feeling. You are supplying the missing half of the picture. One honest counterweight, spoken or written, is usually enough to slow the pendulum.
Do this daily and the swings get shorter, you remain balanced. In that middle baseline is where you can make level decisions, see the world through healthy perspectives, and live in reality.
3. Retire the judge, hire the researcher. The judge asks, what is wrong with me? The researcher asks, what is running me?
Same event, two completely different men looking at it.
When the craving hits, when the old profile gets reactivated, when the shame wave rolls in, take notes like a scientist studying the most fascinating subject on earth, because you are.
Where is it in the body?
What happened an hour before?
What is it promising?
Curiosity and condemnation cannot occupy the same mind at the same moment. Choose curiosity often enough, and it becomes your default setting, and curiosity, sustained over time, turns into tenderness.
That tenderness toward yourself begins to turn outward, and I promise that your world will fundamentally transform.
The Deeper Invitation
You do not need to amputate half of yourself to be lovable.
The man who used and the man who healed are the same man.
The one who lied in active addiction and the one who tells the truth in group on Tuesday nights, same man.
Every trait you have served a purpose or you would not have survived long enough to read this.
The goal was never to become a one-sided saint. The goal is to stand in front of the mirror, see the whole man, both images at once, and remain as the compassionate observer.
That steady unflinching seeing, is love. Who doesn't want to be seen for who they are?
This Week's Exercise: The Level Ledger
Take one event that still carries a charge. Your last using episode works, or the moment in your addiction you are most ashamed of.
Draw a line down the center of a page.
On the left, write every drawback of that event. Be thorough and be honest.
On the right, write every benefit, and yes, there were benefits: the lesson it forced, the bottom it revealed, the compassion it later gave you for other men, the reason you are doing this work at all.
Keep writing on the right side until the two columns are roughly equal in weight, not in number of lines, but in felt truth.
Then read both columns out loud, together, one left entry followed by one right entry, back and forth until the page is done.
You are teaching your nervous system to hold both sides of one event in one breath. When you reach the bottom, look up, find a mirror, and hold your own eyes for ten full seconds.
That is the practice. The whole man, witnessed by the whole man.
Alright, I hope this helps.
Love, Dallas
Five Journal Prompts
- Who is on my highest pedestal right now, and what trait of his am I refusing to recognize in myself?
- Who is in my deepest pit, and what trait of his have I displayed in my own life, even once?
- When I replay my last using episode, what was it giving me that I have not yet learned to give myself?
- What is one thing my proudest self and my most ashamed self would say about me that is actually true in both directions?
- If I saw both sides of myself at the same time, right now, what would I finally be able to stop performing?
Sources
Demina, A., Petit, B., Meille, V., & Trojak, B. (2023). Mindfulness interventions for craving reduction in substance use disorders and behavioral addictions: Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. BMC Neuroscience, 24, 55.
Juneau, C., Pellerin, N., Trives, E., Ricard, M., Shankland, R., & Dambrun, M. (2020). Reliability and validity of an equanimity questionnaire: The two-factor equanimity scale (EQUA-S). PeerJ, 8, e9405.
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