Content Warning: This episode and study guide discuss methamphetamine use and chemsex, arrest and incarceration, the loss of home, work, and relationships, physical deterioration, despair, and thoughts of ending your life. I tell a story in here that I have not tidied up for anybody's comfort.
There is also a specific ask in this episode: to look directly at yourself at your lowest. That is not a small thing to do. Read this when you are steady, and give yourself somewhere to land afterward.
If you find yourself in crisis while reading, please reach out. In the US you can call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or call the LGBT National Hotline at 888-843-4564. Nothing in this guide is medical, clinical, or legal advice.
What This Episode Is About
This is a short solo episode about one tool: the post-use video. In the recording I call it the post-relapse video, which is the name it was born with. In my program it goes by post-use video, and that is what I am calling it here.
The tool is simple to describe and hard to do. You record yourself on your phone in the hours right after a using episode, while you still look and feel exactly like what just happened. Then you watch it, every day, for ninety days.
That is it. That is the whole tool.
What makes it worth an episode is why it works, which has a lot less to do with willpower than with what is happening in your brain when a craving shows up.
Key Ideas to Sit With
The night it started
I did not design this tool. I fell into it on one of the worst days of my life.
I had been arrested again. One of the dumbest decisions I ever made. I needed a car, the guy I was with had a car but no plate, so I wrote numbers on a piece of paper and called it a lost plate. We made it about a mile from my house. I was being surveilled at that point. After my first arrest it was big news in a very small suburb of Charlotte, and the police were watching everywhere I went.
When I finally got home, thirty miles by Uber, my front door was standing wide open.
The house had been ransacked. Every drawer, every cabinet, every closet pulled out. My quote unquote friends, my posse, had come looking for a stash, because they knew I hid them around the house.
I walked through that place malnourished, exhausted, exasperated, hopeless. No car. No job. Eviction coming. And I stood in the middle of my ransacked house and thought: I have no one. I have no one now.
I did not know what to do besides scream. There were some darker thoughts in there too.
So I put my phone up on my dresser and I recorded myself, to me. I cried. I screamed. I spewed hatred at myself, at my friends, at my family. It was not my best hour of taking accountability.
But I caught it. I got to see myself at my lowest, with all the trash in the background.
The forgetting is the problem, not the memory
Here is what I knew standing in that house, because by then I was an old pro at this.
It was not going to be a week, maybe two, before I was back on the prowl. The house would be cleaned up. Everything would level off. The friends would start contacting me again and I would probably let them back in. And I would have forgotten exactly how I felt in that moment. That despair.
That is how a brain manages pain.
Despair does not stay vivid. The memory of what it actually cost you fades a whole lot faster than the memory of the high.
The video exists to interrupt the forgetting.
Euphoric recall is a chemical event, not a weakness
This is the mechanism, and I want you to learn it by heart.
Your midbrain wants to change its state. It wants that dopamine, and it thinks you need it to survive. So it takes over. Your prefrontal cortex, the part of you that thinks critically and makes executive decisions, shuts down. Autopilot.
And your midbrain knows you better than you know you. It knows exactly what to say to you, or what to have you think, to convince you to use. It will tell you every lie possible:
I'm just getting on Grindr to look around.
I'm just taking Friday off for me time.
I'm just driving through that neighborhood to see what's up.
All the while, in the back of your mind, you know you are plotting to use.
I want to be clear about how I frame this. This is not a malice thing. It is not an enemy. It is not a monkey on your back. Your midbrain is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing. Meth made a chemical change to your neural pathways, and you do not have a chemical to change it back.
So you have to find another way to wake up out of euphoric recall, because it will put you to sleep so quickly.
Safeguards create the pause. The video fills it.
You can block the apps. You can have somebody stay over with you. You can lock your phone up. You can surrender your car keys. You can do all sorts of things, and you should, and here is precisely what all of it buys you: a pause between you and using.
The pause is not the goal. What happens inside the pause is the goal, and that is your prefrontal cortex coming back online.
The post-use video is what you put in the pause. It will snap you the hell out of it, fast. And used the right way, it does not just interrupt a craving after it arrives. It strikes preemptively, before the trigger ever gets a foothold.
When to record: before you sleep
The timing is not incidental.
Make the video before you lie down. There is a magic in sleeping, and part of that magic is that it takes the edge off. That is exactly what you do not want yet.
Record when you are at your ugliest. When the high is gone and the crash is in place. When you feel the most miserable and you look the most miserable, and there is nothing in you that wants to use.
That is the moment. That is where the resolve is. In that state there is nothing you want more than to never do this again, and that resolve is your fuel. The whole point of the video is to bring yourself back to it on demand, over and over.
Three to five minutes is all it takes. You are going to be watching this every day for ninety days, so you do not want a ten minute video. Mine was long. A whole dramatic monologue. I could have won an Oscar for it. I did not watch the whole thing every time.
What goes in it
There is a free form in the show notes that walks you through seven questions, and it exists for one reason: in that state, when your brain is trying to heal from what you just did to it, most guys have no idea what to say.
Broadly you are capturing three things. What you see and what your body feels, in detail and without euphemism. What actually happened in the last twenty-four to seventy-eight hours, what it cost you, and what is sitting on your phone that you wish were not there. And a message to your future self, because he is the one who is going to get told next week that he can handle it one more time.
My version of that message: I know it sounds appealing. I know you think you can do it one more time. I know, I know, I know. But this is what you get when you use. No exceptions.
Download the form. It is free, it is short, and it does the thinking for you when you cannot.
The ninety-day protocol, and where men fall short
Making the video is not enough. Making it and watching it is the tool.
You watch it in a chemsex-free state, every day, for ninety days. You mark off each day. You give it your whole attention, not a glance while you scroll something else.
I do not have research to back this. This is the world according to Dallas. You do not believe me, try it.
What I have is a lot of men who tried it and a clear pattern in what separated them. Most men can make the video. The watching is where they fall short. They do a day or two and then they cannot do it anymore, or they say they cannot.
And I understand why they stop. Watching yourself with your eyes sunken in or bug-eyed, dark circles, emaciated, in that much despair, while clear-headed, is hard. It is not a little hard. It is one of the more uncomfortable things a person can choose to do.
The cringe is not a sign you are doing it wrong. The cringe is the whole mechanism. It is the evidence that the distance between that man and this one is real, and that distance is what takes the charge out of euphoric recall.
Muster up the strength to do this and I promise you, euphoric recall's charge goes way down. Your willpower goes way up, because you can snap out of midbrain control and hand the decision back to the part of your brain that thinks.
The other video: catching yourself grateful
This one is newer and I am still playing with it. There is no form for it yet.
The post-use video captures the despair you. But there is a second version of you worth recording, and he shows up a few days later.
You have slept. You have gotten some food in your body. You are starting to get back into life. And there is a new resolve. Okay. I am ready to do this. You are so grateful you did not lose the job. Grateful you still have the car. You go into a job you usually say you hate and you are glad to have it right now, because you could have lost everything.
Everything is bright. You feel strong. You are never using again.
Save that too. Save it and watch it.
For some men the despair video is the one that lands. For others it is this one. You do not have to guess which one you are. Make both and find out.
One more thing, if you have not used recently
Do it anyway.
Make a video to your future self from right where you are standing. This is who we are. This is what we are doing. If you are thinking about using, here is the goal.
It lives in your phone. You can put a screenshot of it on your home screen if you want. It is there for the day your midbrain decides it is time to go look around.
Going Deeper
I have a couple of episodes on euphoric recall coming up, and I cannot wait to dive deeper into it. There is real science here and I want to acknowledge that, because research can tell us a lot about how to process it. I also think we make it too complicated sometimes.
This tool is not complicated. It is uncomfortable, which is a different thing.
If you try it, let me know. What is your method? How do you combat euphoric recall when it shows up? I would like to hear from you.
You already know that the man in that footage was trying to tell you something, and you already know how fast his message fades once the house is picked up and the phone starts buzzing again. Three to five minutes, before you sleep, and then ninety days of looking at him. That is a small price for getting your own decision back. For coaching and more resources, visit www.recoveryalchemy.org.
If you are struggling with thoughts of ending your life, please reach out right now. In the US, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or call the LGBT National Hotline at 888-843-4564. You are worth the phone call.
Love you!! Dallas 💚
5 Reflective Questions
Sit with these before you record anything. There are no right answers, only honest ones.
- Think back to your last using episode. How long did it take before the memory of how bad it felt lost its grip on you? A day? A week? What did you tell yourself when it faded?
- What are the exact lies your midbrain uses on you? Not the general ones I listed. Yours, in your own words, in the voice they arrive in.
- The safeguards create a pause, and a pause is only useful if you have something to put in it. What safeguards do you already have in place, and what happens inside that pause right now?
- Watching yourself at your lowest while clear-headed is hard enough that most men stop. Before you begin, be honest: what are you afraid you will see, and what would seeing it mean about you?
- Which version of yourself would you actually listen to, the one in despair or the one who is grateful and resolved a few days later? What does your answer tell you about how you motivate yourself?
5 Journal Prompts
Give yourself real time and privacy. Write longer than is comfortable. Nobody has to read it.
- Write the scene of your own ransacked house. The moment, whenever it was, when you looked around and understood what this had cost you. Put in the details you leave out when you tell that story to other people.
- Write down every lie your midbrain has successfully sold you, one per line, and next to each one write what actually happened after you believed it.
- Write a letter from the you who just crashed to the you who will be feeling fine in ten days. Tell him what he is going to forget and what you need him to do about it.
- Write the letter back, from the grateful version of you a few days out. What is he glad he did not lose? What does he want to build with the time he still has?
- Write about your resistance to this tool. If you already know you are not going to watch it for ninety days, write down why, in full, without arguing yourself out of it. Then read what you wrote.
5 Action Exercises
Pick one to start rather than all five.
- Download the form. The free post-use video worksheet is linked in the show notes. Get it on your phone now, before you need it, so it is there in a state where you cannot think of what to say.
- Record the video you can record today. If you are past a using episode, record the grateful, resolved version. If you have not used recently, record the message to your future self. You do not have to wait for a crash to start using this tool.
- Set up the ninety days before day one. A daily alarm at a time you are reliably alone, and something to mark off: a calendar, a notes app, a piece of paper on the fridge. Pick morning, or evening, or both, whichever one you will actually keep.
- Screenshot one frame and put it somewhere you cannot avoid it. Home screen, lock screen, inside the app folder you reach for first. The point is to meet that face in the seconds before your midbrain gets going.
- Tell one person you are doing this. A coach, a therapist, a friend who knows. Give them the start date and the ninety-day mark and ask them to check in on it. And tell me how it goes. If you use during those ninety days, I want to hear about it. If you do not use, I want to hear about that too.
Responses