Content Warning: This episode and study guide discuss childhood trauma, sexual abuse, addiction, shame, and references to BDSM, kink, and intense sexual practices within the chemsex context. Please engage at your own pace and reach out for support if anything feels activating.
A Note From Dallas
For most of my life, I treated parts of myself like enemies.
The part of me that wanted to use. The part that felt rejected before anyone even spoke. The part that performed femininity as a kid and got laughed at for it. The part that craved intimacy so badly it would settle for being desired instead of wanted. I locked all of that in a basement, threw away the key, and tried to live my life upstairs pretending nothing was rattling the floorboards.
Chemsex was the day the basement door blew off its hinges.
What I didn't have language for then — what Jamie Willis gave me in this conversation — is that everything that came rushing out wasn't evil. It wasn't proof I was broken. It was me. The parts of me I'd been told weren't acceptable, distorted from years in the dark, finally getting their say. The problem wasn't that I met them. The problem was that I met them with no ritual, no container, no aftercare, no one to bring me home.
If you've been through chemsex and you're sitting in the wreckage right now wondering what's wrong with you, I want you to hear me: nothing is wrong with you. You met your shadow before you were ready. That's not a moral failing. That's just what happens when there's no roadmap.
This guide is part of building that roadmap.
Love you. — Dallas 💚
About Jamie Willis
Jamie Willis is a clinical specialist in chemsex, addiction, and LGBTQ+ mental health with 22 years of experience across service development and frontline practice. He began working with chemsex-related issues in 2009 as they were first emerging, and by 2014 he was managing Antidote — the pan-London LGBTQ+ drug and alcohol support service that sat at the epicenter of the chemsex crisis. In 2015, he was published in the British Medical Journal calling for chemsex to be made a public health issue.
Qualified as a Gestalt therapist in 2007, Jamie has developed an integrative practice drawing on Jungian shadow work, attachment theory, internal family systems, and trauma-informed approaches. He has also worked as an addictions lead at a therapeutic community in Northern Thailand, an A&E substance misuse counselor in North London, and has provided consultancy and training internationally, including in Uganda and Malaysia. He is now based in London where he continues his private practice.
Jamie also has lived experience with addiction earlier in his life — something he doesn't share often, but offered generously in this conversation as part of why he understands what it takes to do this work.
You can find Jamie and his writing on LinkedIn.
What Shadow Actually Is (And What It Isn't)
The word "shadow" sounds spooky. Most people, when they hear "shadow work," imagine they're being asked to confront some evil twin living inside them — the bad part, the dark part, the part to be defeated.
That's not what shadow is.
Shadow, as Carl Jung described it, is simply the repository where we push everything we've been told is unacceptable. Not just the things we don't like about ourselves — but the things other people taught us not to like. Things like neediness. Anger. Power. Femininity. Masculinity. The wish to be wanted. The wish to be held. The wish to be vulnerable. The wish to be sexual.
As gay men, our shadows tend to be especially full, because so many parts of us were invalidated before we even understood what was happening. For me, it was being caught walking on my tiptoes like I was in high heels and getting ridiculed for it. In that moment, that part of me learned it wasn't welcome upstairs — so down to the basement it went.
The thing about the basement is that nothing actually stays still down there. Jamie used the word fermenting, and I love that — because the parts we exile don't go to sleep, they distort. They take on a life of their own. They start running the show from behind a locked door, and we wonder why we keep self-sabotaging, why we feel grayed out, why we settle for being desired when what we actually want is to be wanted.
Shadow work is not killing those parts. It's not even fixing them. It's building a relationship with them.
Chemsex as Uncontained Shadow Confrontation
Here's the reframe that changed everything for me in this conversation: chemsex is shadow work without a container.
When meth hits, the basement door swings open. Every part you've been working overtime to suppress comes flooding into the room — your wanting, your kink, your rage, your hunger, your need to be touched, your need to be seen. For many of us, that's the first time we've felt our whole selves in the same room. No wonder so many men say this is what I've been looking for my entire life.
But here's the problem. You weren't ready. There was no ritual. There was no negotiation. There were no safe words. There was no one waiting to bring you home. So instead of meeting those parts as a resource, you got flooded by them. They took you over.
Jamie put it in language I won't forget: shadow work without containers is retraumatization.
That's what happened to so many of us. We didn't fail at chemsex. We met our shadow before we'd built the strength, the ritual, or the support to meet it safely. The despair you feel the morning after isn't proof you're broken — it's the predictable result of meeting that much of yourself with no aftercare.
Knowing this changes the story. You weren't weak. You weren't crazy. You were unprotected.
The BDSM and Kink Community as a Model
This part surprised me, but it shouldn't have. Jamie pointed to the BDSM and kink community as one of the clearest contemporary examples of how to meet shadow material well.
Think about what happens when BDSM is done properly: there's negotiation up front. There's explicit talk about desire, power, control, the wish to inflict or receive pain. There's ritual. There are safe words. There's deep attention to consent. And critically, there is aftercare — somebody holding you, water, gentle grounding, a deliberate coming back from what you've explored together.
That's a container. That's how you confront shadow material safely.
Now compare that to a chemsex scene. The same elements that BDSM negotiates carefully — power, intensity, pain, surrender — are often present, but with no negotiation, no safe words, no aftercare, and often substances overriding consent. At the end, you're not held by a community. You're alone, twitchy, paranoid, ashamed of what just happened.
I want to name something here for anyone newly chemsex-free: a lot of you assume that kink, BDSM, or anything intense is off-limits to you now. That's not necessarily true. In fact, the kink community's emphasis on consent, negotiation, communication, and aftercare is closer to true recovery work than vanilla five-minute fucking. You can have intense, exploratory, embodied sex without meth. And done properly, you'll actually experience more of it — because you'll be present for it.
Inviting the Shadow In
So if we're not killing the shadow, what are we actually doing?
Jamie used a beautiful old Zen metaphor — the ten ox-herding pictures. A man goes into the forest searching for an ox. The ox is wild, untamed, powerful — all that raw energy. He finds tracks. He finds the ox. He builds a relationship with it. He puts a rope on it. He tames it. He climbs on its back. And then, in one of my favorite images, he comes riding home playing a flute on the back of the ox.
That's the work. Not slaying the ox. Riding it home.
In chemsex, what we did was the opposite. We found an ox, any ox, jumped on its back, screamed yee-haw, and got dragged through the dust. The energy was real. The mistake was the lack of relationship.
The way you build relationship with a shadow part is — counterintuitively — to invite it in. The part of me that wants to use meth is not my enemy. It served me. It gave me something. It allowed me to feel wanted, to feel powerful, to feel unashamed sexually, to feel held. If I attack that part, isolate it, call it a demon on my back, all I'm doing is rejecting myself — which is the same thing that put it in the basement to begin with.
The most effective work I've ever done with rejection — which is a lifelong schema for me — wasn't trying to get rid of it. It was sitting with it. Saying yes, I feel rejected right now. This isn't the first time and it won't be the last. Every time I invite that feeling in instead of running from it, it gets softer. It's around less. The ox is being tamed.
A useful trick for finding your own shadow material: pay attention to what you accuse other people of being. When something about another person really gets under your skin, there's usually a piece of yourself in there that you haven't owned. I once spent weeks bitching about a coworker for being arrogant. Then I did the turnaround — I am arrogant — and was horrified to realize how true it was. From that moment, the coworker stopped bothering me. He was only triggering what I hadn't seen in myself.
The Gift: Chemsex as a Rite of Passage
I want to close on the reframe that I think is the most important thing Jamie said in the entire episode.
Most cultures throughout history have built deliberate rites of passage — moments where a young person is sent into the wilderness to encounter fear, hunger, loneliness, their own shadow material — and then welcomed back into the community to make meaning of what they found. Boy becomes man. Initiation completes. The community holds the integration.
LGBTQ+ people rarely get a rite of passage. We burst onto the scene and figure it out as we go. There's no graduated program for becoming a healthy gay man. We're often left to find our own initiation, in whatever form the world hands us.
For many of us, chemsex was that initiation. Brutal, uncontained, traumatic — yes. But also a wilderness journey that forced us to meet parts of ourselves most people in this world will go their entire lives without ever encountering.
Jamie said it like this, and I want you to actually hear it: some people walk through their whole lives never doing this work at all. Go to work, watch Netflix, go to sleep, repeat. Never meet themselves. Never crack open the basement door.
You and I had the basement blown wide open. That is, in a strange and counterintuitive way, a privilege. A starting point. A gift, if you choose to claim it.
You are not broken. You are not behind. You went into the wilderness without a guide and you came back. Now is the time to make meaning. Now is the time to integrate. Now is the time to come home riding the ox, playing the flute.
That's the work. That's recovery.
Closing Reflection
When Jamie said don't be afraid of your shadow, I wanted everyone listening to feel that in their bones. So much of chemsex recovery work is teaching men to stop being at war with themselves. The meth-using part, the rejected part, the angry part, the feminine part, the wanting part — these aren't enemies. They're you. They've been doing the best they could with the energy they had, locked in the dark, waiting for you to come downstairs with a flashlight and a little compassion.
You don't have to do this work alone. In fact, you shouldn't. Shadow work without containers is what already hurt you. You deserve ritual. You deserve relationship. You deserve aftercare.
If you're ready to begin building those containers in your own life, I'd love to walk that road with you. You can learn more about my work and the Recovery Alchemy program at drdallasbragg.com.
Love you. — Dallas 💚
Reflective Questions
- Which parts of yourself were you taught — explicitly or implicitly — were unacceptable as you were growing up? Where do you think those parts went?
- When you look back at your chemsex experiences, can you identify which shadow parts came flooding out? What were they trying to express?
- What does it mean for you to "respect your shadow" rather than fight it? How does that change how you think about your meth-using part, or any other part you've been at war with?
- Where in your life do you already have containers — places, people, or rituals that hold you safely? How can you draw on those as you do deeper inner work?
- If chemsex was a kind of rite of passage you were never properly initiated into, what meaning are you ready to make of it now?
Journal Prompts
- Write a letter to the part of you that wants to use. Don't lecture it. Don't try to fix it. Just ask: What are you holding for me? What do you need me to know? Let it answer.
- Finish this sentence as many times as you can in ten minutes: Growing up, I learned it wasn't safe to be ________. Then read back through your list. What patterns do you see?
- Jamie asks his clients: How would you express yourself sexually if you were completely unashamed? Write your honest, unfiltered answer. No one ever has to read it but you.
- Describe one feeling you habitually run from — loneliness, FOMO, rejection, rage, neediness. Invite it onto the page. Let it speak in the first person. What does it want you to know?
- Imagine yourself riding home on the back of the ox, playing a flute. What does that scene look like for you? What does integration — not perfection, but wholeness — actually look like in your life?
Action Exercises
- The Turnaround Practice. Identify one person you've been complaining about recently. Name the trait that bothers you most about them (arrogant, selfish, needy, dramatic, etc.). Sit with the sentence I am ________. Journal honestly about every way that trait might also live in you. Notice what shifts.
- Build One Container This Week. Identify one regular, ritualized space in your life that could hold deeper inner work — a weekly therapy hour, a journaling practice at the same time each morning, a recovery meeting, a coaching session, an art practice. If you don't have one yet, schedule one this week.
- Sit With a Hard Feeling. The next time you feel the urge to react — to text someone, get on Grindr, scroll, distract — pause for five minutes. Place a hand on your chest. Name the feeling out loud. Say: I see you. I'm not going to run from you right now. Notice what happens when you stay.
- Map Your Shadow. On a single sheet of paper, draw a house with a basement. In the upstairs rooms, write the parts of yourself you show the world. In the basement, write the parts you've exiled — the wanting, the neediness, the rage, the kink, the fear, the femininity, whatever lives down there. Don't fix anything. Just look.
- Practice Aftercare. Borrow from the kink community's wisdom. After anything emotionally intense this week — a hard conversation, a therapy session, a difficult memory surfacing — give yourself deliberate aftercare. Water. A blanket. A walk. A check-in with a trusted person. A few minutes of grounding. Begin building the habit of bringing yourself home.
Responses