SPFPP 117: Trace Your Trigger
When you received your herpes diagnosis, there was probably an intensity or absence of emotion. Whatever it was, this likely wasn't the first time you felt it. I invite you to explore the most recent time you had that feeling (or absence of feeling) if you are able to name it. Once you have the emotion and know the most recent time you felt it other than your herpes diagnosis, then see if you can identify the FIRST time you felt it. This could have come from an interaction with your early caregiver(s)/parents/grandparents/foster parents. Now that you've identified those three, you have a solid base for establishing an idea of what pattern is consistently present that the emotion emerges from. I BELIEVE (I'm trying to stop using the word hope) you'll find this to be useful.
Episode 117 Transcript
A Message from the Future: Why This Episode Changed
00:00:00 Courtney Brame: Welcome to Something Positive for Positive People. I'm Courtney Brame. Something Positive for Positive People is probably extremely confusing to you right now if you've been listening to these podcast episodes in numerical chronological order because I know that I've said different things at different times and it's grown and evolved and at this point it is a nonprofit organization that provides mental health support resources to people who are navigating herpes stigma. I don't think I can put it any more concise than that.
Courtney Brame: And the reason that structure is what it is now on this particular episode is because I'm coming to you from the future. No, it's actually January 27th, 2023. And I had a request to remove some podcast episodes, which that's been more of a thing recently. And I don't know if it's just been people were really excited in the pandemic of having this opportunity or if people were doing this out of a coping response and then later kind of realized this was a bad idea or what. But it's been a thing and it's become a thing. I've had people I normally let them listen to before I share the episode. More people have just been like nope I'm fine with it.
Courtney Brame: But I'm finding that there are I guess things that go beyond what I can be prepared for when setting the expectations of recording a podcast episode with me. So there's been people just saying things that they wish they would have said differently or regret. And this is years later, so I'm coming back to this episode in 2023 and just replacing it with a new audio. Hopefully this is something that is still useful to you. I don't want you to feel like you're wasting your time by listening through this podcast episode. So what I want to share here is the importance of recognizing not just what triggers you about your herpes diagnosis, but to understand the emotion behind it. What does it mean to be triggered?
The "Forward" Trauma Response
Courtney Brame: It just means that there's an intense state of emotional expression or even just emotional repression and there's a buildup and it's radiating throbbing within you and it needs to come out in a way and the way that our triggers express themselves are sometimes due to our trauma responses fight freeze fawn and what I've discovered is that there is another response which is the forward response and that's the one that I like to think that I use whenever I find myself in a state of being where I am in position to potentially intensely emotionally respond to a situation in front of me. and the way that I demonstrate that is for example, let's use Something Positive for Positive People.
Courtney Brame: I got my herpes diagnosis. And what it represented for me was this avoidance of rejection that when I decided to go deeper became a fear of disappointment and then when I went deeper than that it was a fear of success. So, Eartulli said on Kendrick Lamar's album, which this is such a future episode. Kendrick Lamar's new album, Worldwide Steppers, the big World Worldwide Steppers. it's a two-part album. I forget the whole name of it, but I know that that's it.
Courtney Brame: Equari says at the beginning, he goes, when you, Hold on, let me just pull up the screenshot. I'm so happy I took a screenshot of this because I butcher a quote. So, he says, "If you derive your sense of identity from being a victim, let's say bad things were done to you when you were a child, and you develop a sense of self that is based on the bad things that happened to you." All right, I'm going to say that again. It says, "If you derive your sense of identity from being a victim, let's say bad things were done to you when you were a child, and you develop a sense of self that is based on the bad things that happened to you." So, in my case, the way that that looks is I recognized that I was sort of my mom's emotional boyfriend, okay?
Courtney Brame: And I would try and avoid the pain of being rejected by wanting some sort of I don't know when you're a little boy you just kind of want to be up under your mom. You want love. You don't know what that looks like. In my case, perhaps it was physical touch. So maybe I wanted to hug her. And I remember her saying, "Get out of here. I'm on the phone." Which is a form of rejection. So I think that what happened was that I became so in tune with her needs that to me I got that connection that need met by meeting her needs. So it's such a weird thing to try and say but if you were to draw lines it would look like me having an arrow pointed towards my mother and an X going through it because that didn't work.
00:05:00 Courtney Brame: That didn't get me what I wanted by going directly to her and asking for what I needed because that would present rejection. But me being as available as I possibly could and so in tune with what my mom's needs were, it meant that I would always just be there and when she came to me, make myself available. So, her arrows pointed to me and then there's a green circle. to where the need of me just asking for what I needed and getting it was substituted by me being so readily available to meet her needs. I don't think I've ever said it so eloquently before, but that is essentially what that was and what that looked like.
Tracing the Root of Rejection
Courtney Brame: and looking at my herpes diagnosis, there's the way that shows up is it's an avoidance of rejection. So, I've learned to not ask for what I need, but be available for whoever needed what I had to offer at that moment, even if it was someone that I wasn't really interested in. So, if it's someone that I didn't really like, the fact that they made them more attractive to me. And that's a real effing thing. I don't know that this is something that a lot of people do, but I know that it's something that I've observed within myself in regard to my herpes diagnosis. And the exercise here is to think about how you felt when you were diagnosed. Think about the most recent time you felt that same emotion.
Courtney Brame: And then try and think about the first time you felt that emotion. So, I've already traced it back to growing up being around my mom and just being so attuned to her needs. I look at any of my recent relationships really and I see that for me there's been that making myself so readily available to meet that other person's needs and not putting myself out there to ask for what it is that I needed. If I need time with you, if I need touch from you, if I need an act of service, right?
Courtney Brame: just going through the love languages, not directly just asking for what it was that I needed. Because who's to say that if I would have just told my "Mom, can I have a hug? Mom, can I talk to you about something? Mom, can I give you this?" Those things wouldn't have turned out differently. Maybe there wouldn't have been that, "Get out of here. I'm on the phone." Maybe there wouldn't have been that feeling of rejection had I just asked. And I see more in my day-to-day life now as an adult. I'm 34 years old. How that continues to show up and I've gone to extensive lengths to try and make myself less available. And the reality is that it just… It doesn't work for me to make myself unavailable intentionally. I know that this person is going to need this thing from me. I'm going to go out of my way to not be available. that doesn't work.
Courtney Brame: And in fact, I think that that could be a really useful tool by potentially abusive people because it can be like a drug. When you deprive someone of something, you increase the value of it and then when you finally give it to them, enough in small doses enough to where they feel like they can only get the intensity of it from you, then it continues to increase in its value. And I think that this is how people end up and find themselves in abusive relationships where it manifests in a healthy way is not intentionally blocking myself off from the person when I know they're going to need something, but it's really come down to just making myself prioritize other things that are important to me and not compromise those things.
Courtney Brame: So, if I'm deciding, okay, for this hour of the day, I'm not going to use my phone. I put my phone away and let's say I look over and I see it vibrating or I see a call coming through, not to answer that phone. If I know it's someone who likes me or if I know it's someone who typically gets my emotional availability and energy and they've called me looking for that, I'm not going to jump to answer the phone. It's no Courtney. I decided that this hour was going to be no phone time. So that's what this hour is. I'll call that person back. And typically what's happened when I've done that accidentally is that the person figured out what they needed, didn't need me at all or they didn't want anything or it was an accident cuz that's realistic too. It looks like me I'm going to a yoga studio and you have to plan for that.
00:10:00 Courtney Brame: So now, if I want to go to the yoga studio at 3, if I'm at home, I need to leave at 2:30. So from 2:30 to probably 3 I'm sorry. If it starts from 2:30 to maybe 4:30 p.m., I'm probably not going to have my phone. So if I'm texting someone before and they're like, " my god, Courtney, I need your advice on something." I'm not going to ditch yoga class to text back and forth with them or have this phone call with them. I'm gonna go to yoga class and they'll be there when I get back. It really just looks like And that is one way that I've been prioritizing my time and myself and attempting to heal and utilize the energy from my trauma response, and make it a forward response.
Directing the Energy of Your Triggers
Courtney Brame: So, I'm taking that energy and I'm applying it to something that is much more useful to me rather than allowing it to just run freely. Because with fight, flight, freeze responses, what do we get out of that? We just have the feeling, it passes, and then what? We just wait for it to happen again. where I think the forward response sort of mitigates the intensity of it or if you have the intensity it kind of gets you more excited there's not a difference between fear and excitement. The stress that you feel in your body whether you're excited or whether you're afraid is the exact same.
Courtney Brame: So you can utilize that energy to be afraid and you can be ready to fight, you can be ready to run, you can freeze up or you can consciously take it and direct it towards something, So I choose to direct it towards my healing. And so when I get triggered by rejection or me avoiding rejection at all costs and then still experiencing rejection and then I get triggered, I recognize now, okay, here's how I'm here's how I'm moving forward with that. And I mentioned going a few layers deeper into that, which is recognizing that my avoidance of rejection is actually a fear of disappointment. And that my fear of disappointment is actually my fear of success. So getting exactly what I want scares me just as much as not getting what it is that I want. It's such a weird dynamic, man.
Courtney Brame: And it's really difficult to speak to because I'm relating it to my herpes diagnosis and it really just made it more difficult for me to have the kind of love and relationship that I want. That's what my herpes diagnosis did for me because now not only did I have to address this insecurity and this conversation around disclosure, but I also have to put myself in the spaces where I have the potential to not only get that relationship but also be rejected in an attempt to get that relationship. So, dating sites, perfect examples. This is how a lot of people meet.
Courtney Brame: A lot of people meet online and they do online dating. And for me, very quickly, I have to tell people I have herpes because this is what I do. I run Something Positive for Positive People, the nonprofit that provides mental health services and support to people who are navigating herpes stigma. And while on one hand that may be received my god, that's so awesome that you do that. On the other hand, it could be like, you got herpes. And I've experienced that, So, you take both you take the good with the bad and you just really have to move forward and that's what the forward response is all about. and then I think that my fear of success is really around is this really success? Because again the feeling that I get when I think about success is the same feeling I get when I think about disappointment.
The Fear of Success and Dealing with Disappointment
00:15:00 Courtney Brame: In fact, I would argue that I'm more comfortable with the potential of feeling disappointed than I am the potential of being excited about something. I don't let myself get excited about a thing until after the fact. So, for example, I bought a PlayStation 5 recently. I was in the store. I left with it. People wanted one. It was the last one. And it took me until I got home. I unplugged my PlayStation 4 and then I was setting up my PlayStation 5 out of the box. Took everything out and I'm plugging the cord into the PlayStation 5 before I start to get emotional about it. And it was like, wow, this Not, yay, I'm excited. This is going to happen because I get disappointed a lot.
Courtney Brame: And I've experienced some, sort of disappointing responses from people who I've been I don't know if I can say seen, but people that I thought were there or that I had some type of relationship with. And I think that that's my fault again for- cuz I think all I do is work and I don't really do a good job of building relationships. and I'm gonna touch on this in the next podcast episode, but setting an intention, being intentional, as well as initiating relationships, initiating, and being intentional with opportunities. I think that when I don't do those things, that's where I get disappointed because I allow people to disappoint me, so therefore, I'm disappointing myself.
Courtney Brame: But when I'm the one initiating, it's like there's an element of something There's something to be said for that because I'm very clear and intentional on what it is that I want. And if you tell me no now that you don't want to help me with doing that thing or meeting that need then that is better to me because then I can move on to somebody else who might say yes rather than letting time pass. I'm not asking other people because I'm hopeful that you're going to do it and then you disappoint me and it just creates higher expectations and hope and once the rug's pulled from under me, I'm not just falling to where I just fall, I can get back up. I'm falling at an altitude of which bones break, energetically and mentally and emotionally, of course.
Courtney Brame: But tying this all into my herpes diagnosis, and hopefully, if you're listening to this, something that will help you out with this as well is just Look at the emotion that your herpes diagnosis brought out within you. Don't run from it. Don't try to cope with it. Just try and recall it, and then think about the most recent time that you felt that and then the first time you felt that. And then ask yourself, what does your forward response look like when you get activated? When you're triggered or when you're in that state of high alertness, where can you direct your focus? Where can you shine that light? Where can you point that energy to where you'll be able to look up and be like, " this paid off. This worked out. Yeah, this is exactly what was supposed to happen."
Courtney Brame: And then look back and just be happy about that or just be proud of yourself that you rose to a challenge and you had the energy to meet that challenge and you did something with it. So this is what I've done. I don't know how helpful it's going to be to you, but I do hope that it looks at me. I'm using the word hope, I know that it will and I believe that it will be helpful to you if you are to utilize this for yourself. So I don't know where you are in your journey but I believe that you will continue to listen to this podcast and also get something out of it. and if you haven't already reached out to me you can say hello however you found me. you can ask for whatever resources you need. You can check in if you want to donate.
Outro: Podcast Updates and Respecting Boundaries
Courtney Brame: I'm always welcome to donations if you want to be interviewed for the podcast. We can make that happen as well. Just please don't ask me to delete the podcast episode later. I think I do a good job of vetting people and letting them know what to expect and that if they say something that they don't like that I can remove it. But yeah, I guess we really can't predict the future. There's all types of stuff that comes up and things that people want to pursue at a later time that they may not want their names attached to, which is often why I give people an alias or I just don't say their names at all and let them introduce themselves. So, yeah, just whatever is needed for you in order for you to be able to do this. If you decide that you want to be on the podcast, you do that and then just let me know.
00:20:00 Courtney Brame: Let me know how I can be supportive to you throughout your journey as well. All right, this is Something Positive for Positive People. I believe episode 117, recorded on January 27, 2023, and I stopped saying till next time, stay sex positive because of where I'm at in life right now. sex positivity does not do anything to promote and uphold healthy, strong Black families. And ever since I've been made aware of the controversy on Instagram, he and I had a discussion about that in great detail. We talked on the podcast, but we also talked one-on-one.
Courtney Brame: And it's changed the way that I view sex positivity. and you'll see that as time passes. I don't want to keep giving you all these time travel spoilers cuz you got a lot of good content to work through. And I got to stop saying hope. And I believe that you will find it useful. All right. catch you in future episodes.
Meeting ended after 00:21:34
