Episode 120: The Emotions Vampire
I really wanna shoutout Michelle Cassandra Johnson, author of the book, "Skill in Action". I attended a workshop she put together here in St. Louis at Brick City Yoga through Yoga Buzz where I won't give away much of what was shared beyond the meditation question, "Where am I from?".
Meditating on this, I found myself back in a memory as if it were the present. I was in my child body experiencing the energy of the first home I lived in. The feelings made my body heavy and I managed to pull two words out of the experience that reflected the memory I was in, controlled and emotionless. This explains my pursuit of freedom and why I'm in a space of so much emotional intensity.
Revisiting the environment we come from can provide insight to how we got to where we are now and that certainly is true in my experience. This yoga teacher training is bringing me into the depths of my being and I'm learning the importance of centering and connecting to oneself.
Episode 120 Transcript
Intro and the "Where Am I From?" Meditation
00:00:00 Courtney Brame: Welcome to Something Positive for Positive People, I'm Courtney Brame. Something Positive for Positive People is a 501c3 nonprofit organization equipping stigmatized communities with experience-based tools to navigate their healing processes. Thank you to Datingpositives.com, the originators of the We Need a Button campaign, for sponsoring the podcast. I want to start this podcast episode. So, we don't have a guest. It's just me. If you're new to the podcast, this isn't a great place to start. I strongly suggest you go and check out episode zero. And that gives you an idea of where Something Positive for Positive People came from, a little bit about me, and where this developed to.
Courtney Brame: As of that point in time, of that episode, I am in yoga teacher training. I've been practicing yoga since not too long after I was diagnosed with herpes. Now that I think about it, it's in its eighth year. I think it's easier for me to just say what year we're on rather than how many years it is that I've been doing something or how long it's been a thing in my life. And in yoga teacher training over this past weekend, I experienced something for the first time that might have just changed my life.
Courtney Brame: I am very new to exploring mental health and the terminology around it and understanding emotions and consciousness and awareness and I have this strong pull to it because what it does for me is give language to things that I've known or felt and just haven't been able to communicate in the past. And considering what I want to talk about this podcast episode, things that I felt wasn't the most accurate way of describing it, but just there's some sort of a knowing about the world around me and the experiences that I've had that I now feel like through exploring emotions and mental states, I am able to communicate these things and articulate them in a way that works best
Courtney Brame: for me. So, one of the things that happened over the weekend was we had a meditation. It was a workshop led by Michelle Cassandra Johnson, the author of the book Skill in Action. She was such a great facilitator of this workshop. I love her. and what she did for me, this was a major contributor to my healing process that I mean, I'm only just becoming aware of it as of recently. So, I won't give away her workshop or tell you exactly what happened. U, but there was a piece of it that really hit me and I just want to share a little bit of what that experience was. I've never been big on history.
Courtney Brame: I've never been big on exploring the past because to me it just wasn't relevant anymore. The past happened, here we are. Let's talk about what's happening now. Let's talk about how we're going to work towards the future. And there's a number of factors that played a role into why I had to have had a short memory because it served me in a lot of the things that I've done. I played sports and one of the most invaluable tools that you can have in sports outside of physical ability is a short memory. So whenever you make a mistake, whenever you mess up, you miss a tackle, you drop a pass, you miss a throw, you have to be able to forget about that and then get back to the moment, get back to the next play and be present in that down that you're in.
Courtney Brame: So history's just never been anything that I felt pulled to at all. And on Friday evening at Brick City Yoga here in St. Louis, free plug, Michelle guided us through a meditation. And the meditation was centered around the phrase," The question where am I from? And as we went through the breathing, she just guided us to take inhales and exhales. And she mentioned things that we might have considered thinking about when we thought about where we were from.
The Emotionless Inner Child and the Illusion of Control
00:05:00 Courtney Brame: And I noticed after a few times of being asked, I don't know how long it was, it felt like forever, but I'm sure it was maybe 10 minutes at the most, I felt myself not necessarily being where I'm from as far as the origins of my ancestors or anything, but I almost instantly found myself in the first house I ever lived in. My mom was very young when she had me. so we lived with my grandfather and it was my grandfather at this point in time where I found myself and I was in the house. I remember what the furniture looked like. I can tell you the exact layout of this house and the dark maroon burgundy There were some really ugly colors on this couch. it was wooden in certain spots.
Courtney Brame: So, the sofas were individually separated by some wood. So, if you flopped down on the couch, you could easily bruise your ass because you flopped on a piece of wood. and I just remember the texture of it feeling like the surface of an artificial flower. I remember the yellow in the kitchen. I remember just everything. And I was facing the kitchen and I was in this environment. And the earliest memory that I have about where it put me in the space of where I'm from energetically and I very well know that I was able to give it two words or at first the feeling was controlled like I felt I couldn't move. and I heard her say, "All right, I invite you to stand up. We're going to move around a little bit."
Courtney Brame: And I just** sat there and my body was in that room in the yoga room, but my being was back at however old I was in this space. I didn't see myself to know exactly what my age was. And I felt a heaviness of the atmosphere and the atmosphere felt very emotionless is the word that I use to describe that aspect. So when finally I caught myself and I was like, "Whoa, this isn't me. This is a memory." And I pulled myself out and I was able to just look around and go, " this is my memory of feeling controlled and just not necessarily having any sort of feelings about it. To me, this is just the way things are."
Courtney Brame: and when I pulled out of my body, my head wasn't over the sofa. So, I might have been in single digits of age, somewhere between four and seven, I want to say, in the memory. So, going through this meditation, that's where I was. And when we got called or invited out of the meditation, we were instructed to journal a little bit. So, it was just a short bit of journaling we shared with the people around us. But I don't want to give away her workshop. But what that ended up leading me to was after the meditation and after I got home that night, I thought about what happened there.
Courtney Brame: And I think it was the next day that I ended up writing out exactly what I was experiencing. And the question, where am I from? And my relationship to history or my views and beliefs about history may have been some sort of a mental block to keep myself from revisiting that because I felt like I was there and I didn't like it. and making the connection between where I'm from and where I am. All of my actions, behaviors, decisions, where I am in life, they all make sense as a result of me just putting these two things together. Right?
Courtney Brame: So, we have young Courtney who is emotionally numb, just there, views things as very stoic. It is what it is, whatever. And feeling controlled, no actions were my own or I remember always being told what not to do. Don't do this, don't do that. Don't get nobody pregnant. Don't bring no white girl home. Don't do this. Don't get bad grades. Don't talk back to the teacher. So just the compliance was such a big thing like I had to be controlled and I understand where that came from. raising a Black boy in the United States of America, it's almost a luxury to be able to have the kind of freedom that you would think kids should just be able to have that you just don't get with dark skin or being Black or being a minority, period.
Becoming an "Emotional Blood Bank"
00:10:00 Courtney Brame: But that's another conversation on something that I'll share with you all from an interview that I did with mental realness mommy. and we'll talk about that later. So, the way that I live my life now, the most beautiful beautiful, the most visual analogy that I can give you. Here's the image. At single-digit age Courtney didn't really have the luxury of exploring and experiencing emotions, per se. I mean, I'd get excited, get disappointed. But if you listen to other episodes, know what that's about. But the primary emotion would have been fear, if there was one, and fear as a way of control in order to keep me safe.
Courtney Brame: me I live complete So the opposite of control is I value freedom with all of my being and I welcome emotions. I've set my life up in a way that welcomes a space for all of the most intense emotions to come into my space. And I view myself as this emotional vampire that works at an emotions blood bank. So I have the most access to blood or the emotion blood or whatever it is, however you need to visualize that. And I don't think I'm hurting anybody because the blood is given to the blood bank that I just so happen to always be at.
Courtney Brame: And so the more intense the emotion, it doesn't matter if it's positive or negative, it's like the more I get to experience it. And so when people come to me and say things like, "I don't know what to do with my life. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me in regards to a herpes diagnosis." I feed off of that. I feel energized by it or feel alive by it. Whatever the opposite of numbness is because that's the feeling that I associate with my childhood experience with emotions. That's what I feel like and that's where I'm at now. when people tell me how happy they are that they found Something Positive for Positive People.
Courtney Brame: When people share with me their disclosure story and they tell me how happy they are or how they did this work for themselves, these things make me happy. And in the same breath, someone can completely just open up to me about what's happening in their lives, how they feel about themselves, how they feel about other people, how they feel about situations, and that intensity of emotion is what I am most drawn to. And I don't absorb it as my own. Maybe part of me still has this deep deep sense of not groundedness, but I don't let myself feel what other people are feeling. I pick up on it and I know what it is and I want to be in the space of it.
Courtney Brame: I have that it's like I am not reliable. I don't have to deal with the after effects of the emotion. It's kind of like if you take what you need you get it or it's like if you like kids but you don't want any of your own. You'll play with someone else's kid and then when it s* on itself you give it back and you leave. or if you play with someone's dog and then it's time to go walk the dog or make the time to come back home and walk it and do all of the responsibilities and take care of it, you get to just leave. That's how I am with emotions. I want to play with them. I want to experience them, explore them. I want to know what you're feeling because I get to experience them vicariously through other people, right? And so being
The Meliodas "Full Counter" and the Gift of Intensity
00:15:00 Courtney Brame: being in the space of emotionally intense situations is just where I feel charged. I feel rejuvenated. And I think that throughout my life, I've been told by partners, the people that I've been the most vulnerable with, that I am emotionally a lot. because it's happened more than two times, I can say that maybe it's true. And there's so many ways to connect this. In yoga teacher training, we did an exercise that had us bring this up too. And the thing that I realize is that there's a gift in that thing that's supposed to be my flaw, the bad thing that happened to me or the bad attribute of myself. in that I'm emotionally quote unquote a lot or too much.
Courtney Brame: And I think that that's just an intensity that isn't mine, but reflected back to other people, so to speak, because I've developed this safety mechanism to not get too invested in people even. And if I like the space, I'm there. And when I wish I knew if people were nerds because there's an anime called Seven Deadly Sins. The main character Malotus, he's a f** demon. And if you just start watching the show and I just spoiled that for you, but his special ability is his counter where if you send an energy blast to him, he can full counter it and it comes back at you amplified. Right.
Courtney Brame: So when it comes to emotions, this is a character that I can really relate to because when emotions come to me, I am able to counter it and not be affected. And in the counter, it's sent back to the person. And it's just this intensity that often a lot of people just aren't ready for. And I understand that now. It's taken me a while because I'm a child in this space of exploring emotions and knowing the power that they have and what they can do. So if I'm just being in this space and experiencing the energies of other people, their disappointment, their joy, and it's like, this is pleasant.
Courtney Brame: and then we exchange vulnerability or share experiences or whatnot. I think I show a lot of parts of themselves that they don't like and that's intimidating. That is scary. But at the same time, this is such a beautiful gift to have. the way that I choose to look at it at least it's a beautiful gift to have because executed properly I don't necessarily feel drained by other people's emotions and I can take the gifts in their vulnerability that comes through me and not necessarily counter it back directly to them but send it through me in a way like how light goes through a diamond damn these are some
Courtney Brame: very arrogant analogies that I'm using. So, please bear with me. how you flash a light through a diamond and it separates the light and the fragments of the rainbow. I sort of break it down so that it's more digestible for the rest of the world to see. And that's what I feel like Something Positive for Positive People is. When people bring me their emotions and their vulnerabilities, I'm able to use my quote unquote emotional intensity and send that out into the world so that other people can enjoy the view of this separated light slash the rainbow or the diamond, whatever it is that they're looking before I get too much off track because I know I even took notes this time.
Who Am I Without the World?
Courtney Brame: I took little notes so that I can put this here. But I don't talk much about myself. And I think that maybe it's time I start to do that because the reason I don't talk about myself is because I don't know myself necessarily. I think that perfect example, I had this point in time where I thought I was queer because I was attracted to a non-binary person with a vulva. And I was like asking people, I was like, "Am I queer? What's this mean for my sexuality? Does not compute. I'm attracted to someone that's not a woman." And I spoke to enough people to come to the conclusion that I'm just a heterosexual.
00:20:00 Courtney Brame: Sorry to be so plain and boring, but I think this was an example of me actually absorbing what was happening around me and what that might mean and drawing meaning from the information that I surround myself with and the experiences of other people around me. So, that's just one example of me just having to rely so much on the world around me to tell me who I am. It's one thing to look at the world and see who I'm not.
Courtney Brame: But if I were to just sit in a room by myself, I notice how uncomfortable I am because when I sit alone, when I'm in that quiet space, there appears to be nothing there. Just like that feeling of when I got called into that meditation of where am I from? I was in a space where there wasn't any real I don't know what emotions were like I didn't have any experience with intense emotions and I'm f****** addicted to that s*** and this is where I mentioned codependency before in a previous episode how I feel like I'm addicted to being needed.
Courtney Brame: and I think that this gives me better language to navigate it. I'm not editing that out. I was going to go through this without having to stop and edit. I am emotionally intense and that's okay. This can be a gift if executed properly. If I'm able to really center myself and recognize what it is that I believe that the thing that I feel is just like this numbness. And it helps because I can remain objective in a lot of situations. I don't get pulled into other people's drama. I don't get pulled into if they're raising kids and mommy and daddy are arguing or the kid has to grow up, like I'm not invested. I'm just there.
Courtney Brame: I play with the baby and then when it's time for me to leave, I get to leave. And this is just like how I've been in my career, in my relationships. And now that I'm aware of this, it's time that I explore this. It is truly a gift to me to be able to use this seemingly infinite emotional intensity to be able to support other people's healing. But I realize now that I don't know what I feel personally. And damn, that was a very deep ass thing to say.
Courtney Brame: That was a very vulnerable thing for me to say because it's something that I hadn't said out loud before. I texted someone that sentence and that's what made me realize, wow, I really need to explore this, but it makes me wonder, it begs the question of, do I need What is healing? What do I feel? And maybe I really need to make space to explore what my feelings and my needs are. and that can be helpful. I don't know exactly what that looks like. I know that I'm only through the first three weekends of yoga teacher training. And if I had this kind of blowing epiphany then over the next seven weekends that I have, who knows what's going to happen. I might mess around and be a different person completely.
Courtney Brame: But I do believe that this kind of goes back to my interpretation of God or source or universal creator what the intention was of life which is just that it was bored. I think whatever created us was just bored and maybe split itself out into the infinity of what life is. And we're all on a course to just kind of make our way back home and think about how boring it is to just be alone to know everything and not have anything be a new experience.
Therapy as a Luxury vs. Necessity
00:25:00 Courtney Brame: So why' I say that? I don't even know. Just if that didn't register, just disregard. But I have this belief that if life had a reason to be what it is, it would just be because the thing that connects us all needed to separate itself in order to experience itself and experience otherness and to be expert to experience and be experienced as a result of just straight up boredom because there's really no other explanation for that.
Courtney Brame: So, I apologize if you're a super religious person and I just offended the s* out of you. But this is a safe space where we can openly explore our thoughts and whatnot. So the next steps in this for me are just going to be to connect with myself. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know. I've been exploring getting a therapist, but I'm a smartass and know it all. And I feel like what's going to happen is they're going to make me say the same things that I'm saying out loud to you right now. And then there may or may not be action steps that I may or may not already know need to take place.
Courtney Brame: But I've also had this deep rooted belief that being able to get therapy might have been a luxury or is a luxury. And that's something that I got to work through and deal with because I don't think that's the case. I've seen it work for people. I see people working through different aspects of their life and exploring their own healing. and it's something that I hope to be able to provide for the people as an option to explore their healing processes as well. So, if I'm going to do that, then maybe I need to dabble into it myself. So, at some point I'm going to do that, but right now I really need to focus on my takeaways from this because there are more takeaways from it.
Courtney Brame: big thing being like because emotions were not really understood about how to explore them or I didn't really have any knowledge about them growing up or know what they meant, what they were. It was just control and then just keeping me safe. That was the big thing. The men in my life were excellent providers as far as what was needed physically. We had a roof over our heads. We had a new game system when we got good grades every Christmas, electricity, and we just had everything that we needed. We had food, shelter, clothes, and there wasn't much expression of emotions, because the priority was survival. And when your priorities are survival, maybe exploring emotions is a luxury.
Courtney Brame: So, I've created a life for myself where I really don't value stability or providing. especially because I remember my mom being "Don't be like your daddy." And that was one of the things that kept me and my dad probably as separate as we've been. and just him prioritizing what made sense and what was needed and being a provider and stable that it made me be like, I don't want stability and to be a provider because my mom told me not to be like my dad and so I'm going to not be like my dad and I'm going to explore emotions and freedom and not stay at one job and one field for my entire life. It's funny how these things play out.
Courtney Brame: but I said, trying to bring this back full circle. I don't talk about myself very much. I don't talk about what I go through personally, partly because I don't feel like it's necessary or it's relevant or necessary because it's about the guest. but I just felt compelled to share a little bit more of myself in this space lately. As part of my healing process, if this is going to be a space for healing and for people to explore what may work for them, then I got to jump into it, too. I got to lead by example. just like leaving the reviews.
Redefining Stability and Finding True Emotions
Courtney Brame: Cuz I can't ask y'all to leave reviews of a podcast I ain't left a review for. So, is there anything else that I want to say before I go? We're approaching the 30 minute mark. already shout it out dating.com through we need a button campaign so without me continuing to ramble here thank you all for continuing to listen to the podcast thank you for being supportive of the nonprofit and I need to not care about what other people
00:30:00 Courtney Brame: Today, but it would be nice to know how you feel about me sharing a little bit more of myself here. The solo episodes used to make me really uncomfortable, but now I'm really learning that there's a lot that I actually have to say and there's a lot of growing that is taking place for me. and now that I'm aware of this unconscious action that I'm taking as a result of possibly my childhood, I've gone in the complete opposite direction.
Courtney Brame: You think that, how to model the adult men in my life who were providers who yeah, I have enough, but I think that this has kind of cultivated this belief to me that money is bad or having too much money makes you a bad person. And so, I have enough to do what it is that I need to do, but not be able to do any more than that. And with more money you have to make or you become less in tune with emotions. And I really like emotions. This s***'s cool.
Courtney Brame: But I got to learn about my own emotion and what I'm feeling so that I can have my own intensity and be connected to that and not require other people in order to feel the intensity of emotion. So, that's my quest. So, I'm on a quest now to figure out what my natural state of emotion is and also, I guess, create stability for myself because I've been fighting it for so long. All right, y'all. This concludes this episode of Something Positive for Positive People. Please rate, review, subscribe to this podcast. Well, I mean, I don't know.
Courtney Brame: I don't care to get big or go mainstream or anything like that because I feel like the way that it is now just makes it so cool. I'm free to say whatever I want to say. There's no one, it's not like I'm getting paid to not talk about certain things or talk about certain things. So a non- mainstream space is good where it's at. So I guess share it to people who you think invite people to this space of healing as you see fit. Make sure that you can cosign for him and that you approve of him as a person. If you wouldn't hang out with him, don't send him this podcast. All right, y'all.
Courtney Brame: Till next time, stay sex positive.
Meeting ended after 00:33:14
