SPFPP 234: Narratives
The shorter the podcast episode title, the bigger the message. This is another solo episode with a real emphasis on our narratives. The unfinished business we have with our primary caregivers who nurtured us gave us experiences that allowed us to form a narrative around. This narrative becomes our beliefs. Challenging our beliefs, we begin to grieve that version of ourselves that held those narratives as true to our identities. I had an interesting experience with grief in last night's Yen Yoga class where I hyped myself up and received my own validation, however, there was a major resistance to it because in order to receive, I'd have to accept a truth that I was conditioned to reject about myself. This is an episode that absolutely reflects healing if you're up for it, or at the very least, it'll plant the seed for you because you won't be able to just unsee whatever this reflects to you. Enjoy!
Episode 234 Transcript
STI Diagnosis and the Shattering of Identity
00:00:00 Courtney Brame: You hear me mention that when a person is diagnosed with herpes that there's this intense challenging of a person's identity. The main reason for that is that our sexuality is extremely interconnected with our identity. Or maybe I should have said that backwards. Our identities are super interconnected with our sexuality. Receiving an STI diagnosis completely shatters that and it makes you have to rethink who you are. Um, we've been conditioned by society to offer our sexuality, our sexual purity, our sexual experiences to the person, a person who we're going to be with for the rest of our lives, right? Like, oh, you know, this is for my husband, this is for my wife, this is for my partner. And that's not 100%, you know, how this works, man. And so when a person receives an STI diagnosis, a herpes diagnosis, an HIV diagnosis, HPV diagnosis, it's like their entire identity has been shattered because they no longer know who they are.
Redefining Grief Beyond Death
00:01:55 Courtney Brame: The word for this is grief. I for so long have considered grief and grieving to be a process of mourning the loss of a loved one. Um, someone has to die in order for there to be grief present. And I've learned that grief is very, very, very complex. We don't just grieve the loss of a loved one. Um, we can also experience grief as I spoke with Erin Davidson about in her book uh, Break Through the Breakup. We spoke a lot about grief as it related to breakups as well as identities, as to who we thought we were with that person that we've lost in our lives, which was exclusively related to a partner.
00:04:34 Courtney Brame: Take the fact that we're living in a pandemic. You know, Covid started in 2020. It's 2022 and we still have people who are having to live in a way where we're not we're not functioning at our you know, whatever our baseline used to be. We had to create a new baseline. I don't want to use the word normal because nothing's ever been normal about existence here. Nothing. But the baseline just changes. And in the adjustment of the baseline, like the grieving process, like a lot of us are grieving... There are a lot of things that we have to grieve about as they relate to reflecting back to us who we are or who we thought we were in the presence and the experience of those other things.
The Yin Yoga Breakthrough: Hearing the Inner Voice
00:07:27 Courtney Brame: If you have taken yoga classes, you may have heard that the body stores emotions. If you've read the body keeps the score or you're familiar with any sort of trauma information, then you'll understand that just being in certain postures in a yoga class can trigger an emotional response... In my process of experiencing grief like I have, I've had this blind spot that I was just completely unaware of. I was in um it was just a basic forward fold like a hamstring stretch... and we had to be in that posture for 5 minutes.
00:08:50 Courtney Brame: In that stillness, in that silence, I heard a voice that is extremely unfamiliar to me. This voice spoke to me in a way that I have never been spoken to before. This voice said things to me that when I heard or felt the words, it struck my nervous system. I was activated. I was triggered... And what this voice said to me was, "You are worthy. You are here. Look at what you've done. Look what you've accomplished. You can make money. You can be successful. You can make money and make an impact." This voice just ran wild speaking positivity to me.
00:11:06 Courtney Brame: Courtney, you done accomplished this, you done accomplished that, you did this. Like, and you still like worrying about experiencing rejection? How you how you put presentations together, whole proposals and and got 250 whatever podcast episodes demonstrating commitment to something that you care about and you over here like humbling yourself or like trying to keep yourself from uh being confident. Like you got all the confidence in the world and this is just I almost let it. The waterworks almost flew y'all.
Trusting Yourself: From Call of Duty to Real Life
00:12:20 Courtney Brame: I think that for the first time in this yin yoga class, I heard myself say things to me that I believed so much that I took it to my video game... I play this game called Call of Duty War Zone. You basically throw 10 teams onto an island... So, I play and I'm always playing with my friends whenever we get on and whenever it's down to like the last few teams, I recognize that consistently what I will do is if I can, you know, win the game on my own. I usually choose not to. I go the unconventional route. I'll try to revive my teammates and let them finish it out even at the expense of me no longer being able to be in the game.
00:13:25 Courtney Brame: I can bring back my teammates or I can do this on my own and no matter what it doesn't matter how much they trust me or believe in me, like that's cool. But after hearing my own inner voice and believing my own inner voice, like I done tapped into something that, you know, the quality of the intensity, the power, I didn't even know existed. So like I believe, you know, my friends when they tell me I can do it, but there's always a part of me that's been like, "Yeah, right. Nah, no, you're better. You're better than me at this." like this just distrust of myself. And yesterday in this yin yoga class, like it that sparked me going into my video game experience different.
Unpacking Childhood Conditioning and the Core Wound
00:18:03 Courtney Brame: I want more of this positive self talk for myself. Where's my resistance? Where's my resistance to being able to do so? And y'all, I'mma tell you this. Like, it stems from narratives. Narratives that I still subscribe to that were instilled in me as a child. I've mentioned before that um the issue that I've had with my dad has been that he would set me up for excitement and then I would be disappointed. And so the narrative there is if I get too excited about something, I'm just going to be disappointed. It's not going to happen. So don't bother getting excited.
00:19:09 Courtney Brame: My issue with my mom has been that she groomed me to be not like my dad, not like my granddad, and also not like the men she dated. My mother groomed me to be very emotionally available... So the resistance there and like what I'm hearing as a kid is if you're like my dad or like your dad, you're going to disappoint me and you're not going to receive my love. you're you're it's it's risky like for a kid who doesn't get their primary care provers approval and love like that's that's synonymous with death.
00:21:40 Courtney Brame: So my being groomed for emotional availability, which is what my dad and my granddad didn't have, that's what I had. So when my mom wasn't getting what she needed emotionally from significant others, her dad, uh my dad, I was there and I was groomed to listen and offer emotional support and be there and be empathetic and be in tune with emotions. So this explains why I have such high emotional awareness, maturity, and intelligence. Because I was groomed for it and competing for my mom's attention or that reciprocity.
Asking for Validation to Break the Cycle
00:23:12 Courtney Brame: What I've come to learn is that, you ready? I'm about to blow your mind with this. We seek to heal the unresolved business with our primary care provider through our relationships... So healing looks one way with my mom. I've recognized, huh, in my dating life, I am pursuing emotionally unavailable women because that's what's familiar, and I'm looking to make them emotionally available to me. Like, I want from other people what I really want and need from my mother, what I want and need from my father.
00:31:11 Courtney Brame: I asked my mom, I asked my dad to send me a voice message just telling me how they see me. What do they think of me? And I realized that in that ask of what I needed... I needed validation. And the whole point of that was for me to be able to begin healing through receiving validation from places that I just have it as because again I don't want to seem needy or like I have needs. So I was able to overcome that for myself and just ask them. I asked them for what I needed and they both delivered.
00:58:53 Courtney Brame: We have to. I am grieving a narrative that no longer serves me. Narratives that no longer serve me and I'm welcoming in my own inner voice. More of that, more of how I heard myself talk to myself... I am directly asking for what I need as a way of resolving the or closing out the unfinished business of my childhood traumas with my mom and with my dad. And I'm allowing myself to stop resisting being who I am... I hope that you all got something out of this like you have from the previous episodes, y'all. And continue to like, rate, review, share, and give me your thoughts on these episodes so I can share. Till next time, stay sex positive.
