SPFPP 277: Something Positive for Men Part 1

People praise me for being vulnerable on a regular basis and I've accepted it up until my therapist pointed out to me that people don't connect with that part of me. It didn't take long for me to grasp what that really meant because I know I've really been able to hide behind this mask of vulnerability that is Something Positive for Positive People. He pointed out to me that I'm not sharing my experience or much of anything about me, as Courtney. I've realized that is because I've accumulated this immunity to criticism through SPFPP. Who's going to give me shit about having herpes when I'm doing this so people don't wanna kill themselves? You gotta be a real dick to talk shit about me for that. But I do open up myself to the criticism that comes with sharing my own emotions and experiences as a man navigating this space and that feels right in my soul to speak that truth so here it is. I put this out here to connect with and encourage more men into this space that is crying for masculine presence and experiences.

Episode 277 Transcript

An Unfiltered Message for Men

00:00:00 Courtney Brame: Welcome to Something Positive for Positive People. I'm Courtney Brame. You know what this is by now if you've been listening to these podcast episodes. You know that this is essentially a self-help resource for people with herpes. Everything's donation based. whatever you can give. If you found value in any of the episodes or the resources that you found through Something Positive for Positive People, please consider making a donation. Um, I'm very much 100% fully invested in making Something Positive for Positive People, something that people can take seriously, something that break into the world of STD prevention, um, and sex education because there's so much here that we're accumulating from people's experiences that can be very useful to the sex education that people receive early on prior to engaging in sexual activity. This episode is for men. If you are not a man, if you do not identify as a man, you have been warned. I know that everybody's going to probably still listen because they still want to hear what I got to say, especially with this particular topic.

00:01:46 Courtney Brame: But uh I am speaking to men in this podcast episode. You have been warned. I don't want to hear no I don't want to hear no s***. Like if you have issues with what it is that I'm saying in this podcast episode, you can keep it to yourself. Uh, this is probably the only time I'll say that because it's very important to me that I be as real and raw and honest as I can possibly be from my own experience, the experiences of men that I've spoken to. And I really don't want to have to filter myself for this and sound politically correct. I've done that s*** in 300ish podcast episodes. I can have a few episodes uh where I don't necessarily do that. So, I don't know how many episodes this is going to take for me to get the overall message that I want to get across, but I do want to highlight avoidance. I want to highlight emotional intelligence. I want to talk about uh emotional availability or unavailability.

00:02:48 Courtney Brame: I want to talk about what it means to be of value. And I also want to talk about the importance of being a man and what that really means and what that means to me. Uh so that y'all understand that y'all's presence here is necessary. I did a survey and the survey in 2021 had 1,149 people take it. of that I think about 15% were men and the rest were women. Um, and I believe trans non-binary people uh made up a very very small percentage of that as well. But my point here is highlighting the fact that all these people ain't giving herpes to themselves. All of these people are not the only ones who need access to resources. And I get it, you know, for what it is that I'm doing, the message that I'm relaying. I hope that you are someone who can come here, get this message, and then leave. But I really want and believe I really believe that every man who comes through here is probably not finding what they've been looking for and maybe just decided, oh, what I need ain't here.

The Struggle with Emotional Articulation

00:04:06 Courtney Brame: Let me go and get up out of here and go on about his business. And then that ain't the case. And I had this experience where I made a friend. Um I was seeking out men's groups on Meetup when uh I first got to Portland, Oregon. And I ended up connecting with a younger guy. He's about 26 years old. And he and I met up,we got lunch and then we met up again. We went out and I think it was the third time that we went out. He started following me on social media. So, he saw the kind of stuff that I post and uh he asked me something about it was some sort of relationship advice. It had something to do with uh dating women and uh he said something to me. I don't remember what it was, but I replied in a way that he was surprised by how I replied to him.

00:04:56 Courtney Brame: And his surprise came from a place of seeing that I post a lot of um el LGBT issues, sex positivity, and um speaking to a lot of the sex education components, things like gender things in relation to uh feminism, I guess you could say. And really him having this idea that maybe I wasn't a safe person for him to be a man around. And that that was generally what I got out of how he responded to whatever my reaction was. I was like, why? Yeah. Like, why wouldn't I say this thing, whatever it was that I said. And I can't remember, it was so long ago. And I've been trying to put this podcast episode together for probably months now at this point because I know how important it is that I inspire men's voices in this space as well. I've had men come on and they've done the episode and then they've asked me to remove the episode. I've spoken to men who have really struggled with being able to articulate their emotions.

00:06:02 Courtney Brame: And once we together are able to get them out there, it's so uncomfortable. was really raw and unfamiliar that it's something that I think that we tend to run away from. And fortunately for me, uh, I've been able to work through the discomfort of saying certain things out loud that I might have not necessarily been able to put words to and really be able to not only have the emotion, but feel the emotion, which is often time I think what a lot of men do is avoid feeling the emotion. And that that's not nearly as helpful as just going through feeling it when it comes up. Giving yourself a little bit of time to feel it, even if it's just briefly, right? Yes, there is the fear of once we have an emotional reaction that maybe the floodgates open and then that s*** never stops and we just lose it, right? That's a real fear. So therefore, we need to be able to get to a point where we can get better at that, understanding what that feeling is and then taking the energy behind it and then applying it to whatever it is that has meaning in our lives.

Identity Invalidation and the Choice to Thrive

00:07:11 Courtney Brame: That's what we really got to learn how to do. Closing out the conversation u or my reason for having a conversation with uh the guy that I was just mentioning was because it made me realize that damn you know maybe I am so connecting with and communicating for women that men aren't necessarily feeling seen in my experiences or safe in my experiences to be able to to engage with me to have a real conversation with me and talk about the issues that they have in dating or to even uh carry on some type of an ongoing friendship with me. And because of that challenge, because of that struggle, uh i've been more aware of that lately. And one uh two instances actually that really inspired me to really go deep into making this particular podcast episode series has been one black man that I met. I met him in New York, man. And then we were at a herpes support group meeting and everybody was kind of going around introducing themselves, telling their story and it was all good.

00:08:20 Courtney Brame: And I had met him before. I don't want to say his name. And if he's listening to this, like I want you to know you inspired this. You and um another podcast guest that I had have inspired me being pushed over the edge to really speak in this way because of how necessary it is. But I remember the first time we met, he mentioned that he knows he's unattractive. He's accepted that. that he's like, "Oh, yeah. I didn't already accept that and I decided to not date. I chose to not date. These were his words." And when I heard that, you know, I heard it for what it was. But underneath that, there was kind of like this there's always an undercurrent of emotion behind people's words. And what I picked up from that was, "If I was more attractive, I'd date again. If I felt like I was more attractive, I'd date again. I'd be dating again if I were validated in my attractiveness." And we constantly validate

00:09:09 Courtney Brame: our own identities with the behaviors that we display. And when I first started this podcast, I thought that suicide ideation had something to do with a loss of control. But what I've learned over time is that it's really about identity invalidation. When one uh when someone who they think they are is not who others think they are and they're constantly reminded that they aren't who they think they are, that is identity invalidation. And one of the coping strategies for that, I am not a licensed psychologist or therapist. I'm just telling you what I've seen. One of the consistent coping strategies for such a thing is to shift your uh like i believe that our beliefs translate into thoughts translate into feelings translate into actions and behaviors. All right? And i believe we can challenge our belief systems with behavior change. So that whole cycle that i just gave you from belief to thought to feeling to action can be reversed and have the same impact.

00:10:15 Courtney Brame: So if you change your behaviors, you start to change how you feel. You start to change how you think and you start to restructure what your beliefs are with your actions. And so I feel like what he did was instead of fighting and resisting the idea that he's unattractive, I think that he decided to just lean into that and say, you know what, I'm unattractive. And it wasn't from a place of acceptance though. It was from a place of u feeling a sense of empowerment with choice. choosing to be unattractive, choosing to uh or making the illusion of choice and choosing to say I choose this. Right? So on one hand, this can be a way of empowering uh and challenging your own beliefs, which is, oh, am I going to keep lying to myself about being attractive? But then on the other hand, what I saw in that was a submission to an untrue reality, right? It's a copout and it's lazy to me.

The Fury Against Suicide Ideation

00:11:18 Courtney Brame: It's genuine, it's genuinely lazy for me to hear someone go, I'm unattractive and you know I'm going to just choose to believe that rather than make yourself challenge that system of beliefs with your own behavior. Everybody can do something to make themselves more attractive. I genuinely believe that. And as someone who's worked in the fitness field, i've seen this s*** happen. I've seen people change how they eat. I've seen people push themselves a little bit harder to move their body and make consistent lifestyle changes with consistency. The consistency piece is a b****. It's hard, but you got to f****** do it, man. You have to do that s***. If you are unhappy with where you are and you have the ability to change a thing, you have to change that thing. And the reason that I'm getting so fired up and passionate about this right now is because uh I i'm mentioning to y'all Something Positive for Positive People started because people with herpes wanted to kill themselves.

00:12:21 Courtney Brame: And the second time that I met this person um he reiterated that he has chosen not to date which I still believe is b*******. It's not a choice. It's a submission to the laziness of what has to be that choice. Right. U but he also mentioned he said the only reason that he was still here was because he made a promise to his best friend that he wouldn't kill himself. And that infuriated me in the moment as it always does when people talk about suicide. This is probably something I don't publicly broadcast, but I get f****** furious to hear people who the the odds of being born between abortions, between miscarriages, between periods, between birth control, between condoms, between masturbation, between the unalignment of the the where the woman is with her menstrual cycle, with the health of the man and the ability to reproduce and all the sperm cells that connect to that particular egg or that don't connect to that particular egg. All the nuts that have gone in socks, tissues, toilets, mouths, assholes want to undo that process.

00:13:34 Courtney Brame: It f****** infuriates me. My mom threatened suicide. My sister threatened suicide. I have a relative who killed herself. Uh not not blood relatives, but someone that i considered to be family. I had a high school teammate kill himself and I've heard other people. I had an ex-girlfriend. She tried to kill herself uh in the bathtub and fortunately whatever my spider sense was that went off, I was able to call whatever hotline it was. I didn't know her address, but they were able to f****** find her in the process and save her life. She's gone on. This was probably 13, 14 years ago. And now she's got a family. She's living life. And all because she made it through that. and we had a conversation recently uh and she's doing well. You know, she apologized for how she was treating people around that time. And so for me, like seeing both sides of the spectrum between people having these suicidal thoughts, actually going f****** through with it, and then hearing people say, "I would kill myself because of this f****** stupid ass herpes diagnosis that I have gotten so much from because of how i've chosen

00:14:42 Courtney Brame: to reshape my beliefs about this diagnosis. My behaviors have directly f****** impacted what I believe to be true about this virus. When I was first diagnosed, I wanted a cure. I didn't want this s***. Don't nobody want this s*** when they get it. I got it, then I don't want this s***. And over the years, i've had to have that battle of choice on whether or not or how I was going to decide how to move forward with this s***. Initially, I am so grateful that suicide doesn't cross my mind. And perhaps that's because of the early experiences that i've had with my own relatives, with the people around me, with uh people that i've seen go through with and kill themselves. And like I see enough people take other people's lives. Why the f*** would I want to take mine? Like why would I want to take anybody else's? Why would we want to do that?

00:15:32 Courtney Brame: And I understand, you know, different people are in different stages or wherever they are. But you got to accept if I got to accept that you might be dealing with that. You got to accept the fact that suicide ideation pisses me off. And as a man, it is my responsibility to use that pissed-off energy in a very productive manner. That has developed into what is Something Positive for Positive People. This is one expression of Courtney Warren Brame. Uh the first of his name house. I was about to try and make a Game of Thrones joke, but that might go over some people's head. But this is what I do with that anger. When I had herpes, I was f****** embarrassed. When I got my diagnosis, I was f****** embarrassed. And I'm saying f****** a lot to emphasize with a word because you can't see the passion in my face. You can't see that my f****** eyes are watering right now.

Tapping into the Forward Trauma Response

00:16:24 Courtney Brame: That there's this radiation of heat coming from my central nervous system along like across my shoulders and my back like you don't see this. So I have to use my words as best I can to articulate not just what I'm saying but the emotional undercurrent of what I'm saying like this right now. What's coming up is because i'm angry. This is the anger that is being focused here because I don't see men showing up. There is such a need for a masculine presence in this space for men to come out and say these are my experiences. This is what I need so that I can deliver. I have delivered for the last six years. For women, it's been super useful. It's been super helpful. Men have come and spoken to me periodically here and there. I have a little bit of experience to pull from there. But it's the ones that I don't hear from now that i'm most worried about because the few that I hear from have these experiences, this extreme sense of suicide ideation, devaluing of self.

00:17:26 Courtney Brame: And if you're not conscious with what you do with your anger and your emotions and whatever else is underlying what it is that you say to yourself, what you believe about yourself and your actions and behaviors, what's going to happen is those are going to be self-destructive or possibly even other destructive ways of expressing themselves. I don't want to f****** see that. I don't want people to have to experience that. If my role in this world is to make it a better place through herpes and through herpes stigma, then so be it. Like I, i'll direct my anger towards that. I have this outlet for it. People always tell me, "Oh my god, you're so calm. You're so kind." Yes, i am. Because I have my f****** outlet for my fury. This is where that comes out. And while it may be me listening, I think it might have crept out in uh one of the episodes i had with a guy who talked about himself, you know, just in a negative way.

00:18:21 Courtney Brame: And that that pisses me off because it kind of goes down that path of suicide ideation. It goes down that path of depression. And again, do you know the odds of being born? You know, there are people who i saw. I saw this dude playing VR getting a workout in with no legs. He had a f****** VR on. He was telling you, "Hey y'all, you can stay fit. You can get in shape. It's as easy as this." And he's doing the punching motions. He was fit. And I was so happy when I read the comments. There was nothing but encouragement and positivity for that. That man was born, maybe went through, maybe he was born without legs. Maybe he had a tragedy that made him lose his legs. But that man didn't kill himself. You tell me you get some bumps on your dick and you are ready to just jump off a bridge.

00:19:08 Courtney Brame: You ready to put a gun in your mouth? You ready to eat some f****** swallow pills, cut yourself? Come on. Life is not supposed to be easy. Life is supposed to be about suffering. When you identify where this suffering is, you got to backtrack that s***. Trace that s*** back. When you get a herpes diagnosis, ask yourself how you feel. And if you don't know how you feel, ask yourself the last time you felt like you didn't know how you felt. Ask yourself the first time that you can recall not knowing how you felt. And when you have those three experiences between your herpes diagnosis, the first most recent time that you can think about how when you felt what you feel, and then the first time you felt that, you have three situations that you can look at and you can go, damn, okay, between that and this and this, I think that i was unsure of how i felt.

00:19:59 Courtney Brame: And with the situations, you at least have something that you can take to somebody and get help processing that s***. If you are incapable of processing it on your own to identify what that pattern is, that pattern is going to tell you what this thing is bringing up for you and what you really need to deal with in your life. I say this s*** all the time. For me, herpes was my avoidance of rejection. I would avoid rejection at all costs to the point where i would only date women who shot their shot with me first. You can't reject me if I don't approach you. You can't reject me if I don't ask you for anything. This goes back into my own hyperindependence to the point where even my father, he didn't know I needed anything. My dad was around. I saw my dad on weekends. Sometimes I go over there during the week. He always lived pretty close to my mom.

Asking for What You Need and Breaking the Cycle

00:20:44 Courtney Brame: So getting over there wasn't an issue. And when I approached my dad at 32, 33 years old about him not giving him what I needed, he was like, "Damn, son. You never asked for anything." thing and it blew my f****** mind because all this time, you know, i'm thinking, "Oh, you're supposed to give me what I need, but I'm supposed to ask for what I need." That's one instance. Another would be uh in the dating world, you know, i would argue that Something Positive for Positive People manifested itself through me as a trauma response. Like i am very much emotionally available and invested in Something Positive for Positive People because i was emotionally available and accessible and intuitive to my mom's needs as i grew up. Like from childhood till now, i am very f****** emotionally aware, intelligent, and available to what i choose to be emotionally available for. I made jokes about not being emotionally available. I make jokes about loving emotionally unavailable women and going after them, but the reality is it's not been that way.

00:21:59 Courtney Brame: And this is where I would normally cut this b**** off and start over because I said a lot of things that were really good, but at the same time, this being where i'd stumble through or f******, it's probably because i'm about to say something that needs to be said, but I don't want to say it for some reason or i'm going to have to fumble through it because i'm saying it out loud for the first time. But uh the way that this has manifested, it's almost like amplified that belief that I have about myself for not being someone who approaches women. Like now I don't have to. So it went from damn, I got herpes, so now i'm not going to date anymore because that would have been the belief. It would have been the hard belief in the beginning of f*** i'm diagnosed with herpes. All right, i'm going to choose to get in front of this thing and i'm just not going to date anymore. What kind of b******* is that?

00:22:46 Courtney Brame: Right? Like I could have done that, but instead what I did was I didn't put myself out there. I stumbled into situations where someone would initiate and then i'd have to just tell them, "Hey, i got herpes. This is a situation." And stumbling through that the way that I did, I ended up in some relationships. I ended up having some sexual partners. I ended up in some uh situationships. whatever you want to call them. But the avoidance of rejection is probably what even got me in the situation of having herpes in the first place because it wasn't me going after a woman who I knew that I wanted. It was me essentially taking whatever I could get prior to my diagnosis. And even after my diagnosis, it’s probably been the same thing. Having been in therapy for three years, and i haven't been back since uh December, it's March now. I haven't gone back to therapy because i recognized that there was a little bit of a dependence for me.

00:23:44 Courtney Brame: Like on one hand, yeah, I want to be able to pay him his full rate, but I cannot. I can't pay him his full rate. Just being completely honest. But there were moments where i would go, hm, I can't wait to talk about this in therapy. And therapy being six days. So the six days that i'm waiting for therapy to come, i'm not processing what happened. I'm not implementing a new behavior. I'm not implementing uh some sort of a strategy to deal with it. I'm not communicating with the person that made me feel a certain way uh to let them know, hey, you made me feel this. This is how you made me feel. This is what i'm going to do from it. I'm going to set this boundary. You can either honor it or we are going to have to part ways. i've been practicing that. i've been practicing that uh for the last three months.

00:24:32 Courtney Brame: It's hard. It's really, really difficult. And when I get done, i have my moments where i feel great about myself. I set a boundary with uh there was this company I was supposed to do a talk for. i'm not going to go into too many details about it, but I wasn't happy with their communication. I wasn't happy with what their ask of me was. And then coming to the point where, you know, the event was about to start that day. I hit them up and i said, "Hey, i'm unhappy with the communication here. i'm very disappointed. I don't like how this was said, this was said, and this was said, and these are three things that are inconsistent and contradict one another. I turned down money. I mean, it wasn't going to be much, but I turned down the opportunity to speak and add that to my resume. I turned down money for Something Positive for Positive People.

00:25:15 Courtney Brame: And when I did that, it was uncomfortable as f***, but what if i would have been like, "Oh, i'mma process this in therapy." And I went through with the event and I would have gotten my money. I would have done this thing only to find out later that it was out of integrity and I would have felt like s*** for having done it in the first place. Can't do that. I can't do that. No. And going back to because I don't think I closed this out, but going back to the uh avoidance of rejection thing, like that was my battle with my herpes diagnosis. When I look at the first time i experienced this, this embarrassment uh or i'm sorry, having my diagnosis and feeling embarrassed because i didn't want to be the dude that was giving people herpes made me think back to another time where uh there was just like an embarrassment and it would probably be after having sex with somebody that I wasn't really proud of myself to be having sex with.

00:26:04 Courtney Brame: if it was somebody who maybe wasn't as attractive as i would have liked or if it wasn't somebody attractive by the standards of myself, like if we didn't match each other, if we didn't go together. And then I look at the first time that i might have been embarrassed. The first time i might have been embarrassed was the girl that I did like that I approached and tried to get with probably just dismissed me and turned me down. So, we've got embarrassment linked to my avoidance of rejection. So, moving forward, it just became all right, i ain't never getting rejected again. And i've been facing that s*** lately. Like i shot, i shot my shot this weekend. Was it this weekend? Yeah, over this weekend. You know, um I hit her up like, "Yo, this is what i'm feeling." She was like, "Oh, well, i'm thinking of friends. Like, what are you thinking?" I was like, "Well, i'm thinking more than friends. I'm thinking of friends and dot dot dot." And uh the way that the conversation ended,

00:26:53 Courtney Brame: she's just like, "Oh, you know, i'm really flattered, but i'm not in the place for that right now." So, she let me down real easy. And i am so much more proud of myself for not just avoiding that conversation and taking myself into a friend relationship that i have no desire to be in. That felt really good to me despite having experienced rejection for it and it didn't have anything to do with herpes, right? And I think that we put so much of our emphasis on our herpes diagnosis that we don't even look at what that s*** represents and then deal with that because when you deal with that, the herpes diagnosis becomes completely f****** irrelevant as shared in this experience that i just told you about. The second thing or the second person that really inspired me to go through this was a recent podcast guest I had on. He's a u he's a male. Uh they are a male. I don't remember if his pronouns were he or they.

Vulnerability vs. Immunity to Criticism

00:27:48 Courtney Brame: Uh but no, we talked about him and his experience he talked about on the podcast. He was very real. He was very raw and he shared the episode on his social media feed and one of his good girlfriends had reached out to him and was like, "Hey, like you the way that you're talking is disgusting. Uh you're such an incel." She was just like s*** talking to him and downtalking him. And i happened to have reached out to him not too long after this because someone reached out to me about that episode because she was like, "Wow, what he's sharing about this girl sounds exactly like me." I listened to his podcast episode and I got up off my ass and I took a shower for the first time in days. And i was like, "Yo, do you mind me sharing that with him? Would you actually like for you to tell them?" So I connected them. Uh she told him uh her story and how it inspired her.

00:28:41 Courtney Brame: And then he reached out to me with screenshots from this said he was going to reach out to me and he was considering having me take the podcast episode down because of this criticism that he received from this woman after him being raw and real about his own experience. And even that, reading that s*** infuriated me because on one hand it's like, you know, women ask us to be more and more emotionally expressive and share our feelings, tell our stories, what's going on in our minds. And then here we have a man who f****** does that. A young man at that. I think he might have been uh 23. He's around 23 years old, somewhere between 22 and 25. Um he did that and this is what he was met with. He was met with being called a f****** incel. For those who don't know, it's an involuntary celibate, which would essentially be like the first guy that I explained to you who said that he's not dating, who said that he's uh unattractive and like opting out of dating entirely.

00:29:41 Courtney Brame: Not because they're not good at it, but not but because they don't want to do what it takes in order to get better. This is how I receive the word incel. And I think that the reason it pissed me off so much is because I see so much of myself in both of these individuals and I see so many other men who see who um uh I see so much of them and other men as well because there's no there's not much of a road map for them. Like yeah i'm speaking to women but as a man you know you come on this podcast and you listen you're like uh you know the experience is completely different. the experience is completely different but there are similarities there and I think that the similarities are absolutely worth exploring but uh one thing that I did get out of therapy was how I myself have not been vulnerable I have been vulnerable behind the guise of Something Positive for Positive People this has been safe for me because who is going to come after I'm a black dude with herpes when people found out Usha got herpes They let his ass have it.

00:30:47 Courtney Brame: Like whenever those allegations were out, they let him have it. Anytime a celebrity or somebody has herpes, they let them have it. When a black person is accused of having herpes or whatever, they let his ass have it. Who the f*** in their right mind is going to come after me for I get diagnosed with herpes and then i make a nonprofit podcast where uh I do this for people who wanted to kill themselves. You make fun of me, you a f****** dick. You're an a******. You ain't s*** and you should run through the ringer because of that. That's what should happen. And so I have developed this immunity to criticism so to speak for being a black man who is openly being vulnerable and talking about my experience with herpes. And it's seen as like herpes is a vulnerable thing. What i'm doing is a vulnerable thing, but what i'm doing is not actually vulnerable. What i'm doing now might be vulnerable because i'm speaking to my anger in regards to suicide.

00:31:43 Courtney Brame: I'm speaking to men. I'm speaking about seeing myself in these men and talking about my my own real experience with this s*** and what had to happen in order for me to get to this point to this place where i'm at now. And like the girl who called this man an incel like he said that's what broke him because of what that's associated with. There's a lot of stigma stereotypes with the kind of person who is an incel that they hate women and all that kind of s***. He was speaking objectively about what he observed in his own experience in hindsight. Why would that make him someone who hates women or who talks bad about women or any of that s***? Because that's not the case. He's speaking about his experience. You going you gonna like s*** on somebody for sharing their experience. I genuinely believe we should not be judged by our actions. We need to be judged by the consequences of our actions.

Accountability, Misconduct, and Perception

00:32:40 Courtney Brame: of said action, right? If I do something and i get away with it and i get away with it and i get away with it and i get away with it. If you think about people who uh let's because this is top of mind right now, abusers. People who are abusers, whatever that may look like, physical, emotional, mental, financial, people who are abusers, they are enabled by people around them to continue to do it. There are various reasons why people who abuse get away with it and why the people who are abused allow themselves to be abused. And there's this there's definitely a sense of uh there's a reciprocity there. There's a trade-off. We ain't gonna keep giving away s*** when we are not getting something back in return that we want or need. Even if that's just the presence of a person who might be an abuser, that person is being judged on being an abuser. When you call them out as an abuser, right?

00:33:37 Courtney Brame: Or you ask for accountability or you demand accountability or you catch them and you're like, "Yo, this ain't right. What are you doing right now? This ain't cool. You need to stop." If their response is, damn, you know, I never really thought about it that way. Here I was like, she stuck around and she kept giving me her money, so I thought that this was fine. Like people don't have their eyes open if there's nobody there to open their eyes. And when you do address some s*** like that and you see that person's response and like, oh, i genuinely didn't know that that's what was going on. Like your person might say that and not mean it doesn't even matter. But the fact that they now have had it brought to their attention, what are they going to do? That thing is what you need to base your opinion on off of. So, are they going to stop abusing? Are they going to have a conversation like, "Hey, you know, someone pointed out to me that, you know, you pay for everything, you give me money on a regular basis, and you don't say anything to me about it." Like,

00:34:38 Courtney Brame: what is that? Oh, well, i just really like having you around. I love you here, and I feel like if I stop giving you money, then you're just not going to like me anymore and that you'll leave. Oh, damn, baby. Well, you know what? This ain't about your money. Like, this ain't got nothing to do with your money. Here's how I feel. Blah, blah, blah. Relationships change. And now that person that you might have thought wasn't s***, was a piece of s***, had no regard for other people, has had the opportunity to go and like to figure out from the source of the abuse, so to speak, and be like, "Hey, here's what i'm seeing. Someone pointed this out. like what's up? All right. Now, what's happening moving forward? Are we consciously going to continue the same thing? Because somebody likes being in a relationship and paying for everything, same thing.

00:35:25 Courtney Brame: Being in a relationship where somebody's just constantly giving you money can be perceived as something completely different. Perception is reality. Perception is our individual reality. So, when we look at that situation, we may say to somebody, "Oh, that's an abuser. No, f*** them. That person's terrible. Don't ever do anything with them." Why not, hey, you're an abuser or we've seen abusive behavior. Uh, can you talk about that? And you may be bringing this to light to them for the first time. I'll use myself as an example here. There was somebody who accused me of uh, and i'm not going to say names. I just don't f*** with this person anymore. If you've been following me for a while, you will recognize that me and this person, I have no connection to this person. But um I was called uh what was the word? Uh a perpetrator of sexual misconduct by someone I had never f****** met before.

00:36:18 Courtney Brame: And this was infuriating because we had only communicated and worked together on social media digital campaigns. And so this person goes and they post in a prevalent um group. And I just so happened to find out because some people know who I am and they wanted to see how I would respond to this. Otherwise, i'd have never known that this was out here about me. Uh, there were talks about me uh taking advantage of impover what not impoverished marginalized women uh and pursuing sexual relationships under the guise of an open relationship behind my then girlfriend at the time's back. And I would have not ever known this. I would have never been able to defend myself if I didn't have somebody do to me what i'm suggesting that we do for the world, which is present it and then be like, "Hey, what's your response going to be to this?" So, having seen that, I was able to say, "Yo, i've never met this lady in my f****** life. We've worked together on social media campaigns.

00:37:20 Courtney Brame: We've never been in person." Because the comments, especially on social media, over time, they begin to evolve. It goes from uh sexual misconduct, which is anything from, "Hey person, I like your hair today." to full-blown beating the s*** out of somebody and raping them. That is the spectrum of sexual misconduct. It's not like this person made me uncomfortable with this thing that they said. And there wasn't even any context there. So, I responded with the objective truth, which was i've never met this person. I've not talked to this person in this long. I don't know what this situation is. In my podcast, I talk about having been non-monogamous. I talked about where I was in my relationship with my partner. i've even had my partner on the podcast. My partner at the time knew what I was talking about on the podcast. So, it was just like this person was able to blatantly lie about me and have me set up to be uh an abuser of power.

00:38:15 Courtney Brame: Uh someone who was a sexual uh misconduct perpetuator, perpetrator, whatever. And for all those people to have seen that, only a few were willing to reach out to me and ask me about that and hear my opinion and see how I was going to respond to it. And I pursued legal action. But unfortunately, I can't do anything until it impacts my income. So, if it doesn't impact my income, i can't do anything. But to see that there was a response, there was an action that was taken as a result of being accused of this particular type of behavior. I am now able to now be judged accordingly uh with whatever details people choose to believe and then my response to these particular allegations. Right? So with that said, we have got to be able to do that. So to call this man an incel for having shared his experience versus seeing how he chose to handle his experience by sharing it on the sSomething Positive for Positive People platform and being able to use his experience to hopefully help somebody.

Breaking the Cycle and Unleashing Your Potential

00:39:23 Courtney Brame: This hurt him and the way that it hurt him was it had him second-guessing himself and it had him ready to ask me to remove the podcast episode. He said that hearing from that woman made things better. It made things better for him hearing from the woman who said that his story helped her. And there's always going to be this balancing act of the positive and the negative. And we've really got to allow ourselves to experience both ends of that. We have to be willing to experience it because we can take the reward, but the reward won't be what it is without the risk. He really was risking his emotional self. Like, he put it out there, y'all, on this podcast episode. He put his experience out there. He didn't know this was going to help anybody. I don't f****** know if it's going to help anybody, but I know that I have to be consistent in this because as i'm consistent, people are always getting diagnosed with herpes.

00:40:22 Courtney Brame: people are always uh reaching out at some point and they're just happy that this platform, this thing exists and they get something out of it. I know that to be true. I know that to be consistent, but I don't always know if this is helping somebody. But i'm being very intentional here, especially to speak on behalf of these two men who I know whose stories have inspired me to do so. and inspired me to be open about my experiences. Like I can't tell you how many times like I wished I was getting some p**** but just wasn't. And it wasn't because I was incapable of it. It was because i wouldn't do the hard thing. The hard thing would be to go up against my trauma response of oh well i'm going to avoid rejection by not approaching or not initiating any type of relationship. i had to bust through that s*** man. And it's hard. Like it is a very hard thing to do to not only identify it, but i'm the kind of person who when I see the problem, I have to fix the problem.

00:41:28 Courtney Brame: I can't just see it and unsee it anymore. I have to address that issue. I still have issues with initiating relationships. I still have issues with initiating or approaching uh a woman that I might be interested in and initiating that whole dialogue and trying to get into a dating situation, a relationship or a sex situation, whatever that may be. I still struggle with that. 10 years into my herpes status, six years into running this podcast and uh five, hold on, how many years? 2019, 20 212 is this four years? This will be the fourth year that i've been running the nonprofit Something Positive for Positive People that did not have 501c3 status. Like all that's happened for me is that I have gotten more comfortable hearing people's experiences, telling people's stories and speaking from my own experience. And doing so has made me more attractive. I see myself as more attractive. People see me as more attractive. And for a really long time that has not been the case.

00:42:33 Courtney Brame: I've been someone who has really struggled with that because of not wanting to do this hard thing. I wanted to just subscribe to being lazy. Oh, I got herpes. Ain't nobody going to want to have sex with me. Ain't nobody going to want to be with me. How f****** lazy that is. Like men, we are not. We can't be lazy. We cannot be lazy. The lazier we are, you know, these the things that women want from us are some aspect of motivation, some aspect of restraint, discipline. They want to see that f****** that monster in us. And if we ain't doing something to unleash that monster in us, we ain't putting ourselves out there. We can't just be at home doing what we want to do. We got to do a lot of s*** that we don't want to do. We got to do a lot of s*** that just has to be done out of a sense of necessity, out of a sense of duty.

00:43:21 Courtney Brame: We got to get up and go to work every day so that we can keep that roof over our heads, so that we can eat, so that we can have internet, so you can listen to this podcast, so you can watch your p*** or whatever it is that you're doing. Like, you got to be able to do that s*** at bare minimum. And what I find is that a lot of the men who find themselves like in a very dark space don't have s*** else going on for themselves. Have something going on for yourself. You need that. You need that and make that thing that you got going on for yourself so big that herpes becomes f****** irrelevant. Do that. Do that for yourself. And you have to be willing and able to do that. If your big picture goal is to have a family, right? You need to be working towards that goal. What does that look like?

00:44:09 Courtney Brame: All right. What's in your what's in arms reach for you right now that you can change, that you can touch, that you can control? Is that going to be becoming a more attractive person so that you have more options so that you have more opportunities presented to you? If that means just doing 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats a day to get into a routine so that you can pump yourself up before you can get into the gym or before you can start to go outside and run. Maybe do a little bit of walking. Maybe change up, you know, what it is that you eat. Instead of fries, get that salad instead. If it's making more money, you know, if you don't like your job, if you're an unhappy person, like starting to make those changes, you can do this. Like, we live in a time where everything we need is on the internet. You can learn how to do anything. If it's how do i get a new job, go to the internet, type in how do i get a new job in Google and watch what happens.

00:45:04 Courtney Brame: Reach out to me. Like, I have put myself in this position because I like this s***. I love this s***. I love what I do. I love that people come to me for advice. Like, as a man, i love fixing s***. And I love helping people fix their own problems. And if herpes is the problem, i ain't going to say I mastered the f****** cheat code of navigating a herpes diagnosis, but I damn sure navigated the explorative space of trying to figure out how to get to where you need to be in order to be okay with it. And then you can decide for yourself how you would like to move forward with this. But i gotta tell y'all, man, like this, ever since being in this space and doing what I do and finding myself accepting it, because i'm i'm still resistant to this s***. I go in and out of am i doing what i'm supposed to be doing?

Prioritizing the Spirit and Taking Action

00:45:54 Courtney Brame: I could be making a lot more money doing something completely different. I can use the skills that i've gotten through here and I can apply to my other podcast. I can apply this to another job. I can start another business. I can be doing something different. Maybe I should go back to school. Maybe I should get a degree and become a therapist myself. Maybe I should become a sex educator. I have gone through all this s*** on a regular basis, but all signs keep pushing me back in the direction. i'm doing what the f*** i'm supposed to be here. And when you prioritize the needs of your soul, when you prioritize the needs of your spirit, when you can sit still long enough and not avoid the emotions that are telling you and guiding you in the direction that you need to be going, you hear that s***. When you prioritize the needs of your spirit, the body, the needs of the body, the needs of your world and the reality around you, that s*** tends to take care of itself.

00:46:47 Courtney Brame: I'm living proof of that. I don't know how i make $20 an hour at a job that I might work between no hours and maybe 20 hours a week. another job where i make $60 an hour maybe four weeks out of the year. I run this nonprofit. I haven't paid myself yet. There will come a time where I do because i'm absolutely ready to double down on this s*** and like really uh go balls to the wall. I thought that i was running this full-time when I first got to Portland, but having been in Portland, like i've been making money at these other jobs and i ain't going to lie to you, that s*** does something for my confidence. Like, damn. You know, i ain't a lot of money. I feel like i'm upper lower class, but i'm able to do a lot of s*** that I want to do. I'm able to see this side of myself that i'm unfamiliar with, but I f****** love.

00:47:36 Courtney Brame: I like being able to buy stuff for myself. I like being able to go on dates and pay for everything and not have to be like, "Ah, you know what? I think i'm gonna order the chicken tonight. I ain't gonna get the steak and the lobster tail." I like being able to travel. I like being able to buy new shoes. I like being able to give money to uh people. I ain't going to say homeless people, but I like being able to buy food and then give that food away to somebody who might need it without being like, damn, you know, i really wish that I had that right now. I value that. That has become important to me. And I know that what's happened for me is that i'm starting to sacrifice my Something Positive for Positive People energy for Courtney and his livelihood and being able to make money and maintain and upkeep this lifestyle that i've developed for myself. That's an ongoing struggle for me.

00:48:33 Courtney Brame: It's back and forth. But again, like I i believe that when you prioritize the needs of the spirit, the body takes care of itself. So, when I went out to Portland, I doubled down on Something Positive. Um, and i was presented with this challenge. It's like God was like, "Yo, all right. Are you sure you want to run this nonprofit full-time? Here goes some money right now. You get paid every two weeks. It's consistent. Something Positive ain't going to be that consistent. I might get a $10 donation. I might get a $25 donation. Might get a $100 donation. I might periodically get a few thousand dollars of a donation. I might even get a grant and be able to pay myself, but I got to trust and believe that s*** before I can start to do that s***. And i'mma be honest, I don't believe it. I don't believe in myself right now.

00:49:17 Courtney Brame: I don't believe that i'm the kind of person who can uh step away from the work that i'm doing and fully double down 100% into Something Positive for Positive People, get my own place, trust that i'm going to be able to pay the bills over the course of the next month and that i'm going constantly donations, grants, and funding in order for me to be able to run this nonprofit and pay myself and still maintain a lifestyle that fills me with pleasure and joy and be able to work toward a relationship where i can start to think about creating a family for myself and plant roots somewhere and be there and start to create a home for myself and the kind of career that I want where I still get to travel and do these workshops, these conferences, and have these talks and provide ongoing herpes support groups and um disclosure type conversations and continue to just build around this community. I have doubts, but i'm challenging those beliefs with my direct f****** behavior. That's what i'm doing.

00:50:16 Courtney Brame: I'm saying yes to what needs to be said yes to. I'm making plans. I'm saying no. Living in Portland, more than anything, has taught me how to say no. And I turned down that one opportunity and I got another one immediately after working through the discomfort of being able to just say no, this ain't for me. And there's more of that to come. I f****** know it. And I know that there's more of that to come for you. So that's the reason i'm sharing this. That's the reason i'm here. And I want to do Something Positive for men with herpes. This is for y'all. I'm talking this way because I know this the way that y'all gonna get it. Like the gentle, oh, you know, tell me about that. That's s***. That's for the women, but for y'all, like, we we got to do this s***.

00:50:58 Courtney Brame: I can't sit here and cuddle you. Like, we got to take the energy behind our emotions and put that s*** to action. We don't want to just be heard. We want to see that something is being done. Like, my emotions are what Something Positive for Positive People is. What are you? What are yours? Were you directing yours? When you get an intense sensation of emotion, are you beating your girlfriend? Are you shooting your guns? Are you doing drugs? Are you drinking? What are you doing? Are you or are you directing that into your craft, your poetry? Are you creating something? Are you making art? Are you drawing? Are you uh doing tattoos? Are you working on your car? What are you building? What are you creating? These emotions are powerful s***. When you can allow yourself to feel this s*** and not disconnect or disengage from how you feel, what you feel, your emotions, when you are able to get the f*** out of that, you got a whole man.

Creating Your Own Path and Closing Thoughts

00:52:09 Courtney Brame: Yo, you're living in a whole new world, man. I'm telling you. I'm f****** telling you. Trust me. Trust me because i'm learning to trust myself and it's a constant battle. i'm fighting against my beliefs with my behaviors. That's why i'm here right now. i've tried to record this particular podcast episode for probably a month and a half, two months, maybe even a little bit longer than that. And it's just I haven't been able to work through it. Even in November, I tried to sit down and tell my own personal story and it just wasn't coming out. There was a period where my voice didn't even sound right. It was just like it wasn't meant to be the way that it was. It wasn't meant to be the way that I was trying to get it out. And now i've had the experiences i've had people share with me enough for me to be able to do it in this way and knock it out in one take and be f****** real.

00:53:03 Courtney Brame: Like this is this is this is me, you know? This is the person that you know you might feel disconnected from. This is who I am. This is like me peeling back the layer of Something Positive for Positive People so you can get a glimpse of Courtney. Courtney struggles. Courtney has hard times. Courtney experiences rejection. Courtney's not perfect. Courtney is battling between do I want to keep doing what it is that i'm doing and do this for other people or do I want to prioritize myself? Say f*** this s*** and go somewhere where I can make $100,000 a year as uh whatever job position that I would be qualified for. All right, I got two degrees. i'm majoring in masscom uh advertising and public relations. There is no reason that even with the experience that I got now, i can't get a job. I got a 500 hour yoga teacher training certification. I can teach yoga.

00:53:55 Courtney Brame: That ain't gonna pay me no $100,000 a year. But that's something that I would also do. And even with the Something Positive for Positive People, people who reach out to me like I can tell people like, "Yo, hey, if you want to talk to me, this how much it's going to be. This is how much time I got and we just put a dollar value to the hourlong conversations or whatever. But that doesn't align for me. And I know that the more I prioritize my spirit, my body's going to be fine. The reality that I live in, it's going to be good. And i'm trusting this. i'm trusting that, you know, when I do have these conversations and I offer people the opportunity to make a donation that maybe they will. It might be small, it might be big, but whatever it is, they get what they give. That sounds like a nursery rhyme right there. Might be small, it might be big, but whatever they give, it is what it is.

00:54:47 Courtney Brame: Remix. Um, but thank you. Thank you for listening here. I'm going to go ahead and post this one now. i'mma post this today. Uh, I feel like that's the right thing to do. i'll reorganize the other episodes that i had that were scheduled to release when they were scheduled to release, but this one has been bubbling up in me. Uh, this one has been bubbling up and I remember um around Halloween uh 2022, this lady came up to me and she said, "Your journey is not even a journey. Like, it ain't even a path. Whatever it is, it's going to be hard." She's like, "I share the burden." Like, I share that burden with you. But you are creating your own path. And that's what it feels like. You know, I hope that my journey, my own path that i'm creating is one that will inspire you to go ahead and make yours.

00:55:36 Courtney Brame: Get started. You know, put yourself back out there. Start working on yourself. Like that's what we need. We need to be strong bodied. We have to be strong willed. We have to have a strong mind. And we got that s***. And how you do one thing is how you do everything. The mind follows the body, the body follows the mind. That's one thing my football coach, Coach Sam used to say. He used to always say that the mind follows the body, the body follows the mind. What you believe is how you're going to behave. How you behave is going to shape what you believe about yourself. So, like I said, i'm prioritizing my behaviors to shift my own beliefs. And you can do that s***, too, man. You can do this. Let's go. Thanks for listening to this podcast episode, man. I I appreciate y'all for being here. Um, reach out to me. Reach out to me. I want to know what you think. Um, if you want to have a conversation, if you really are ready to just like have a safe place for you to just say out loud what the f*** happened when you got your herpes diagnosis, you know what? What happened? Just say that s*** out loud and we can just talk about it, man. We can talk about some real s*** that can be done. We can talk a little bit more about the experiences that were around that might and how they might have impacted you and we can go from there.

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