SPFPP 374: Storytelling for Stigma Minimization - Live from STI Engage 2025
In 2019, I showed up to STI Engage with an idea—what if people living with herpes had access to consistent, psycho-social support through podcasting? That abstract turned into Something Positive for Positive People, and six years later, it’s no longer an idea—it’s a lived community experience.
Recorded live from Phoenix, AZ, this episode captures our 2025 return to the conference, where I led a somatic meditation on stigma, offered a real-time example of our support cycle, and shared how identity validation through storytelling has created a ripple effect of healing and community.
With hundreds of episodes, thousands of conversations, and tens of thousands of listeners later, this work continues to evolve—and it all began with a microphone and the courage to speak up.
If you host conferences, workshops, or events centered on identity, wellness, or stigma, reach out to collaborate at www.spfpp.org. And if you’ve got a story to share around stigma—herpes-related or otherwise—I’d love to hear from you.
Episode 374 Transcript
The Origins of SPFPP and the Impact of Stigma
00:00:00 Courtney Brame: All right. Hello everybody. My name is Courtney Brame, I am the founder, executive director, podcast host, yoga teacher, peer support, facilitator. I think that's it. Of something positive for positive people. This is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that has started out supporting people navigating herpes stigma. It began in 2017 just as me interviewing people who were living with herpes about their experiences. Uh I'm very honored to be back at SCI Engaged. Back in the day it was STD engaged. I had issues with that uh the word disease over infection. Um and it's nice to see that that has changed over the years. So what I want to show y'all real quick is what we presented or the abstract that I presented the first year that I was here. How do you do this? Oh, this button. All right, I got it. This was an abstract. Um I mentioned that I started out interviewing people living with herpes and the reason for that was because I learned that people with herpes had suicide ideation and I just asked of the people who were in the support groups that I was in. I have herpes myself.
00:01:49 Courtney Brame: I forgot to lead with that. But um I started to just ask like okay what's been your experience with herpes? And over time, what ended up happening was I developed somewhat of some momentum, a community, and was able to just go, "Hey, I have these survey questions. Can y'all answer these?" And then we were able to get a lot of responses just off of the expressions of vulnerability, I guess, from my own experience as well as the people who've been willing to come on to the podcast and share their own experiences. So, we had uh asking the question, "Have you ever had any of the following as a result of your diagnosis?" one of which was suicide ideation. And as you'll see here, it's almost 49%. And this was in 2019 when I could only get access to like a hundred people. So since then, the podcast is at like almost 400 episodes. So these are all interviews with people living with herpes, couple solo episodes, as well as uh interviewing sex therapists and people in the world of public health to get more of a scope of what people might be experiencing.
00:02:51 Courtney Brame: So, for today's objectives, also, I don't have any disclosures. It's just me. Uh, I have a board. Um, and they're cool with me being here. But, uh, I just want y'all to really be able to witness what community can look like. Uh, I want for y'all to have more of an expansive somatic understanding of what stigma is and what it feels like. So, we're going to do a thing that's going to require y'all to put y'all phones down for five minutes. People with phones. Uh, and then yeah, we'll be able to see sort of what the long-term impact of safe spaces. I don't know why I wrote that. I always say this, I don't believe in safe spaces. No offense. There are only intentional spaces. So, the intention that we create here is really to minimize stigma. And I use the word minimize over like prevent or eradicate or destroy or end because these are violent words and we don't want to perpetuate stigma with any violence or negativity.
Defining Stigma and a Somatic Grounding Exercise
00:03:49 Courtney Brame: So, I'm only going to give y'all like a minute to answer, but I'm curious to know if anyone has any working definition for themselves of what stigma is. Anybody can just blurt it out. What is stigma? You can say that louder.
Attendee: Judgment.
Courtney Brame: What else? Somebody said lies. Oh, bias. All right. I appreciate that. So, a working definition that I like to use is from Erving Goffman. He's the author of the book Stigma, Notes on Management of Spoiled Identity. Spoiled like spoiled milk, not like spoiled like you had everything handed to you. And so with that definition, it is an attribute that makes a person feel less whole. Simple as that. That's like the most simple definition that I that I've seen or heard. And I like to use that to work from. So what I want to do next is just for the next couple of minutes, if you need to grab your phone, you can do that.
00:04:51 Courtney Brame: But I would like for people to just ground themselves real quick and just kind of place your feet on the ground, sit upright in your chair. I love this crowd control. All right, so if it feels safe to you, look around real quick. Just notice what everything looks like around you. And then I invite you to close your eyes. And with your eyes closed, see if you have to like be in first person. I know exiting the body for some people can be a little bit dramatic, but for those of you who feel comfortable, too. Just visualize yourself, maybe just looking overhead. But if you're someone who's in your seat and you need to just be looking outward, you can do that as well. I want you to take a full exhale completely emptying out the lungs. And then when you inhale, fill the lungs up with breath as much as you can. And then exhale, empty everything out.
00:05:54 Courtney Brame: Inhale, bring everything in. And I want you to allow yourself to maintain that rhythm of breathing just over the next two and a half minutes. Now, while you're breathing, whichever route you went between first and third person viewing yourself, I want you to think about your identifications. Everyone here, I believe, works in some capacity with NCSD. So we have an identity as maybe an employee or an employer. We might be parents. We might be siblings. And what I want you to do as I go through each of these identifiers is just envision sort of an energetic line coming away from you into like a little baby version of yourself, right? So parent, child of parents, sibling, employee, maybe you're a community member of some sort, maybe someone's depending on you familiarly, friend, relationship. These are just some of the ways that I think many of us can readily identify as how we show up in the world. Right? So, you're here, you're breathing, and you're able to see those energetic lines, whatever your favorite color is, branching out from where you are now into these little baby versions of yourself.
00:07:46 Courtney Brame: Okay? Continue to breathe. And I want you to sort of take a screenshot of all the identifiers that you have around you and just maybe think of the number in your mind because maybe there are things that you identify outside of that. Maybe socioeconomic status, perhaps race, gender. Okay? And once you get that screenshot, I invite you to take one more breath. And then right after that last exhale, you can begin to flutter your eyes open. Ain't nobody pull their phone out. Look at y'all. And real quick, you can just take a couple neck rolls, rub your hands, open, close. You can stomp your feet a little bit. All right. Now, we took that screenshot. I want to know if you can just by show of hands or if you ain't got enough hands, like how many energetic lines did you have going away from your body? We can shout some numbers out or throw our hands up.
00:08:56 Courtney Brame: What we got?
Attendee: 10.
Courtney Brame: Okay. More than 10. Anybody have more than 10? Anybody want to share what some of those were? Just some identifiers. And you, you ain't got to
Attendee: Nurse.
Courtney Brame: Okay. Okay.
Attendee: Grandfather.
Courtney Brame: Grandfather. What' you say in the back? I heard queer. What else did I hear?
Attendee: Auntie.
Courtney Brame: Okay.
Attendee: Spouse.
Courtney Brame: All right.
Attendee: Son.
Courtney Brame: Okay. Are we on time? Yeah. I've never done this in 20 minutes, so I'm jumping around here, too. So, I just wanted to name some observations if anyone, you know, if there was anything anybody wanted to share. You got like 30 seconds, so we ain't got time for the
Attendee: Oh, I don't want to share.
Courtney Brame: Does anybody want to share any observations as we went through that visualization?
The Weight of Fragmented Identity
00:09:48 Courtney Brame: What you got?
Attendee: So, community and what communities you're a part of, right?
Courtney Brame: Okay. Thank you for that because I think that that is really important as well. Uh, but is there anything else that you wanted to add to that? Okay, you jumped ahead. That is exactly the point that I was going to make about what people who are experiencing stigma kind of go into.
Attendee: Would you say that it felt like one of those baby extensions of you were maybe heavier than the rest as you sort of went down that dark road?
Courtney Brame: Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Has anyone had a similar experience of that? Everybody close your eyes and raise your hand if you did. Okay, we got a few hands. Everybody put your hands down before everybody opens their eyes. Okay. Um, this is very synonymous from what I've experienced in talking to people of what people who are struggling with stigma experience.
00:11:31 Courtney Brame: So, while like we try and say “stigma is this…” and we verbalize it like on a somatic level, that's what it feels like. It feels like an extreme overidentification with a fragmented part of self. And a lot of what I speak to is really just identity validation for people to see themselves outside of that part of themselves in which they're over identified with. And through presence, practices of presence, we're able to take those lines of all these identifiers and bring them home. But that's like more yoga than what we have time for today. So I'm sorry to just kind of lead y'all there, but I wanted to speak to some of those observations. So, we saw the statistics from the 2019 SCB engagement that I went to and presented at. And now we're looking at the 2023/2024 survey that we conducted through Something Positive for Positive People, which has now become so much more than just me being a dude with a podcast asking people who are in these support groups, hey, you want to talk about herpes?
Survey Data: Sexual Health is Mental Health
00:12:33 Courtney Brame: Because now we're able to get a lot more responses. That first survey was a hundred people. This one was I have a slide later but this stands out. I always say that sexual health is mental health because of the overidentification with one's sexuality as one of those identifiers. When someone gets herpes it's not I have this diagnosis. It becomes “I am this diagnosis”. And the weight of that, what I was trying to speak to I didn't mean to like to try and put words in your mouth of your experience. It's like the weight of it just makes a person forget all these other aspects of themselves. And so the identity validation piece is just being a space that reminds people that you are whole. Going back to Erving Goffman's definition of stigma, right? That attribute that makes a person feel less than whole. All right. So I have to go through these really really fast because it's like a few screenshots, but the slides are in your Okay.
00:13:29 Courtney Brame: Thank you. All right. Because I just did it. I ain't gonna lie. I put the rest of this presentation like I modified this yesterday because I asked the community there was someone who reached out for support and I was like damn this would be great for the presentation. So here we have someone Hold on. I want to play this. Oh no, it won't play. All right, never mind. It's somebody texting. So I thought it was real cool to see like somebody texting while this is popping up. But the synopsis here is that someone reached out to me on Instagram and they just wanted to share their story for today, right? So, she had no expectations of what she was going to get out of it. She appreciates what it is that we do. And this is as a result of a community that's been going on since 2017 that's just perpetually stayed in motion of being a space for people to share their stories.
Community Support in Action
00:14:16 Courtney Brame: I'm about to click through, so if you want to speed read through the rest of it, you can. But essentially, what we have here is that someone was in a relationship for five years, disclosed to the partner that they have herpes. It's a non monogamous relationship. partners like, "Hey, I don't want to do this s*** no more." Okay, so here's what community support looks like in action. I just shared that screenshot and made everything anonymous and just ask, "Hey, if y'all have any words for our friend here, please share them." So, we got a lot of these some of these responses are very extreme. I didn't put all of them up here, but here's some of them, right? like normalizing not just the stigma of living with an STI, living with herpes, but also normalizing that uh the relationship structure. So we talk about stigma and identifiers. We're dealing with someone who is non monogamous. We're dealing with someone who was in a relationship who's also dealing with a breakup.
00:15:10 Courtney Brame: So there's these other identifiers there as well. So here's the kind of support that we're able to get from uh being involved with engaged in community. And this is one of the things that is so healing for people because now this person is able to see themselves uh outside of just a herpes diagnosis. Here's some more if y'all want to just take a moment to read these. Uh yeah, I mean I had the general consensus. I don't know if y'all got any ideas based on what y'all saw. I'm assuming this dude probably just didn't really want to say what the real reason was and just kind of dismissed it off the herpes. So, what you see here is like these are all different, these are all different responses from different people. So, like the community is very apt to show up for people who are willing to be vulnerable and share their stories as long as there's an intentional space for it. Everybody knows @CourtneyBrame Instagram.
00:16:09 Courtney Brame: Y'all can follow me. Courtney Brame, all one word. My Instagram is a space for minimizing stigma. Minimizing. I ain't trying to kill it, end it, destroy it, erase it, eradicate it. It ain't going nowhere. It's too much money to be made off medications. All right. So, the beautiful thing here, I got consent to share this and um the individual. I just let her know, hey, look at the stories. Like, you can see the support. This is what she sent. Y'all, this part next slide almost made me tear up a little bit. her sister reached out to me and was like, "Oh my god, this is my sister." And I wait, did I say, "Oh, I I unent the message." I was like, "No f****** way. Are you serious?" Like, I was really enthusiastic and excited about it. But it was real cool like that this made it back to her sister.
00:16:59 Courtney Brame: Her sister was able to see that she was getting the support that she needed. She knew that she was going through it and she really didn't have much of a way to be supportive to her because she doesn't really know what this person's going through. Like she can be there for her and listen, but there's something about that identity validation piece that is oftentimes missing. And fortunately for me, like I don't have rules to abide by, letters behind my name. I can just press record, start talking, say some things, put it out there, and people maybe reach out that resonate or they don't. And I get whatever feedback I get. I know like a lot of people don't have that privilege of being able to be as open and vulnerable. So I feel like it's a very purpose driven thing for me to be able to be transparent about what my story is. And then I told her I was using this for the presentation. You see, hey, and you can see the time stamps on there.
00:17:49 Courtney Brame: I was working 5:18 a.m. But um something that's also relevant here is that the power of this storytelling has created sort of this gravity drawing people in who also want to not only share their stories but also because of the intention wanting to get involved in a way that we're able to get survey data. So I'm able to understand Something Positive for Positive People audience. Uh I just threw like some bullet points up there. 14% of respondents are male. Uh so we're dealing with mostly women and non-binary people. Uh the whole thing about dirty. So what I love about our surveys is that we get to get to the nitty-gritty of things and find out like what all right, what is dirty? What are some of these stigmatizing things that people make assumptions about for people with herpes? And so we look at before people's diagnosis, whether they whether they've tested positive for any other SCI since their diagnosis. And you see the differences here.
00:18:46 Courtney Brame: And I believe that there's a positive correlation between someone getting an STI and then being like, "Oh s***, this is real." Okay, let me be a little bit more communicative. Let me see what resources are out there. Because you really don't have a reason to until you have a reason to. Uh patient provider communication. Oh, that was very important. So we're able to see the patient provider communication about STI between a health care provider initiating conversation about sexual health with the person or the person initiating discussions with their provider about sexual health. And you see 30% and 34% are never like no one in these periods are talking about sex and sexual health. So, we're able to see like a lot of what many issues are outside of herpes and sexual health, but also the communication component. Uh, looking at SEI prevention, I don't like that word, but it's what everybody uses. Prevention to me means, hey, if we do this, this will not happen.
00:19:46 Courtney Brame: I like minimization. It's on everything because we're minimizing the risk. You can use a condom wrong, you can use a condom, right, and then just be like, "Oh, there there's things that can go wrong." I don't have time to really go into the ease of talking about it. Communication is a very important thing. When we talk about how “unethical” or “dirty” people with herpes are, what we see is that 87% of people have disclosed their status to a romantic partner despite how difficult it is. So 37% say very difficult, 36% say very, uh say just difficult. So that's a very high number of difficulties for talking about it. Uh talking about safer sex practices, condom use, 73% of people with herpes never wear condoms for oral. So like people with herpes aren't just like unwillingly passing it on to partners or anything like that. A lot of people are consenting to sexual acts with people with herpes. These are things that we've been able to learn.
The STARS Method and Q&A
00:20:42 Courtney Brame: I'm probably like over Okay, cool. So uh that full survey is like two hours long. If you want more information, hit that QR code. The password is “no stigma”. Please don't share this because a lot of people bought tickets to this uh conference. And so, yeah, I want to just like I don't want the word to get out. Did any of y'all go to the conference last year? The herpes stigma conference. Oh, cool. All right. Don't tell nobody about this. Um, all right. So, the website for more information is something positive for positive people. It's just spf.org. I'm Courtney Bra. Uh, Tik Tok. I'm I I really don't Tik Tok. So, if you go there, you see like a post every few months maybe, but I'm most active on Instagram at Courtney Brain. Um, I'd like to open up for any questions.
00:21:41 Courtney Brame: I think we only got like five minutes, right? All right. Okay. Thank you. Wait, wait. I saw another hand.
Attendee: When you say clinical, what do you mean?
Courtney Brame: Uh, it's just yoga certification. So, have a 200 hour certification that really taught me how to put people in postures and a 300 hour certification that taught me more of the philosophy. So, like if we want to go there, we can, but I don't I don't know if we do. But um the way that I use it is really for uh there's a concept of the koshas that speaks to the body the energy nervous system mental emotional and like bliss body like oh wow sorry I will uh just kind of talk to people from that lens and just kind of see what information they're giving me and then use practices of yoga whether that be movement, breathing, meditation, or self-reflection to help guide them kind of like what we did in the meditation where it was like people's identity is scattered and find out where they are and try and bring that home with presence.
00:22:55 Courtney Brame: Does that answer your question? All right. I'm a yoga therapist in training, so I'm I'm going through that, but yeah, I can't really say like “yes” to that yet. Uh didn't you were second. Okay.
Attendee: So, thank you for sharing that. This is the first time I've ever Y'all see the power of storytelling. Just saying the power of storytelling. So in practice, right, the screening doesn't happen unless you show up with I know whatever. You're not there's… the only reason I got screened out is because you know all right you might work at clinic. In practice, it's very rare for it. And so there is obviously folks like myself in this, um, but clinically it's not like a priority and no I understand but so how do we reconcile and… I love that you know what I mean? But this kind of goes like, you know, left alone and I have um you know, we can treat it and like you're not going to die, but psychologically, mentally so much damage without…
Courtney Brame: Well, we got like 30 seconds.
00:25:36 Courtney Brame: Six seconds. Oh my. Um, so I've had conversations with people throughout um, and while there's like stigma, one of the things that I continue to see is that there's no prioritization of it, right? Like there's the psychological and the emotional piece of it, but that's really it. Oh, what y'all got? And the idea will boost your immunity. There's Yeah, there's a lot of stuff happening that like is a lot of people wouldn't know about until they're in a situation. Like there is another medication for like people who might be in chemo or super immuno compromised to be able to take uh that apparently is more effective than the generic brands of medication that we have but a lot of people don't know about it and there's some petitioning happening now to get that like publicly available. I saw like five hands just went up. A lot of times we connect… have one here.
Attendee: Um it's more so a Um uh earlier the slide said uh sexual health is mental health and that is insanely true.
00:27:29 Attendee: Um I feel like if you aren't in like the best mental space you can make fairly risky sexual behaviors. So yeah just uh and you killed it on your time. So thank you.
Courtney Brame: I say I was like ah 20 minutes. Um, put your hand up. Yeah. Yeah. And I do need to I, I forgot to preface this with “I hear from like worst case scenario people”. I believe that most people living with herpes are okay. They're either in a relationship or unaffected by it. They don't have outbreaks or they just don't know they have it. Like ignorance is bliss, right? When I hear from people, it's they just got diagnosed or the relationship they were in that took their mind off of everything has ended and now they're having to get back out into the dating world. Um, but oh yeah, herpes was in a title. I was going to say like, do y'all feel like we hit all the objectives?
00:29:12 Courtney Brame: All right, everybody, everybody got the somatic experience. Did you get the example of how community in action can be supportive to storytelling? And then whatever that third one was… Minimizing, minimizing stigma. Yeah. Uh okay. We have two minutes worth of time left. If anybody has any questions, any feedback, statements, anything.
Attendee: Yes. Episode 299.
Courtney Brame: So, uh this is one of my board members is Dr. Evelin Molina Dacker. She is a family physician and she speaks to the STARS method. Uh we're going to have a workshop actually July 21st where she's going to come on and I'll have a Zoom link for anyone who wants to participate and she's going to go over it. It's a two-hour workshop where we talk about essentially how to have safe sex conversations, safer sex conversations. And it's not exclusively about the sex and sexual health. It's about safety, turn-ons, avoids, relationship intentions, and then STI status.
00:30:24 Courtney Brame: So, she's going to teach people how to navigate that conversation for themselves so that they can go into a disclosure. I hate that word, too, because we're not signing legal documents. It's not a confession, it's a conversation. So, she's going to give people that practice and that resource to be able to navigate this. Um, and yeah, but episode 299, I interview her and we apply it to herpes. So, if you just Google SPFPP 299, it should be it will be the first thing that comes up. We probably got like 30 seconds left. I can't believe we got this far ahead. Oh, and my screenshot presentation. What you got?
Attendee: Where are you from?
Courtney Brame: Everywhere. So, I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. Uh, my home was affected by the tornado. So, I kind of been a nomad for the past like two weeks. Uh, so I'm on the road. I'm going to housesit in San Antonio uh in June and then I I'll be able to go back home. Insurance check cleared today, though. So, um, but yeah, it's, it's virtual, but I plan to move to New York in the fall, so I'll probably be in Brooklyn. But everything's virtual. We talk to people across the world. You, you wouldn't believe how stigma is different around the world. I should stop now. All right. Thank y'all.
Transcription ended after 00:38:15
