Welcome to Something positive for Positive People.
I'm Courtney Brain. Something positive for positive
people is A5O1C3 nonprofit organization supporting people
who are navigating herpes stigma.
And let me tell you all this, I just updated the website
tremendously. There is now a men's herpes
support group. There are, if you go there and
you're interested in that, like you'll see a link that directs
you to the additional resources for men.
This includes some of the stuff that I used to do when I made
Self a nonprofit, which was dedicated to men's emotional
Wellness resources. And those men's emotional
Wellness resources are now directed on the Something
Positive for Positive People website.
So if you're looking for men's groups, men's resources, you'll
be able to find that on the website.
So just go to the website. It's going to be super easy to
navigate. Now my graphic designer who
shitted on me recently in a 7 minute voice message, she won't
hear this because y'all don't think she listens to the
podcast, but she, she lit a fire into my ass and I got all my
shit together. So the website is a lot easier
to navigate. It'll be much easier to find
what it is that you're looking for.
I think that we did a real good job of stripping down things.
I got really hyped up and excited when I was learning
about atomic language, which I'll still use.
I'll use that personally and I'll let my podcast self be
where I'm more so speak out loud and practice using that language
and exploring that. And then whenever I'm working
with my yoga therapy clients, using that framework as it
applies to yoga in order to support people and get them to a
better place with their diagnosis.
And a lot of times what it is that I will say I do, from
support calls to support groups to yoga therapy, is really
getting people to understand what their baseline is, the
connection, the relationship to the nervous system and how that
expresses itself in behaviors in the body and the mind.
And I know a lot of people don't like to use spiritual language,
but I believe that the nervous system is a manifestation of the
spirit. What this regulates us, what
heights us up, what slows us down, what makes us feel
stagnant and stuck. And everything is about balance.
And that's one of the things that I'm learning from yoga
therapy, which I'll be done with my training in 2026.
So I just went through and I checked in with my instructor to
make sure that I was on track to get everything squared away for
2026. So I'll be fully licensed,
assuming I passed a test, which there's no reason I shouldn't
pass the test. Yeah, I'll be fully ready to go
come the end of 2026, going into 2027.
So yeah, be on the lookout for that.
So what that means is that there will be more of a connection to
yoga in the presentations that I create and talking about like
this as a support resource. And I think I might have found
the longevity of my career in utilizing yoga practices and
yoga therapy specifically as a way of supporting people with
their herpes diagnosis. Not just to minimize the
symptoms of outbreaks or expressions of the virus and
transmission, but also how people deal with the statement,
the emotional Wellness, the mental health piece.
I want to shout out to all my practice clients that had let me
work with them, and then the clients that decided to stick
with me because they found value in it.
The ones who've left and come back.
So yeah, it's real validating that I'm doing what I'm supposed
to be doing. Yesterday I did a workshop with
Project Safe and this workshop was with a shout out to Tara
Jones. Tara Tara Jones of the Youth Sex
Spurt program. It's found out she was 25.
I didn't know she was 25, but she came in with me to Project
Safe here in Brooklyn, which is a youth organization that
educates people, young people, and they have like young people
as ambassadors for the program as well.
And the overall goal was to go in and talk about herpes, herpes
stigma. But in order to meet the
requirements for what they needed, there had to be a little
bit more expansion on SC is like we just had to really touch on
it. But I didn't feel comfortable
not doing that by myself. So I reached out to her and I've
been seeing her work for a while and I've wanted to support, but
every time that I'd want to do some type of a fundraising
thing, the event which is not sale or I had a lot of stuff
that happened in the first half of this year, so I wasn't able
to produce what I thought I would.
So it was nice to be able to reach out to her and invite her
along to present with me and be able to pay her directly for
what she brought in because Lord knows I don't like making
presentations. So yeah, between that and
conducting the presentation, it was a really good experience.
I'm glad that Project Safe, you know, reached out and wanted to
have me come in and do this. So I thought about recording it,
but I don't know, that didn't feel right.
So what I'll do here then is instead just recap.
This will be something that's for more of the health
professionals, healthcare providers, therapists,
educators. Some of the things that
consistently come up when it comes to like the stigma
minimization training or how do we eliminate stigma from our
vocabulary and from our practices and marketing
materials is the the language. A lot of times language is
something that people are confused by and we want to use
the information that's out there, the data that exists.
But a lot of the data and information that exists,
especially regarding herpes and herpes stigma, it doesn't make
sense and it's inconsistent. If you go to the World Health
Organization or the NIH or the CDC, the American Sexual Health
Association, you'll see different things.
And even if you go to something positive for positive people,
like I always tell people, my disclaimer is that the people
who take our surveys, the people who we hear from, these are
people who are generally not doing well because of their
diagnosis. So we're not really able to get
a reflection of the entire population of people who have
herpes and know that they have herpes.
OK. So a lot of what I try and stick
to are the psychological mental health, the emotional Wellness
effects, and anything that can be recorded.
If they can report the frequency or intensity of the herpes
outbreak, if they know that they have or have not passed herpes
on to a partner, this is the kind of information that we can
get that we can report on and we can further investigate.
But beyond that, like I don't believe that there's a way for
us to quantify transmission rates like accurately, because
it does depend on so many things.
And I'm learning from my yoga therapy clients when they share
with me their experiences with outbreaks and what's going on
with them around the outbreaks time.
Like that's really all we got to report on.
And you really got to follow people and stay with them and,
and like track over the course of, I mean, I guess we can do a
year, but I don't know, man. I think the the course of from
the time a person receives their diagnosis to the time that they
seek out support, that that window of time is so
inconsistent that we can't really, you know, find out, OK,
if this number of people were diagnosed, this number of people
had outbreaks or symptoms at this location and, you know, go
down the list of what it is that you would be tracking.
I don't think that it we can get that consistently enough.
At least I can't, not without a significant amount of time on my
hands and a significant amount of funding to really be able to
just do this because I am curious.
But at the same time, I also recognize the irrelevance of it.
People ask me all the time about transmission rates.
Oh, well, you know, if I wear a condom, if I take the
medication, does that bring the transmission rate down?
Yeah, maybe. But if you're stressing about
bringing the transmission rate down and stress is the number
one cause for outbreaks, what are you really doing?
And also, like I always tell people, the person who doesn't
have herpes, they have to like you more than they don't want
herpes. And also like for you, if that's
something that you're consistently worrying about and
stressing over, then that is going to increase the likelihood
of you passing Murphys on to them or having an outbreak even
because again, this is one of those things where stress it
invites outbreaks. So having to talk to people,
talking to educators and like, explain that the information
that people want a doesn't exist because people want to know how
to prevent transmission. There is no preventing herpes
transmission. And so the only thing that we're
really left with is how do we get people to that realization?
How do we do so in a way that language allows for us to do so
without inviting any stigma? Words like protection because,
you know, that implies an inherent danger of something as
pleasurable, as fun, as connecting, as beautiful as sex
can be. The word safe also does that.
Words like disease, you know, like the word infection, to me
ain't no different. But I know we're going from STD
to STI and an infection is more accurate because you can have an
infection, you can have a virus and not have any symptoms,
whereas if the disease has the symptoms.
So I get that, I understand that.
But there's a lot to be said for not just how we say what we say,
but it's also the words that we use.
And it's very situational. I like to remove violent terms
from the the language we use when we talk about sex and
sexual health, when we talk about even ending stigma or
destroying stigma or eradicating ending.
The words that we use are things that have they have like a
weight tool. And one of the exercises that I
like to do is a simple meditation where we begin to
explore what stigma feels like by consciously looking at the
difference role. The different roles we play in
life are different identities, and then we throw stigma in
there, but we kind of move ourselves into stigma to feel
what that feels like and not be those other aspects of
ourselves. And then we can kind of relate
the weight of those identities up against what it feels like to
be stigmatized. So we also did that and this
gives an idea of what stigma feels like to a person who's
experiencing it and the way out of it being to validate their
identity outside of stigma, which oftentimes it's just
reminding them that they are a sibling, someone's offspring,
maybe a parent, someone who has hobbies or a particular career.
They're a colleague, they're someone's teacher, a student,
right? And these are the kinds of
things that we do in the workshops and one of the things
that's really expensive to do, but I want to do more of.
I'm hoping to hear back about this grant that I applied for,
which will be at the end of this month.
Fingers crossed because this will be the big thing that I've
wanted to do, which is hiring sex educators to be patient
actors so that we can go into clinics, we can go into therapy
practices, and I'll give them a script for us to prepare, like a
back story. And these people are going to
consult with us and communicate with us, delivering the
diagnosis. Answering our questions about SC
is maybe we're newly diagnosed and we just want to know what
our options are in terms of being able to practice sex that
is more safe, safer with our potential partners.
So I think that that is that is, I don't want to say I think that
is the next step of what this advocacy looks like, but I just
got to be, I got to strip things down.
So when you go to the website, you'll see that you might not
even notice, but a lot of stuff has been stripped down from the
website and organized in a way where it's much easier to
navigate. We got the home page.
If you want to learn about something positive, if you want
to learn about Courtney, you can do that.
If you want to understand the the training like I'm describing
here, you can do that. We've got a blog I need to start
adding more to. I've blogged about the main
questions that people have about discording, dating and then
transmission rates. But I I can probably post more
there and I'm going to invest a lot more time on the website
than I have been on Instagram because Instagram has not been
Instagram ain't been cool with me lately.
I would say even I might have noticed it maybe two years ago,
but it's been consistently just not aligned.
It's not been showing my content to people.
And so I'm better off just investing more into the website.
So I put a little bit of money into it.
Shout out to Jenny for making the website look good, making it
easier to navigate, and giving me the feedback that I needed in
order to light that fire into my ass to get shit going.
Because yeah, this is how people are finding something positive
for positive people. And this is where the
opportunities are being created. This is how we're able to keep
things going. So yeah, if you are someone who
works at a clinic, some sort of a Health Organization, public
health, sexual health, mental health education, if you provide
any training, please reach out. If you know of any conferences
that would make sense for something positive, for positive
people to be represented at, please reach out.
Let me know. Like it is, I'm doing this by
myself and I reach out for help when I can.
When I can pay people to do things, I reach out to them to
help me do the things. But I'm doing everything I can.
I don't see myself burning out. I don't see myself stepping away
from this. So please don't like feeling any
kind of sense of urgency or anything, but it is a lot.
It's a lot that I do. And the Tara asked me yesterday,
she was like, So what are the pillars or something positive
for positive people? Yeah, I'm in yoga therapy
training. I do have my 500 hour yoga
teacher certification, which is it?
It fuels the approach I take to the support offerings that I
have. And I also have the stigma free
training with the patient actors, which is a whole program
to manage off. I host the support calls.
There's now a weekly support group, 1 is for men, one is for
women. These meet Mondays at 7:30 PM
Eastern Time. At this moment, anyone who wants
to be in the group, you have to be vetted first.
So we have to have a support call.
And after the support call, that's when you can get added to
the group. And then when you're in the
group, it's required that you make a donation for each of the
ones that you attend. Don't matter how much I just
want you to, I want commitment. I need commitment.
I'm tired of people not showing up today.
I'm tired of people telling me, oh, you should do this and
they're not doing it. I am the person who's
facilitating the men's group as well as the women's group.
These are separate just because I, I, I noticed and in talking
to other people, we've noticed the same things where we'll have
a support group for everybody, but then men don't show up.
We'll have a support group for men and then women will be like,
why? We ain't got what so Well,
that's my experience. I can't say that that's the case
for everybody, but there's alternatives.
If you are a woman who doesn't want to be at Courtney's support
group because I'm a man, cool. We have alternative options for
that as well. So, yeah, this, this episode
really feels more like an update to what's been going on.
But I also really just like, if you are somebody who wants to
help out, can help out, tell me who to talk to.
Just give me give me the name. You ain't got to do nothing
else. If you can make a warm
introduction to one of these healthcare organizations, one of
these public health organizations.
I'm connected to the National Coalition of STD Directors.
I'm connected to the National Coalition for a Second Sexual
Health. I'm connected to the American
Sexual Health Association, like all of the acronyms as far as I
know, I'm connected to, I'm applying to speak at conferences
and presented these places. I have my first HBCU that I'm
talking to historically Black College in Baltimore coming up
next month. And I'm I'm doing more of these
things. I'm looking for more of these
things because he's he's what's keeping the lights on.
He's a progressing mission. And the more of those things I
do, the less shit that I got to look for is looking for.
This shit is really what's kicking my ass, to be completely
honest. And I want to shout out to
Doctor Ina Park, who's a former board member of Something
Positive for Positive People. She had to step down,
unfortunately, to have like a lot of other obligations, and
with her obligations, she was still able to support me
personally, inviting me as well as Jolene, who created the No
Shame in This Game film documentary out to Montreal,
Canada this past July. I think it was July and we got
the present and that's what turned into a couple of really
nice opportunities for me. So I'm very fortunate and
blessed to have people who do just point me in the directions
of things. Shout out to I think it's Amari
sex Ed. She's like a sex education
administrator of some sort, admin by Amari on Instagram who
connected me to someone who writes for Cosmo.
I want to say I think it's Cosmo, she said.
And giving me the opportunity to share my experience with
somebody who's living with herpes.
And yeah, this, this, this life of mine is fueled by community.
I don't do this shit for money. Like I, I need the money.
Yes, the donations that come in awesome.
The paid opportunities make it a lot more efficient and easy for
me, 'cause the less I got to worry about, the more this I can
do. So that I, I got friends who
were like Gordon, yeah, yo, you should do this.
This is how you can make more money, get into the stock
market. I, I honestly don't give a fuck
about that as long as I can. My living expenses are about
$1500 a month. That's it like I just me $1500 a
month and I don't know how the fuck I'm able to do that.
And a lot of the stuff that I want to do off of $1500 a month.
And I just accredited to just alignment and being connected to
what I perceive as to be God, as to be the universe.
You know, whatever language it is that you want to use quantum
mechanics physics. But in aligning myself with the
nature of the flow of what my life experiences and has has
formed me into and what's been formed in terms of my
personality, my identity, I find that a lot more stuff has been
happening just more fluidly for me.
So yeah man, that's that's it. Like if y'all know of
opportunities, please send them my way so that I can do more of
what I've done yesterday and I'm getting better at it to where I
don't need to bring somebody in with me.
I'm used to bringing in people just because I like connecting.
Like connecting is more important to me than how much
money I'm getting. I ain't got no problem with
splitting whatever the cost, whatever the money coming in is
in order to give somebody else the opportunity to share the
spotlight stage speaking opportunity, whatever it is, I
ain't got no problem with that. So that's what I'm looking for.
I'm looking for more of these. I'm looking for more of these
opportunities. If you find them, if you know
them, let me know. All right?
And what this includes is a lot of just speaking to the lived
experiences of people who are struggling with and navigating
herpes stigma, teaching people how to talk about it, and the
people who are in the educational or clinical
settings. How do you talk about this with
patients? A lot of people always get like,
unique questions. There was someone who said
someone that they knew had gotten herpes on his foot from
like walking around the resort, went to the doctor, and the
doctor told him, no, that's herpes.
But they were able to freeze it off.
I was like, all right, you know, I, I hear about the, like,
wrestlers getting herpes from the yoga mask, but that, that
didn't sound right to me. So I asked.
I was like, you sure it was HSV, not HPV?
And then some time went past and she checked and she was like,
oh, yeah, it was HPV. It was HPV.
I was like, cool. So, you know, there's no telling
how long this kind of experience, this, this story can
exist and then grow and evolve over time.
And then, you know, we, we think these things, that's really how
stigma works. It's often times that we don't
have accurate or the, the right information to be able to call
something what it is. So now we've got this ripple
effect because the information that I was given is what I'm
using and sharing as lived experience, as I'm talking to
people, as I'm telling them, oh, hey, you know, this is what I
heard. And this is where that cycle of
stigma continues. It continues to perpetuate and
it's not intentionally, it's not out of malice, it's just out of
not really knowing the most accurate bit of information or
not having all of the information I have and the right
information. And a lot of what I'm learning,
my role is is to really like clean that up, to just clean up
that space of misinformation and stigmatization and to do so
through my own lived experiences.
Like I don't, I ain't got no problem telling the story about
how I got herpes, when I got herpes, how I went through that
process. And you know, even most recently
I shared my own experience, my story, whatever a recent episode
that was, and I got some good feedback from that.
Just like being real and being honest about what my experience
has been speaking about that, that four years between my
diagnosis and then discovering the, discovering something
positive for positive people, or I'm sorry, not something
positive. But discovering positive singles
and learning that there's this resource out there that despite
how good it is at connecting people with herpes, still fuels
and perpetuates stigma. And it does.
So by I, I'm, I'm shitting on them now because they kicked me
off the website and they won't return my e-mail and I know why
they kicked me off. I'm fucking up their money.
They ain't making no money off of me because I'm literally
telling people, Hey, you don't need to only date people with
herpes. So y'all can kick rocks like I,
I'm, I'm over it. I'm done trying to like work
with y'all and work together. Y'all ain't got no desire to
minimizing the impacts of statement.
Like everything y'all doing is just to save face and keep
people in this cycle. Like screw y'all.
And yeah, I was going to get back on there for my own selfish
intentions, I ain't going to lie to you.
But I was also going to talk about the usefulness of
something positive for positive people.
So yeah, that's, that's it. I don't want to come here and
just like be bitching about anything.
But it, this is important work to me.
This is important to me. And it, it doesn't even always
feel like work when it's a line. It just feels like I'm showing
up and just being myself. And you know, maybe that's how
some of the past influencer influencers have felt throughout
history or the people who've LED movements.
But like, all I really want to do is just empower people with
choice. You can, once you learn that
it's a choice of I'm going to continue to be stigmatized and
let stigma run my life or I am not going to, then that's it.
That's all I want to do. That that's what I feel like my
work is, is to just live in a way that empowers people with
choice to live out loud in such a way that people also feel
inspired to live out loud in their own way.
And the return on investment in that is it's it's I can't put a
dollar value to that. I can't And it's it's been this
nurturing of my own nature that I'm finding whoa, that thing was
scary. These Lantern bugs.
All right, so there's these things in New York called
lanternflies. They're like pretty red like
when they jump and fly they're bright red.
But apparently they're like an invasive species that like
eliminates or endangers some type of trees or something, so
people see him and it just maliciously kill them.
Whenever I think about that, I think about that episode of
Black Mirror where the soldiers like were brainwashed into
believing that the people of this culture in these villages
were Ant people, like aliens and shit.
One of the soldiers, his brain short circuited and he was
getting his cognition back and he saw real people, but
everybody else was seeing like alien bug people.
And so he was like, whoa, these are fucking people.
They're just poor. They're just like not, you know,
modernized. They're just in this land living
in huts and shit or like broken down buildings, but like they
got families and shit. So he's not killing these
people. And so Fast forward and they try
and like fix him or whatever. And yeah, basically that's it.
So I'm like looking at these things, I'm like, yo, what is
this misinformation? Like, have I been given
misinformation about lanternflies?
Because it's never felt right to like, kill him.
And it scares me how much like, adrenaline kicks in people and
they feel like rewarded, like they did some good in the world
for stomping on these fucking lanternflies.
Like, I don't know, bro. And my whole atomic living
language. And what I'm learning when you
fuse that with yoga is that everything does have a purpose,
you know, even if its purpose is destruction.
Like even with getting sick, even with getting a parasite,
right? It's a sign that something has
to change. You have to do something
different. So the invitation of things that
are seemingly purposeless, illness, disease, disruption of
rhythm, that's all it does. It's it's designed to redirect
you to whatever your rhythm is. So I don't know if killing these
things is the the way that we, you know, take care of nature,
but it's something ain't right about it.
I'm asking questions. And I shout out to the Black
Mirror creator for that episode because it made me look at shit
a lot different than I would before.
So yeah, I just ask questions. That's it.
And a lot of my teaching is it comes from a lens of curiosity.
So I yeah, if you're somebody who's looking for somebody to
come in and talk to your organization about how to be
stable, free or how to minimize stable in your practice or with
your patients, your clients, I'm in a much better place than I
was several months ago when people were reaching out to me
and ask me about this. So I can like, I can, I can
speak to this a lot better. Now look at this guy.
See, there's one right here just chilling.
Where are you going, though? Like, why do you walk on the
sidewalk when you see what are you looking for, What do you see
over there, 'cause then like if I try and raise my foot to stomp
on it, it jumps. I don't know, I just let me see.
I'm gonna follow it for a little bit while I finish this podcast
episode recording and see what it does.
But yeah, it's kind of big though, so I don't know.
Anyways, yeah, I very much just like appreciate everybody's who
everybody's involvement, the community that this has been,
this is really giving me a sense of purpose, is giving an outlet
for my anger. While I'm not like an angry
person, the anger that I have toward suicide that I have
toward people, not people feeling like they don't have a
choice, like that anger that I feel is directed towards
something. And it wouldn't be, it wouldn't
be as focused, it wouldn't be as aligned as it is.
It wouldn't be what it is had it not been for people's
willingness to share their experiences with me.
So I appreciate y'all. I appreciate the people who come
here and you listen to the podcast, you support the
podcast. Maybe you reach out for a
support call, maybe you join the support group, maybe you share
the resources. Maybe you introduce me to
somebody who later brings me in to speak.
And I, I like I said, I appreciate that.
Thank you for that. And I'm, I'm doing what I'm, I'm
doing, I'm supposed to do. And yeah, I feel, I feel
different. I feel lighter.
I feel like I got some some personal validation as well from
just yesterday and being able to do the presenting that I've done
and maintaining the connections, relationships that I have.
It's it's fucking beautiful. It's fucking beautiful.
So yeah, presentation yesterday went well, we want more of this
that I guess that's it. I just don't really feel like a
podcast episode, Like I ain't, I don't know if I'm like running
out of shit to say, which I've thought about before, like I'm
running out of things to say. So if you somebody that wants to
be interviewed on the podcast and you are ready to share your
experience, know that you can do it anonymously.
You don't have to be anonymous if you don't want to, but I
invite you to talk to me. Reach out, go to
spfpp.org/podcast, Scroll down to the guest intake form, fill
that in for me and we can get things set up to where you can
be a guest on the Something Positive Positive People
podcast. I'm looking for people to share
their experiences. If you are someone who is living
with herpes. If you are someone who is dating
someone living with herpes, if you are somebody who works with
people living with herpes, any aspect or Ave. of herpes stigma
education. If you got anything to
contribute or if you got any input for us, please don't
hesitate to reach out. I need guests or otherwise we
don't get more of these. I'm going to just talk about
something that's been going on and that'll be podcast episode.
So if y'all want to see this thing contribute or continue
contribute all right till next time stay present.