Coffee Chats w/ Dr. D

Hey, Cadre. It's me, Dr. D. Welcome to my coffee chat. I do have coffee today, and it's so good. I don't know. It's like extra frothy. I like froth coffee. So you guys know if you're paying attention to the calendar later this week. I think Friday is Valentine's Day. So I want to shout out to all the lovers on here, and I want to talk about love today. It's not topic that most people get into, but I've been thinking a lot about what is love? What is love? How do you know that you're experiencing real love versus just infatuation?

How do you know you're experiencing real love and it's not coming from a bad place? Like sometimes. Sorry. Sometimes we feel this infatuation towards someone, and we think we love someone, but the place that we're coming from is just to get. Hi, Jules. And speak wonder. We're coming from this place of what can this person do for me? Let me take a sip of my coffee. I got something in my throat. Hold on. Okay, I think that's better. There's been something nasty going around. Not in my house, but people that I know, I think have been catching the flu.

So hopefully I catching anything. Yes. Get your coffee, girl. All right. Back to love. So I remember I was just kind of going down memory lane when it comes to Valentine's Day. And I remember growing up at my high school, there were, I guess you can do, like, love Valentine grams or whatever. I forgot what they called them. But basically, you know, you would get called to the office, and all the cool girls would get called to the office, and they would have flowers there, candy from maybe their secret admirer.

And then sometimes they would have people deliver roses to the classrooms from their boyfriends or whatever. And I was one of the girls that just never got that. You know, if I got called to the office for Valentine's Day, it was probably because my mom sent me flowers and. Oh, speak, wonder. I hope you feel better. But, yeah, I was always embarrassed by that. Like, why am I getting flowers from my mom? Like, that's so lame. And why is everyone else around me getting flowers from people that they love?

And I know there's people that think I'm cute, but nobody wants to be with me. No one wants to date me. And. And that thought continued into adulthood. No one wants to date me. What's going on? Why am I not being accepted and loved? And so I always had this question about, well, what is love? What does love Feel like. And I think there are people who think that they're in love, but it's not real love. Now, I'm going to tell you, I want y'all to take some time with this and try to go back to the first time you fell in love.

And I'm not talking about just a romantic relationship, because we can experience love in different ways. There are different types of love, even. But I remember very vividly when I experienced what I consider to be true love. So the day my son was born was the first time I experienced real love. And I'll tell you why. So when my son was born, of course, you know, there's this human being growing inside of me. Don't see them. I can't. I mean, I can talk to him in my belly, but he can't talk back.

And when he's born, when he was born, it was like this overwhelming sense of joy, this overwhelming sense of, oh, my gosh, I love this human that I don't even know. I knew nothing about his character. I knew nothing about, you know, who he was going to be, you know, and when a baby's first born, just, you know, just keeping it real. They're all covered in all this nasty stuff, you know? But you don't care because you love that person so much. You love this person that has done no wrong. They're brand new to the world, haven't messed up, right?

And this person, you can tell, you know, if you're a parent, you know, when your child loves you, like it's just an unspoken thing. You just feel it, right? And there's what's called unconditional love. Unconditional love requires nothing. It just requires you to choose to love someone. And so what does that look like? To choose to love people? Now, there are times when, you know, if you've been in a relationship, a romantic relationship, there are times when your partner probably gets on your last nerve, but you still love them.

You have to make a choice, a conscious choice, to continue to love that person. Even when they've hurt you, when they've done you wrong, whether it was intentional or not. There are days when you have to say, you know what? I'm going to have some empathy. I'm going to choose to love them through their pain. I'm going to choose to even love myself as I'm loving them. Have you been there with that? Loving yourself while you're loving others now? Just think about this for a second. Stay with me here.

We're going somewhere. What does it feel like to love someone else when you don't love yourself, when you haven't had the ability to love who you are unconditionally, despite your flaws, despite the things that you see that's wrong with you or the things that people have called out about you that you agree with, that you don't like about yourself. And so you can't even love yourself, but you're choosing to love other people. What is that like? Now, I'll talk about myself here. I've done that, where I didn't love myself.

I didn't know that I didn't love myself. But other people call that out for me. And here I was, you know, toxic relationship after toxic relationship. I was loving other people with all of my being, but I did not give that same love and respect to myself. And where did that leave me? Well, it kept me stuck. Kept me stuck in these bad relationships that were really hurting me. And I don't know if I did that because I felt like I deserved it or I felt like I wasn't good enough to have something better, that I wasn't good enough to experience real love.

I don't know what that was. And maybe I need to take some time and reflect on that because I don't want to go back to that place. Thankfully, I'm out of that. But there are so many people that do that. We get stuck on wanting love so bad that we will give it to someone else, but we won't give it to ourselves. And in doing so, we don't even allow space for someone else to truly love us. Now there. There are people that I know for sure, and I've been here, too, where you've given love to the person that hurt you.

When there is someone in the background that is trying to love you and you can't even see it, you can't experience it, because all you're focused on is loving the person that's hurting you. Loving the person that you see is broken without even taking time to look in the mirror to see that you're the one that's broken. So I'm going to leave this right here this week. If this is you, if you've been struggling with loving yourself, forget Valentine's Day. I mean, let's celebrate love. Yes. But if you don't have a person to love, let's stop that right there.

Let's put an X on that. Love yourself. You have to love yourself first. And what does that look like? Loving yourself means choosing you. Loving yourself means doing what you know you need to do for yourself first. Because if we don't take care of ourselves first, we can't take care of care of someone else. We just don't have the capacity to do that. We have to. Fill your own cup. Fill your own cup. Get some coffee, of course. But fill your own cup with love. This week. Love yourself. Loving yourself means taking time with yourself, reflecting on, what do you want?

What do you need? Are you giving that to yourself before you're trying to give it to someone else? Okay. All right. Thank you all for joining me. Speak, wonder. I hope you're feeling better. I understand feeling tired and getting the flu is not fun. I hope you guys are taking care of yourselves. Maybe this is a chance for you to love yourself this week and get some healing. Refresh yourself. Rest when you need to. That's another form of loving yourself is choosing to rest when you feel like you have to keep going because people are calling on you.

You don't have to do that. You can rest. Okay, so you guys have a wonderful week. Have a wonderful Valentine's Day and love yourself. But I also want you to love others, too. All right, Have a wonderful day. Bye.