S1 E6: The Super Wise Love Episode

Today's episode is about how we process love as a word and how we promote love into action.

Transcript

What's up, good people? Welcome back to the Speak Space. It's your favorite spiritual sister, the super wise, intelligent, here to bring you some super good conversation. Welcome back. Welcome back. I would like to thank today's sponsor for this episode, Audible. Yo, Audible is not the sponsor for today's episode. I'm just trying to manifest them. So humor me if you will, please, and thank you. No, but I would really like to thank my supporters and contributors to the superwise Speak Space. Your support and your contributions mean more to me than words could ever express or say. So thank you very much. All right, y'all, let's get into it. So today's topic is actually all about love. And the love that we're going to discuss does not start and stop at romance like we have been conditioned to believe. It actually transcends romance, and it starts back to when we were born. And I want to speak about love from that space, from the beginning of time for us type of space, because I feel that love at that level, at a very elementary level, shapes the lens from which we experience our lives until something challenges what we thought we knew. And then it gets a little complex and complicated, and that's kind of when things get a little bit weird. So let's dig into it. Now, I would like to start off by talking about love as the hypothesis of childhood, right? The starting point where you learn it, where it begins to shape you. And see, my take on that is that in childhood, what happens there does not stay there. And it really starts with the parental relationships that we are born into. Your parental relationships, in my opinion, is your first life lesson about everything, about relationships, about friendships, about support, about all of those things. And it shapes how we learn how to internalize everything, including how we view ourselves and other people. And it's very important that we think about love from the lens of how we were taught to exist. And this is why parenthood and parenting is so important. It's critical in the developmental years of a child's life because our parents are pretty much responsible for being our guides, our earthly guides. They teach us what we come to know and many times what we have to come to unlearn, but we'll talk about that later. But for the most part, parents teach us what they know based off of the experiences that they have had and the tools they have available to them that they take advantage of in that time. And I think it's so easy for us as adults, because my audience is basically adult y'all, but it's so easy for us to make saints of our parents sometimes, right? Because they are all we know. We have never existed without them, even in the case where people don't know their parents. And if you're listening and you never had a relationship with your parent. I am so sorry to hear that for you. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart. And my hope and desire for you is that you came into a situation where you had people who love you just as much, if not more. And we're going to get into the trauma of that later on in this episode. But for the most part, I just wanted to establish how critical parental role is, how critical of a role parenting plays in the shaping of what love becomes for us. Right? And it's so interesting with parents, because in the toolkit of parenting, which is ever evolving, I think the fear and protection really creates or it can create limitations which can become traumatizing for us. I know. I'm going to be honest with you. It was for me and my mom. Listens to this and listen, Mama, this is sidebar, but everybody's kind of listening in. I am in no way calling my mom out because I will be the first person to give that woman credit for everything that she made happen for us. And a lot of the stuff that happened that was traumatic for me were things that were absolutely out of her control. She was a single parent. I had to talk to her before I have to get permission from her to really go into detail about some things that happened in my life to see if she's okay with me talking about that in this space. But I would say that things that happened that shaped how I feel are many of those things, are things that she really had no control over. And it took me unlearning things to really come into that understanding. But most of all, it took me taking the saint. It took me not deifying her and looking at her as a whole human being for me to really understand how some of the things that happened in my life that shaped how I feel about love, how I feel about relationships, closeness, friendships, how I feel about all of those things. It took me actually seeing her as a human being for me to start my journey of unlearning and healing and just true understanding for myself. And I want to go back to the whole fear and protection because my mom, bless her heart, she tried to, and she's still with us. I alluded to that earlier, but I'm so grateful for that. That's why I said it. There was so much fear in her protection when it came to me, so much so that I think she just tried her best to shield me from things that she knew could taint me as a person who she had expectations of. There was never a time when my mom didn't have expectations of me. And that in itself is a form of love, parental love. And I appreciate her for that. And she was able to give me that because she had expectations of herself, despite so many other things. But I've experienced from peers, I've experienced even from family members and people who I consider to be close to me. That the fear and protection that some parents project onto their children. Start with the generalization of groups of people without them having any proper context or knowledge about circumstances of certain groups of people. And then that goes into the black community, colorism and classism. And for black people in general, going back to our history, which doesn't start and stop with slavery, by the way, let's be clear. But I'm starting with after emancipation and into newly found freedom and the classism and the colorism that exists. And I come from the south, and that's probably why this is such a huge topic for me, because it does make a difference in the experience of life in the south, because I'm melanated, you all, and I have no qualms about it. Your girl is melanated. Okay? I wouldn't pass the paperback test, you know what I'm saying? And if you don't know what the paperback test is, it was a measure for African Americans to determine who had access to what types of things based off of the color of their skin. And the paperback test was if your skin if your complexion was darker than the color of a paper bag, then you were normally not accepted and shunned when it came to having access to a higher level or class, a higher class of experiences in the African American community in the south. I can say because I was born and raised in the South, I can't really speak for anywhere else, even though I know it happened in other places. But the classism, the religion and the indoctrination from the religion, and then the perpetuation of rules and standards that were traditional but toxic, and then they upheld generational curses, and then we can use discipline as an example of that. These things were all things that folks thought they could use as a form of protection, even with colorism, right? Because black people in America are so traumatized from the horrors that we experience throughout our history in this country. So many black families believe that the lighter your complexion, the lighter your complexion, the easier your life will be when the truth of the matter is the exact opposite. It doesn't matter if you're black, you're black, you feel me? So you're going to catch it either way. So I personally promote love and acceptance of all of our shades because at the end of the day, melanin is melanin. It's biological. This whole race construct is Robert Merton. And this Enemy and Strain theory about the inferiority of blackness and all of this other stuff is pure garbage. And it is a catalyst for so much hurt and so much trauma in our communities and as children, because we're still talking about childhood and how what happens there doesn't stay there when we are exposed to these types of things in childhood, you best believe that it shapes how we love. It shapes what we show love too. It shapes our understanding of what family is and the safety that exists or doesn't exist, depending on how you are. Most importantly, in terms of it shaping who you are, it shows you how to feel about yourself. And depending on where you exist on the spectrum of respectability, politics, right, depending on how far right or left you are, right being right and left being farther away from what is considered to be right will be the standard for how you view and treat everyone else until you come into a place of clarity and unlearning which normally happens in adolescence, into adulthood, indefinitely. In adulthood. Because at that point in time you are responsible for yourself. But the met or unmet basic needs in childhood set the standard for how relationships are formed. Once again, I'm not talking about love as love as a relationship, like a romantic relationship. I'm talking about love as just personal acceptance, love starting at the core level within a person. And I think if we approach love at a core level, it'll really help us understand why people do the things they do, why they are the way they are. Many people, many, many people were traumatized at the hypothesis of childhood, right? They were traumatized coming into the world at a critical stage in their lives, at a developmental stage. They were indoctrinated into a system that taught them acceptance or non acceptance based on trivial things sometimes. And that's just considering people who had a familial structure of function or dysfunction. We're not even talking about people who just didn't even have a family structure, because you have some people who are born into that, and that is a different type of trauma all into itself. But I just felt the need to talk about love and how our understanding of it plays such an important role in how we view society. And we talked about grace in the last episode, and one thing I forgot to mention about grace in that episode is how much of an act of love it is. And the most critical and telling part of what grace can become for you definitely depends on how willing you are to receive it. I talked about giving grace, but I didn't really talk about receiving grace, just like I'm about to talk about receiving love. And I noticed from my observation of just society in general, a lot of us have been taught how to give. Many of us have not been taught how to receive. And coming out of that whole childhood thing, right, the baggage that we get in childhood, many of us. And if you had an excellent childhood, I'm so happy for you. But this episode, unless you want to listen to it, just to listen to it, this episode is probably not for you or it could be because you might be dealing with a person and like me, who has trauma to unlearn and to unpack and to heal from. So I do. I invite you to stick around and listen because it might help you learn how to deal with people like me. I'll be as the first person to say, I have a long way to go on my journey. But as far as love is concerned and receiving it, I think because we were saying what happens in childhood doesn't stay there. I think when we bring that baggage, that developmental baggage into our adulthood, that's when it gets a little tricky, because in childhood, you still have people telling you what to do. You still have people, authority figures who create boundaries for you, even though they're the same people who tend to not respect them, but respect the boundaries that they help you create. By the time you evolve into adulthood, sometimes, depending on the situation, it's really hard to drop some of the coping mechanisms that we establish to help us survive childhood. And that's such a strong statement to me. Like, surviving childhood, a lot of us had to do that because all we knew how to do with the little power we had as children was to cope, was to disassociate, was to come up with a strategy, and we didn't even know that this is what we were doing. But if you came from a family where being yelled at is the norm, you definitely learned how to cope, and you came up with a strategy when it was happening, you probably have PTSD, and that's not a joke. That's real shit. If you came up in a family where violence was the norm, the same host true for you. Where toxic femininity or masculinity was the norm, the same host true for you. Those are not situations and experiences that we want to bring idealistically, ideally, rather into adulthood, because those are things that we had to survive, and we bring the unhealthy coping mechanisms just to survive those things into adulthood. And we never had the time, really, to understand why we do the things we do. And a lot of it, once you work through that, a lot of it stems from the lack of love we have for ourselves, because we didn't have situations where people showed up for us speaking the language of love that we needed. And I know that the whole love language thing, a lot of people think it's a gimmick, but there's something to it, whereas it doesn't need to be the exact love languages. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just Google five. I want to say five Love languages or six Love languages or whatever, google it. There I think there is something to it, you know what I'm saying? Because for me, you have to take this test, right? And then they match you up with the way the best ways you respond to love or whatever or what types of love you may need. But we're such complex people. I don't even think that. And I know that you can be a percentage of all of them, whichever is the most dominant is your love language. But because we all have such complex backgrounds, on a given day, you may need love to show up for you in a different way. And that's okay. I think for many of us, we were taught that love is one thing and then it has to be unconditional. On top of that, as fickle as we are as human beings, we have been taught to love unconditionally. And I think that is so abusive. I think that is such an abusive way of thinking. It's so unhealthy because it contributes to people staying in situations where they should probably just go. But that's also a luxury, and that's a conversation for another day. But when it comes to adulthood and the sacredness of a genuine sense of freedom, which is, nine times out of ten garnered through the process of unlearning the projections of fear from your childhood, from parents who just knew what they knew at the time, it can be really hard to process. I know. For me, and I give my mom credit for this, I don't even think she realized that this is what she was doing. But in the process of her trying to better herself, right, she put me in a position where I really had to quickly figure out where I belonged in a situation. Thank God I had a village of people who had genuine love for me because it could have easily gone left for me in that regard. But I was able to. And I was an only child. I am an only child, too, so I really didn't have any other person that when I was in the presence of people who were charged to take care of me, they didn't really have to split their attention. So I was really able to watch how different people approached me. And we didn't have much. But when I say I had a full childhood, there were some things that could have been better. But for the most part, I give my village the credit they deserve for the things that they did get right. Because if it wasn't for the way they did things, I wouldn't be the way I am right now. Some of it comes from me wanting to do things differently, but much of it comes from principle that they instilled in me. Now, sometimes it wasn't the most functional, but I understood the gist. And I don't know, maybe that's a testament to the era that I grew up in because you had to have thick skin. These kids now, man, I don't know. I have to watch my patience with them because they're just really now this is going to sound toxic as hell. Going back to my childhood, but they sound really they they really soft, you know? Like, there was so much there. There was just so much toughness that that came from from my childhood, you know, like, you you had to be able to think on your own sometimes. You had to be at home by yourself at a very young age. You had to learn how to cook a thing or at least put some in a microwave and not burn a damn house down, you know what I'm saying? Those were survival skills that we had to learn at an early age. We did it, and I wear it as a badge of honor, but it's a double edged sword, you know what I'm saying? I can't really compare what we had to know at that time to what these kids have to deal with now, because whereas we didn't have the Internet to contend with, we had other issues. But now these kids have so much access to so much information so quickly, their brains cannot process all of this stimulation, and that's where they kind of get my sympathy, because they don't know no better. And how can you like, I'm a millennial. I'm the eldest millennial. I don't have any kids yet. But it's like my mom I look at my mom going back to me not deifying her and looking at her as a human, even when I was coming up, like, technology was really starting to boom, and she know what to do. I mean, I'm looking at myself now like, these man, like, all this stuff that these kids have access to, how do you teach them through that? Even with how you redo math, like, these people in this Common Core stuff, you all people who got kids in school. You all know what I hate Common Core. You all know what I'm talking about. Why you got to redo the math? Math is math. Science is science, man. The numbers are numbers. Anyway. Went off on a tangent, but going back to love the whole unlearning in your adulthood, I mean, it's probably one of the most liberating experiences if you have the luxury and if you have the awareness to be able to do it. Because honestly, I think it's through the sacredness of having a genuine sense of freedom through your unlearning that you really and truly begin to love yourself. Because it's at that point that you really, truly begin to establish your truest identity based off of your experimentation and the test and the data collection that you get so that you can have something to compare to the protection strategies that your parents had when you were little. And you can dispel some of the myths, and the hypothesis of childhood either gets disproven or it's upheld based off of the experiences you have. Right. You go through a whole scientific method when you are going through this journey of life, and love is probably the air you breathe when you go through this journey, right? It's something that you have to have, something that you have to experience and exposure to differences in my opinion. Like we were talking about the fear and protection from your parents and then establishing the true identity. I mean, you have to have a point of reference. So exposure to differences is really important and it's so funny because the very thing that our parents probably tried to protect us from which would be differing opinions, differing appearances. Those are the things that actually free us up to learn what love is and learn what acceptance is. You know what I'm saying? Like I said, I'm a black girl coming out of the south so tensions between us and Caucasians is always high, very high for very good reason. But as an adult I had to make up in my mind what type of person I really want to be and sometimes I still struggle with it because of very real situations that we have still occurring in this lifetime. But when people say they choose love that's a powerful statement. But it's so easy to say, it's much harder to do because when you become an adult I think that is when you really understand how much of an act love and loving is. When you're a child, you're receiving a lot of it. You have it to give back but you're learning what it is and what to do with it. But as an adult this is when your love really means something. This is when your love really shapes how you experience the rest of your life. And if you aren't careful, many of the challenges and traumas that you learned and that you incurred in your childhood can jack you up in your adulthood if you're not careful. And because in many cases some of us just never take advantage of the tools we have at our disposal like therapy. We just perpetuate the same generational curses and rules and standards that were projected onto us in childhood. Because sometimes it's easier to just stick with what you know than take on the responsibility of unlearning and relearning what you need to know. And to that end, I say don't complain then unless you are really ready to embark upon a soul level change through unlearning the things you thought you knew and relearning what you need to know. You can't really get mad at the experiences you have because as an adult it is your responsibility to do better. Especially as you learn better. You can't come into a sense of knowing what you need, neglect that need, experience the same bullshit and then be mad because at that point in time you have the knowledge to do better. And if you don't choose to do better, that's a choice. And then you choose to be stuck. And then this is where love gets a bad rap because people are just like oh, all of these crazy things are happening to me. I have these failed friendships, failed relationships, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, no, you don't. They didn't fail. They didn't last because you don't know how to show up in them as a healed person. Love and healing are very closely related and I think for many people they lack the love for themselves enough to deem themselves worthy of the healing they so desperately need to experience a better life. And I think the lack of boundaries that people have sometimes is a direct reflection of them not having come into a space of unlearning and relearning what love should really look like for them. And it's unfortunate because these are the same people who go out into the world and establish friendships, romantic relationships, professional relationships with people, and it is a disaster. And it's important that we hold space in situations like that where it's necessary anyway for folks to kind of catch up because not everybody's in the same space and not everybody has people who are around them who are knowledgeable enough and wise enough and understanding enough to say hey, you hurting, aren't you? And some people don't even know. Some people have been living this way so long they don't even recognize their hurt as hurt. All they know is they feel away and they see that there are other people who are happy. There are other relationships across the spectrum of relationships that work and they haven't experienced that yet. So I think the catalyst of all of that is love. And then people say, well, you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else. And that's true. But nobody ever takes the time to tell people how to do that. And it's not easy to explain. You would think that self love would be one of the easier things to explain to a person, but it's not because you have to start from where love began and then you have to work your way through a person's trauma or the person themselves. Rather, they have to walk themselves through a trauma. And sometimes people just don't have the capacity to deal with or to relive the things that hurt them. Which is why for many people who experience trauma they stop growing emotionally at that point when a thing happened to them, they just shut down and go straight into survival mode. Which is why I say that what happens in childhood doesn't stay there. And by adulthood either. People are broken and I'll never say beyond repair. They're pretty fragile. They're either fragile or broken. And most of us fall into one of the two categories. The difference in all of it, though, is the likelihood or the understanding, the internal understanding that we need to do the work, the work ourselves to become better people. When you identify the need to heal you have the potential to heal not only yourself but the potential to heal your lineage. I know for a fact that as I come into the grace that I show myself, the love that I allow myself to receive, the grace that I allow myself to receive and the healing that I experience as a result of that, I heal myself. But I also heal my mom, and I heal my grandmother, and I heal my other family members through the act of loving myself without apology and loving myself freely. Because I feel like I'm worth it. And if I were to give a person an example of self love, I would say that's it being receptive to the fact that you are not perfect, but you are worthy of grace, you are worthy of love, you are worthy of being treated with respect, you are worthy of having your boundaries upheld and your privacy respected. Once you can get into that level of conversation and that level of exposure to a person, I think that's when you can demonstrate fully what love is and you can usher them or help them usher themselves into a space of showing that same kind of love to themselves, pretty much. And there's never really a true conclusion when it comes to love. It's not what you may have been taught. It's actually a journey. It's not something that static, it's ever evolving. It's a way of existing. And only you can define what love is for you and what it means to you and how you give and receive it, but just know that you are worthy of having it in any of its ways, many ways of existing. And one of the things that I'll say in closing is that it is up to you to have love, to be love and to give love, right? But you have to know it before you can do any of these things. And I'd really like to encourage us as a collective of people to get into the habit of accepting well, acknowledging and accepting when we see negative patterns emerging in how we are emotional, how we show up for ourselves in the physical and the relationship that we have to our spirits. I think all of these things tie into each other. And they all definitely have love at their common core. I think we forget that we all share this same human fabric and at the least of all of us are the same basic needs that need to be met. You know what I'm saying? And if you say you care for a person, the first thing you need to do is ask yourself if above all, you care for yourself. Because it's going to be really hard for you to have successful interactions at any level with anyone if you haven't figured out how to receive the love you need for yourself. If you have problems. Because I used to have this as an issue. I used to have problems with receiving love. I thought that I was given love, but what I was doing was just. Acting because I didn't know what love was enough to be able to give anyone anything. It wasn't until I learned how to love myself, it wasn't until I learned what love was for me that I was truly able to understand how I had a relationship with it. And the more I learned about what love is to me, the better I was able to have relationship across the board with people. And my take on situations changed, which changed the experiences that I had around me was very important, that I was honest about how much I didn't know so that I can learn and that I can grow within the space of what love is. Because it's definitely not just a word, it's an action, it's a state of being, it's a state of mind always. It never ends. You can be on the unhealthy side of it or you can be on the healthy side of it, but it will always be. And it is your responsibility as a person to figure out where you want to be in the space of love. Look at love as a spectrum, right? And you decide if you want to you just determine for yourself where you are in your life what kind of relationship you would like to have with love. Firstly, and I hope and pray for you, that when you discuss the type of relationship that you would like to have with love, that you consider yourself above all things. Because really and truly, that's where it starts between you. And if you serve a God, between you and the God you serve, you and your spirit and you and yourself, that's where it all begins, y'all? So thank you for listening. I appreciate your ear. I know I rambled a little bit, but these are just things that were on my heart and these are things that I wanted to share with you guys. Until next time. Go be good.