Everyone loves talking about love. Lets start with a question: Do you love yourself?

People talk about love all the time. Teenagers “fall in love” after meeting briefly and although this could be true love, I think it’s often more of a “love escape”. When someone is miserable and unhappy with themselves, it’s easy and quite comforting to take shelter in someone else. Sometimes, “falling in love” is the best way to run away from yourself.

So what is real love?

Going back to my first question, if your answer was yes, then you’re in a better place than most.

If, however, your answer was, “No, I don’t love myself”, the first thing you should be doing is asking yourself why. A person can be his or her own worst enemy, so start to explore the reasoning behind why you don’t love yourself. People have different reasons and only you can delve into this for yourself. Other people may be able to help you explore why you don’t love yourself, but the work is going to have to come from you. The reality is very painful, and I’m not promising that it will be a pleasant experience. The positive side, though, is that once the reality sinks in, you can start to live a more honest life, being true to yourself. The process is filled with obstacles and it’s vital to hold onto hope, especially when you don’t feel like it.

Now that we’ve clarified that you don’t love yourself, I have another question: Do you think it is possible to love anyone else? Can you honestly love someone when you cannot look in the mirror and say, “I love you” to yourself?

Probably not. So you have two options: You can blame everyone in the world, or you can accept the situation. Let’s explore these two routes a bit:

Blaming Others: Blaming other people for your sorrows is the easier route, undoubtedly. It’s always easier to place the blame on someone else instead of accepting responsibility that you’ve made bad decisions or that you’ve had any part in damaging yourself. In the long run, however, this route damages you more than you can imagine. You can cover up the fact that you don’t like yourself with all kinds of excuses, you can pretend you like yourself and that you truly believe you’re worthy. Despite covering up the truth, it may resurface with the next explosion and get deeper with each time you lie to yourself.

Accepting the Situation: This route isn’t easy and involves no quick-fixes, but in the long-term, gets you much further. Accepting the situation means working on yourself, not simply blaming others for your challenges.

and cover it up with all sorts of different excuses and blame everyone in the world except your self for why and how you got yourself in this messed up situation and you connivence your self that you are good and you will most probably will convince yourself that you love yourself and you love your wife and kids. the problem with the second route is that it is not reality it is just an escape and it will only last until the next explosion and than again you will most probably take the second route again because now the reality is even more painful. every time that you escape the reality of real love you just dig yourself dipper into hole and just keep blaming everyone in the world except yourself for the reasoning of everything that is going on in your life.

If a man doesn’t love himself, how in the world is it possible that he can love his wife and children?

The answer is very simple. You don’t love them, you are trying to get as much out of them so maybe you will get the love you never got. You want them to fill an emptiness. There is only one problem: your job as a father is to love them, and their job is to love you. It isn’t a one way street. Your wife can’t truly love you if you don’t truly love her. Unlike fairy tales, love doesn’t mean that everything goes our way and we use our lover to fulfill our needs alone. Love is something built by giving, not only by taking whatever we can from others.

There’s another type of love, though: the love between a father and his son.

We all know that a son expects unconditional love from his father, but what does that mean?

Unconditional love from a father means making a son feel good about himself. It means that the son is able to develop a level of emotional health within himself, not simply giving the son money or letting him do whatever he wants. When a father lacks the unconditional love, the son’s self esteem very well may go down the drain.

If a son is rebelling, it doesn’t help to cave in to all of his requests. Ironically, by doing so, the father is telling the son that he doesn’t truly believe in the things he claims to believe in. Real, unconditional love would be helping the son emotionally so that he can move on with his life in an emotionally healthy manner.

There is no guidebook for how to help a teenager that is in pain and suffering. But there is one thing I can say from my personal experience: the worst thing a parent can do is blame the son and tell his son he is a bad person. Yes, I had my father’s credit card at times and bought whatever i wanted, but it didn’t mean anything.

To be healthy, people need to be emotionally healthy and the natural way a child learns how to cope is from his parents. When parents are emotionally stable, children learn to become healthy adults. They don’t need to go back to unhealthy coping mechanisms they’ve used in the past because they already have the healthy foundation from their family.