You have conflict and relationship disharmony for two chief reasons. The first is because you believe it's the others fault and that you’re innocent. The second is that you have no idea why you have conflict, but this won’t stop you from inventing ideas and using these mental inventions to righteously correct others.
The ego-self concept, or that package of beliefs you believe in as “you,” does not do well with the unknown. There must be a reason for everything and if “you” don’t know the reason, your ego will make one up, at least it will invent a reason it feels is valid.
And it will be wrong 100% of the time.
Unfortunately, although we are blessed with genius and are supremely intelligent beings, our egos lack the ability to cohabit and live together harmoniously. This results in a great deal of problems for cohabitating strangers. When you are alienated from your “loved" ones you will experience the unknown simply because you are stranger to one another. Alienation, or lack of understanding, breeds ignorance and, therefore, what you fail to understand is the one you thought you knew. Yet, depending on how long your alienation has continued, understanding may be difficult to attain because the conflict episodes have so polluted the air that breathing in the freshness of each other may be seem virtually impossible.
Therefore, since the ego fears what it cannot define, you will ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ with what you think is the truth and act based on that self-constructed information. Neither you nor the other will seek to understand by simply engaging to learn the correct information that leads to a depth of understanding. Rather, you will continue to fill-in-the-blanks, denying truth and continuing to battle each other based on that ignorance.
Unfortunately, when you fill-in-the-blanks, in your intimate relationships, you will be dead wrong. But here’s the confounding part. Even though you’re wrong, you will not seek for correction and simply engage in continued conflict with your loved one based on what you believe is the problem. This is because, once the ego makes a judgment that judgment sticks, because the ego-self is righteous. If this goes on too long, even receiving the correct information may not sway your egoic conception of truth from its righteous path of correction. No matter what the other says, contrary to your determination, you are convinced that your determination is correct.
Of course, the ego does this in its dealings with the world all the time and it results in racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc, etc, etc. But, as they say, what happens in our little world is merely a reflection of the world at large.
Alienated individuals are strangers. Strangeness signifies the unknown and the ego will seek to define what it does not know so that it can vigilantly predict and anticipate actions. If we lose intimate understanding and become alienated over time, we will fill in the blanks and be wrong. This means we will frequently be in conflict for judgments made in the past that, though they may be irrelevant to the present, stick to the mind like glue. Some of the couples I see are so deeply mired in their past fill-in-the-blank determinations that they have created Frankenstein monsters of each other, both barely resembling who they thought they once knew.
It is this faulty understanding of the other that you will attack but, make no mistake, you created it.
Surprisingly, all that need occur, for reconciliation to begin, is for you to drop your egoic righteousness that you understand the problem. This is because the ego loses the motivation to attack that which it comes to know and deeply understand. “Seek to understand and then be understood” is a wise aphorism but is difficult for an ego that has relied on fill-in-the-blank determinations for many years. Responses from ignorance become conditioned knee-jerk attacks that breed contempt and can destroy what was begun in earnest as a loving union.
Shut your ego down and allow yourself to come from Deep Spirit in listening to your partner because YOU are ignorant of who they are and therefore, have lost yourself in that separation and you will only find your 'self' through them.
“He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.” - Buddha
