Written by Guy Finley

If you want a better relationship with your partner, both of you must change. But since you’re the one reading this article, odds favor you’re the one who will have to initiate the work needed to refresh your relationship. No problem. You’ll find a great way to get started in the special relationship exercise that follows. It is designed to work in a two-fold way.

Part one unfolds as you initiate the first action and the new understanding you gain from doing it helps make changes in you. The second part unfolds as your partner sees and experiences this change in you. When you no longer act toward him in the old way, he can’t help but see his own mechanical nature that only knows the “old way” to react to you – and to whatever degree it occurs, your partner suddenly sees the need to change! If ever there was a real “win-win” situation, a way for two people to realize the highest possibilities a relationship can offer, this is it. So, here’s the exercise:

Let’s say you’re with your partner and she does something that “strikes a familiar nerve” in you. Maybe it’s impatience, an obvious pretense, or just the unpleasant tone in her voice when she says something unkind or otherwise painful to your ear.

You feel a sudden negative reaction come up in you, generally attended by an unspoken thought along the lines of there they go again. As a rule, you next feel obligated to give this negative feeling a voice. After all, if you don’t point out his misstep how will he know he stepped out of line, let alone how he troubled you?

But you know from past experience that whatever you feel compelled to point out to your partner causes her to immediately oppose you and push your observation away. So rather than taking your habitual place in this old pattern – you meet the moment with a new intention: you look within yourself before you speak out. And what do you see?

Call it what you will, there stands revealed some kind of pain; perhaps anger, an old resentment, a sense of disappointment. By whatever name, its negative. But you’re not and here’s why: your new awareness of this unconscious nature is the same as your freedom from its compulsion to prove itself right.

Your conscious struggle to bear its pressure in you – to not let it push you to speak its pain – is the same as sparing your partner the brunt of its dark nature.

You are changed on the spot because now – thanks to the exercise of looking within before you speak out – you can now see, clearly, who you can no longer agree to be.

At the same time, your partner is watching you. It may not seem so, but in the same moment of their misstep he could feel your negative reaction. Even if you think you masked it for fear of an unwanted encounter, your partner feels that dark energy. It unconsciously registers within him creating an opposing reaction. So your partner is waiting, albeit unaware that he is preparing to defend himself from what he believed you’re about to say!

But not a contrary word slips out of your mouth. You’re busy learning about yourself, and your silence is deafening, giving your partner the momentary room, and the freedom she needs to see that the only thing punishing at the moment - her own defensive thoughts and feelings. She’s ready to fight … but your silence has left her no one to fight with! She’s left alone with her pain, with no one she can blame for its mounting pressure. This new awareness is the same as their realization of a limitation in their nature she would have never seen otherwise. What was concealed is revealed, and the healing can begin because now your partner has also seen the need to change.

Guy Finley is the best-selling author of more than 40 books and audio albums on self-realization, showing men and women everywhere how to find a life of freedom, enduring fulfillment, and true purpose.  Guy is the founder and director of the non-profit Life of Learning Foundation Center for Spiritual Development in Merlin, Oregon, where he offers free, twice weekly live-streamed classes.