“You are so lazy. You never clean up after yourself.”

“You never pay attention to what I say.”

“You are self-centered, and you clearly don’t care about my feelings.”

Have you and your partner fallen into the habit of pointing the finger of blame or shame at one another when you feel wounded or angry? If you find yourself telling your partner what he is doing wrong or defining her by the behaviors that are bothering you, you’re not alone. Most couples fall into this pattern after the initial infatuation phase begins to wane.

As a couple, you don’t want to get stuck in this phase of deflecting blame and hurling criticism. In a mindful relationship, you need to focus less on criticizing your partner and more on communicating how the behavior makes you feel.

Dr. Harville Hendrix is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Getting the Love You Want and the founder of Imago Relationship Therapy. Hendrix sees a connection between the frustrations experienced in adult relationships and our early childhood experiences.

Through his work with thousands of couples, Dr. Hendrix has learned that when you understand each other’s feelings and “childhood wounds” more empathically, you can begin to heal yourself and move toward a more conscious relationship.

He believes there are three stages in a committed relationship; when our relationship gets in trouble, we get stuck in the second stage and can’t move on to the third.

The first stage is romantic love, which begins when you first fall in love with your partner. You feel a sense of oneness or completion that seems like it will last forever.

The second phase is the power struggle. During this phase, we begin to get more defensive, blame our partners, and focus more on protecting ourselves rather than engaging in the relationship. We start to dislike many of the things that made us fall in love in the first place.

Why does this happen? Because we are subconsciously looking for a partner who can make us more whole and complete?someone who will stimulate our growth. Our partners push our buttons and trigger some of our deepest wounds, usually from childhood. But if we work through these issues, we can achieve enormous personal growth.

Unfortunately, many couples get stuck in the power struggle phase and can’t get off the cycle of defensiveness and repeat conflict.

For a relationship to reach its potential, couples need to become conscious of their power struggle and begin the journey to the third stage of relationships called real or conscious love. In a conscious relationship, you are willing to explore your own issues, so you feel safe enough to meet your partner’s needs.

In a conscious relationship, you recognize your own unresolved childhood issues and how these issues are showing up in your current relationship. When you find fault with your partner, you can shine a light on your own dark experiences to see how you are projecting your baggage onto your partner.

Just taking a moment each time you have a frustration to consider where this upset is coming from can do wonders for easing the conflict in your marriage.

Also, as you work toward a conscious relationship, you begin to let go of illusions about your partner and see him or her not as your savior but as another wounded person like you who is struggling to be healed and to grow.

You also begin to take responsibility for communicating your needs to your partner without expecting him or her to instinctively know them. You become more intentional in your communication so that you keep the channels of mutual understanding open.

Through this process, you learn how to value one another’s needs and wishes as much as you value your own?because this contributes to the health of the relationship and your own happiness.

One way to encourage a more conscious relationship is by changing a few simple words in your communication with one another and being more intentional in expressing your frustrations and hurt feelings without divisive criticism or defensiveness.

When you express how you feel and what triggered your feelings, rather than blaming your partner, you change the entire dynamic of your conflict from divisive to collaborative 먹튀검증.