How many men or women do you know that when a fight has begun – or even in the middle of one – they suddenly see and agree that to blame the other person for the state that they are in is a lie? How long would a fight go on between any two human beings if one of those individuals awakened sufficiently enough to see that the pattern of fighting with another person to prove that I’m right is in fact the proof that I’m in the wrong?

Our experience has shown us that the fighting continues because we are not learning from the relationship. Instead we are burning over what someone or other has implied that we are or that we are not doing and therefore we are at fault. We are never at fault in our relationships until at last the fighting becomes so egregious that we can’t hide the truth from ourselves anymore. And by the time we reach that point with other human beings, we have most often ruined whatever little love had brought us together in the first place.

On the other hand, in our relationship with our own psychology, reaching the point where we realize that we can no longer defend ourselves is what happens when people finally get serious about recovering from addiction or substance abuse… because they’ve run out of excuses for the weakness that hid itself through their relationship with the addictive substance. The same holds true with the people in our lives we fight with: we hold them responsible for our pain, for the disturbance we feel, when the truth is (to see it properly), they are not creating the disturbance in this relationship. They are revealing to us in that moment the part of us that lays in the dark and waits to get disturbed so it can hide behind the cloud of war.

Any time we find ourselves defending some characteristic, some quality in ourselves that we have been affecting, we can be quite sure that in the moment we are called to fight with someone or to prove that we are who we are pretending to be, that we are not what we have pretended to be. And because we are beginning to understand that, before all other things, the purpose of our relationships with others is revelation, we should thank that person for helping us wake up to the fact that there is a difference between the struggle to appear to be something and being what we actually are in the moment. In this way, we serve the real purpose of that relationship by seeing what we are as a result of it.