You can end conflict in any relationship.

Love by itself is never enough to have a relationship work. The divorce courts are full of people who love each other. If you want your relationship work, you need to make sure the other person feels loved.

This is true whether you stay together or get a divorce. To the extent you have the experience of love in your relationship, your relationship will be supportive and relatively effortless.

You create the experience of love by giving the gift of acceptance and appreciation. You destroy it by being judgmental, critical and controlling. Notice how you feel when someone is non-accepting towards you. Notice how fast the experience of love disappears.

Instantly, you get hurt. You get upset and close down. You put up your walls of protection and automatically become non-accepting and critical in return. Then the other person gets upset, puts up his or her walls of protection, and becomes even more non-accepting towards you.

Then you get even more upset. Your walls of protection get stronger and you become more critical of the other person.

Then that person gets more upset and becomes more resentful of you. Then you become more hateful towards the other person. Without knowing, you create a cycle of conflict, a cycle of resisting, attacking and withdrawing from each other. This cycle of conflict then destroys your relationship and produces tremendous suffering. If you have any relationship that isn't working, this cycle is present. If you want to heal your relationship and end the conflict, you need to end this cycle. Fortunately, all it takes is one person.

The cycle of conflict is like a tennis volley. Two people are needed to keep the cycle going. Only one is needed to end it. When one person stops playing the game, the cycle is over. You stop playing the game when you give acceptance and appreciation instead of being critical and resentful.

You automaticaly make the shift from criticalness to acceptance when you let go of your resistance. You can do this by taking the following steps:

Take the following steps:

1. Find and heal the hurt that has been reactivated by the other person. Ultimately, the reason you are non-accepting is because the other person has triggered a suppressed hurt in you. As you heal this hurt, the need to resist disappears. You can then interact in a way that creates love instead of destroying it.

2. Give the person full permission to be the way he or she is. Notice that the other person is the way he or she is whether you like it or not. Your feelings are totally irrelevant. Hating the way someone is doesn't change a thing. That person is still exactly the way he or she is. When you fight the truth of how someone is, you fuel the cycle of conflict and you lose your ability to see what needs to be done. When you are at peace with the way someone is, you see your situation clearly. You can see what needs to be done and you can do it in a way that is supportive.

3. Forgive the person. When you resent someone, a big part of you closes down. You become bitter and lose your ability to love. You also interact in a way that automatically creates opposition and resistance against yourself. Forgiveness is not for the other person, forgiveness is for you. 4. Let the person go. When you hang on to someone, you push the person away

4. The person feels suffocated and has to fight for breathing room. Just look at how you feel when someone hangs on to you. To have any relationship work, you have to be willing to lose the person.

5. Accept full 100% responsibility for the loss of love. Relationships are not 50/50. They are 100/100. Each person is 100% responsible for the presence or absence of love in a relationship. Once you see your 100% responsibility for the loss of love, you can no longer blame the other person. You also become more effective in all your future relationships.

6. See that you are just like the other person. Any characteristic that you can't stand in another person is an aspect of you that you can't stand in yourself. Once you discover that this characteristic is also in you, your resistance towards the other person gets replaced with compassion. You also become more at peace with yourself.

7. Get with the person and clean up your relationship. Once you let go of your resistance towards someone, the next step is to get with the person and clean up your relationship. Tell the person that you've had some major self-discoveries and that now you're interacting in a new way.

Take full responsibility for what happened and ask the person to please forgive you. If you have been hanging on, give the person freedom to leave. Say whatever you need to say to clean up your relationship. Then follow your statement up with action. Make sure the other person always feels loved, accepted and appreciated.

Every time you interact with someone, you will either create love or destroy love, and whatever you give will come right back. So put the focus on ending the conflict and restoring the love, not necessarily as husband and wife, but as one human being to another.

As you do this, you will heal both your relationship and your hurt. You will also create a life that is a lot more enjoyable.

To learn more about how to end the cycle of conflict, read the book, How To Heal A Painful Relationship or listen to How To Divorce As Friends.