How to Become Better In Any Relationship

I was typing up a summary of the philosophies of the Arbinger Institute, and thought I'd also share it here.
The thing to remember in our relationships is this:

We think other people's bad behavior gives us an excuse for when we are less than our best. I had to get angry, or impatient, or bitter, we say, because of the way they were acting.

But we forget that our actions give them an excuse, too. "I had to act the way I was acting," they say, "because that person was so angry, or impatient, or bitter."

Even if they "went first," we gave them an excuse to keep being bad. "I knew I was right to act that way," they say. "I knew that person would be angry, impatient, or bitter."

And then we use their behavior as our excuse, and the cycle goes on and on, in a hopeless downward spiral that no one can ever win.

And it is not enough to try to break out of it by simply "taking the higher road." Because they will just see our attempts to "be the better person" as being condescending, as talking down to them, as passive-aggressive. They'll just use that as their excuse to keep acting the way they're acting.

So then, where is our hope? If we can't make it better by the low road, or the high road, what is our hope of making it better?

It lies in seeing them as a person again. A person equal in importance to us. No more special, and certainly no less. Walking next to them.

And then recognize that our anger, our impatience, our bitterness made them feel exactly the way we feel. And then in our feeling bad for making another person feel that way.

If it was so bad when they did it to us, it must have been just as bad when we did it to them.

Our ability to empathize with them gives us the hope of reconnecting with them. Our ability to understand them gives us the hope that things can become better.

Even if they were the ones who "started" it.

Because then we stop seeing them as a monster, but as a person. A person like us, who has been hurt, like us. A person who sometimes doesn't quite know how to deal with their hurt, and lashes out at a world before it can have the chance to lash out at them. It doesn't make their actions right, any more than their bad behavior made ours right. But it can make their actions more understandable, and make them people to us again instead of monsters.

And that will change our behavior--because we only felt it was okay to act as we acted toward another human being because we weren't really seeing them as a human being at all.