Self-awareness and care are essential to an effective approach to relationships. The more you are aware of your own sensitivities and your own model of the world the more you will be able to prepare yourself mentally, emotionally and physically to respond in a healthy way to your partner in your relationship. Also, you need to take good care of yourself by exercising, eating properly and getting adequate sleep. That can help you listen well and clearly express your needs and feelings in a useful way. It will help you to work out a solution to conflict with or without relationship counselling.
These are some of the questions you can ask yourself:

• What is some of my or my partner’s behaviour that tends to be difficult for me to handle? How do I tend to respond when confronting such behaviours? How would I prefer to respond?
• How could I communicate better?
• What are some things that I can do for myself that help me develop personally… in other words, how can I treat myself, so I can draw on that energy in times of stress or conflict with my partner?
• Are there people that I can speak to that can help me stay “on track” in these situations?
  Would individual or couple/marriage/relationship counselling help me solve the issues I have with myself or our relationship?

We all have different ways of responding in relationships, and those responses lead to understandable consequences. These responses include our behaviours, feelings, thoughts, and physical reactions. These will determine whether your relationship can be relatively well balanced and work relatively well. Or at least as well as it potentially can.