[Joely]

I don't believe Byron Katie is advocating that everybody should stay in the relationship they're in and just love and accept it as it is. That seems a simplistic interpretation of what she says. If you do the work in a relationship and find that it's really run its course, then you leave.

I can only really explain by giving an example. If I was, say, in a relationship and my partner "cheated" (had an affair with somebody else), and I felt that didn't fit with what I wanted in the relationship, by some people's models I might fight it out with my partner and demand that he stay true to me or the relationship is over. Now, in Katie's reality, I can make the demand but I can't control his behaviour, and thinking that I can or should only hurts me. So I have a choice: either I accept what's happened and his behaviour and decide what he does is acceptable to me, or I accept what's happened and his behaviour, and decide to move out of the relationship because I want a monogamous relationship that doesn't involve "extras on the side."

The relationships that people go back to in the book evidently weren't unsatisfactory - the individuals involved had gathered up a lot of thoughts and assumptions about the other person in the relationship which had created the problem. What created the problem were the thoughts about the relationship and how it worked, not the relationship itself.

I find the term "unsatisfactory relationship" problematic. After all, how can you really expect another person to fulfill your needs - unless they want to? I don't see relationships, fully functional ones that is, as being about people having needs that must be filled by others. That is only ever going to cause pain because relying on somebody else to fulfill your needs might mean they don't get fulfilled.

I find it incredibly refreshing to use the work on my relationships in general. I've been walking around assuming that people need or should do things for me - people should look or speak to me a specific way so I don't get upset, or they should be a certain way for me. Knowing that they shouldn't, that they are who they are, allows me to accept them as they are. And if who they are, when I see them without my thoughts attached, means that we don't end up remaining in a relationship, then that's fine.

Byron Katie works with a very solid sense of reality, which I really admire. "He shouldn't leave me." Well, he's going to leave you whether you think he should or he shouldn't so you're going to have to get used to it. Getting rid of the thought "He shouldn't leave me" ends the pain caused by thinking somebody shouldn't do something when they patently should. You can't control other people, but you can control yourself and your thoughts about them.