I need your love - is that true? By Byron Katie - a response

[pumpkin]

I started reading this book I need your love - is that true? by Byron Katie a few days ago and I'm almost finished now.
I picked it up because her name was mentioned in one of the threads, so I figured I'd give her philosophy a try.

I'm quite disappointed and sometimes appalled at what she has to say. Her main point in the book is that "there are two basic misconceptions about love: first, that you have to manipulate others to get it, and second, that love is about getting what you want". This sounds great and I don't have a problem with that statement.
Going on, though, she makes use of her questioning method to get people to see what they really look for in relationships and how to be more loving. There are plenty of examples in her book. Most of them go something like this: "I feel I need this or that from my significant other". She asks if that's true, often adding a sentiment of her own, and the person in question 'finally' sees that they don't need whatever they thought they needed. They can now just love. This seems great, too.

My main concern coming out of this is how to know when to end a relationship. If all that's wrong with a relationship is that one person feels they are not getting what they want, then perhaps we should always stay in the current relationship we're in (wouldn't we all stay with our high school sweethearts, then?) I'm assuming here that the relationship in question is not abusive and 'good' on all other grounds, except for what one of the people feels is missing. (This is what her dialogues seem to all be about, for example: "I need my boyfriend to understand me").

She mentions that love is not about getting what you want. Okay.
I find this concerning, though, because in one of the featured dialogues, she says " Yes honey. Believing the thought that your partner shouldn't leave you is like saying 'I want you to be with me even if that's not what you want. I don't really care what's best for you...".
Well, isn't that opposing what she was saying all along? Technically speaking, both people must believe that love is not about getting what you want. And, if you love the person, that's all that matters.

This book is making me very uneasy. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I hope I illuminated at least partially what I mean.
I feel like what she says about love is right in general, but the way it makes people go back to an unsatisfactory relationship and just 'love' the other person is... unfullfilling.

Would anyone ever leave a relationship that's already started and is at least someone genuine in Byron's world? I don't think so. Yet, she implies that people may choose to not be together, when would this ever be if they were acting the way she portrays as correct?

One other major red light I noticed: she says, "It's not your job to understand me - it's mine". I've read about how Erin Pavlina's two main goals in life are to understand herself and another person (paraphrasing here), and this thought from Byron contradicts that. I don't follow Steve or Erin's beliefs religiously, but I remember when I read those particular goals I felt happy and they made sense to me.

I guess what comes out of this is:
(1) Byron's ideas are great but her methods do not feel right to me. I'd like to continue to act in a way that makes me happy and her methods seem to be wrong. What do you think?
(2) How do you know when to end a relationship with someone you love and hold dear? What if you are consistently not getting what you want (this may be appropriate to post in a separate thread, as well)?

[jaamkie]

interesting... I haven't read the book; but I can see how the advice would work if you assume that people are together because overall they want to be together, but "there is just this one thing...", and the advice would be to figure out why you have this unfulfilled need and why you're expecting your partner to fill it for you, to consider if maybe you could fill it some other way yourself or with friends/family or whatever. I think the point is that each person needs to be somewhat emotionally self-sufficient, and then let love and understanding flow out from that, rather than needy and trying to suck love and understanding in. Imagining your partner being better off without you and your response is a good way of checking whether you're really in giving mode and whether you're self-sufficient enough to give rather than feel needy/insecure at the idea of them leaving.

In my most recent relationship I've noticed something- my first relationships were full of statements- each person telling the other what to do- "You will love/understand me" etc; so then it seemed a big improvement to change it to questions/asking "Will you love me?" and negotiating/trading rather than just demanding; but in my most recent relationship it has changed back to telling, but telling "I love you" "I understand and I'm here to listen", not requiring or asking for anything in return. I think it is a rather important shift to go from mostly asking for what you need/negotiating to being more independent and taking responsibility for your own needs and each person just giving. I think when Erin is saying she wants to understand others, that is flowing out of her, wheras if she said she wanted to be understood then it would be more of a need.

I think the right time to end a relationship is when you can't realistically imagine ever being content/fulfilled by the person as they are.

[Erin Pavlina]

Just to clarify, since I'm Erin...

I came up with that in response to the "If you had three wishes" idea.

I wanted to know myself, know another, and have another know me. Not saying everyone should want this, but that is what I want.

Carry on then...

[vapourmile]

I want to throw some ideas up for the sake of seeing how they get shot down, a couple of hypotheses for debate, if anybody wishes to make a remark:

1.The whole idea of an unsatisfactory relationship is bogus and based on the belief that satisfaction is found through relationships. What I mean is, when people are not satisfied they blame the relationship, a way of saying "I'm not satisfied, I'm with you, so it's your fault". This also suggests to me that there are people who believe the answer to satisfaction is the right relationship with the right person. It also implies to me that some believe their measure of satisfaction is based on what they're getting from somebody else. It also implies that some believe happiness depends on the support of somebody else. In other words, that happiness is somehow contingent to ones capacity to spend a lot of time with somebody (bodies) who is (are) doing the right thing according to some kind of internal map of what other people should be doing.

Maybe you should be reading Viktor Frankl's "Man's search for meaning" (with apologies for the gender typing there, it was composed before we had a social obligation to de-gender our communications).

2.One of the reasons people leave a relationship is somewhere based in the utterly absurd belief that, because the other person is responsible for how we feel, we can get the satisfaction we seek from being with somebody else. In fact, dissatisfaction is innate. In fact, your sense of happiness has got nothing to do with who you're going out with at all, and it is not even anything to do with going out with somebody at all. In fact, the belief that romance holds the keys to long-term happiness is mass delusion.

3. Each of us is ultimately and solely responsible for producing the happiness and misery we feel. If there is a nameable source of misery it is the sustained belief that ones satisfaction depends on a the vacillations of an outside agent of any kind. Or the control or accumulation of such thing. If there is a nameable solution to this mental illness it is the outright realisation that you alone are the source of your satisfaction, and, with this understood, get over your emotional constipation and start producing it. And if you can't do that, at least quit blaming the other. Exactly how much of your satisfaction do you think THEY are responsible for? Because I'd estimate it to be about 0%, most likely, less.

[pumpkin]

1) A response to Erin:
I understand that this is what you want - and when I read what you wrote it really spoke to me. So, when I read what Byron had to say, I noticed that it's yet another red flag.

2) A response to vapourmile:
I think that happiness is indeed our own doing and responsibility. In a relationship, the other person is definitely not responsible for my happiness. Moreover, coming into a relationship already happy and whole (so, realizing all these things) makes it that much better.

Something that my friend said a while ago that made sense: a relationship should enhance your life. (I can see how this can be shut down, but the essence of it is that relationships should be free flowing and easy and joyful, at least most of the time). This sentence was in response to how it seems that relationships go sour and people just go on and suffer through them, and for what?

[carenkh]

I haven't yet read that book, but I have read Loving What Is and I'm now in the middle of A Thousand Names for Joy. I love her work, and what she's brought.

I'm thinking... if you do the work on the thought that you need a person to be a certain way, it doesn't necessarily mean that you'd just stay with that person. I think it would free you up to make a more honest choice. Rather than staying with them, either telling them or thinking that they need to change for you to be happy, and having that whole drama. You can get to a point of seeing, "Oh, OK, I don't need for Steve to have a big weenie for me to be happy. BUT I do want a big weenie in my relationship, so I'm going to move on." In other words, you don't need that person to change, but you may choose to not be with them the way they are.

I don't know if this is clear or not - hope I've gotten across what I wanted to say!

[Angela]

Carenkh, I love it when you get vulgar!

Yeah, pumpkin, like carenkh is saying, it looks like you may be collapsing "love and accept" and "stay together" as if they are one and the same. But sometimes "love and accept" means letting someone go. If I'm going to break up with someone (which it doesn't look like is going to happen anytime soon, by the way ), I would rather be happy for him than bitter and resentful and thinking thoughts of how different he *should* be.

[{aspiring_to_clarity}]

I think carenkh is right (she is pretty good about that).

I don't get the impression at all that the work advocates staying in a relationship you don't want to stay in. She says that the difference is leaving with hate and blame or leaving with love. I think she wants for people to, in any case, question their thoughts about what love is or what it "should" provide. Many people may find that the reason they thought they were going to leave doesn't stand up to inquiry. There are some people who were able to find that even though their spouse was unfaithful and left them, they still love them. It doesn't mean they want to get back together either. They just stop torturing themselves with the thoughts like: "he should be with me" or "he shouldn't desert his family." Those types of thoughts hurt the thinker.

I wish I could explain better. Maybe that helps?

But I would definitely give it another read without the thought that she's advocating any certain decision...I think she even says the Work doesn't advocate anything it's just 4 questions and a turnaround. The goal is to get people free of oppressive thoughts.

[danas]

I’m in the midst of reading her first book after completing "I need your love - is that true?".
Im finding it very inspiring and really helping me let go of alot of frustration Ive had in relationships including with romantic partners, family members, reckless drivers in traffic etc...
First of all Byron Katie divorced her husband after she started doing the work, (a few years later she remarried), so obviously she doesn’t think you should stay in a bad relationship.

But she points out that resisting reality is something that only brings suffering.
A thought like "He shouldn’t be so aggressive"- leaves you feeling insecure, lonely, and helpless. If you stop resisting the reality that he is aggresive you can then:
A) See maybe how your resistance may have contributed and made the situation worse (also because he is mirroring your own aggressiveness you have as a result of this thought)
B) Accept things as they are and with this clarity decide what you want to do (he is still aggressive even though I’m feeling peaceful and this make me feel bad so I’m leaving to be wth someone more peaceful).

Thats how I see her philosophy, and it makes a lot of sense to me.

[Ree]

Just thought I would chime in this discussion with a word about Byron Katie's CD with Wayne Dyer. It's called Making Your Thoughts Work for You. After giving a beautiful introduction, she does the work with members of the audience. I've found it very helpful to listen to her working with others and I recommend the CD

[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.

[{aspiring_to_clarity}]

Like I said in another thread...my new mantra is *see what Joely said*

Very good explanation.

[Joely]

Originally Posted by {aspiring_to_clarity}

Like I said in another thread...my new mantra is *see what Joely said*

Very good explanation.

Thank you *bows*