“I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappearred, not for a single moment.” -Byron Katie
First, let me say that I’m not suggesting that some people don’t find The Work helpful- some of the people, some of the time. Like all tools, it can be the right tool, at the right time, in specific situations. But no tool is a panacea that works to ease all suffering, all of the time.
Let me walk you through my own deconstruction of The Work, through a social justice, trauma-informed, and hopefully through a lens that is empathic to the most vulnerable among us. I do not wish to diminish any healing tool that might be helping you or your clients when used appropriately. But please, be careful with this tool. I’ve seen it help but more often than not, I’ve seen it cause a great deal of harm. As the oath we doctors take says, “First, do no harm.”
What Is “The Work?”
“End all suffering in one weekend” was the marketing tagline for a weekend workshop I took with Byron Katie, where she’d sold out Esalen. Who wouldn’t want to be free of every possible kind of human pain in one short weekend? Sign me up!
But first, a little back story. Byron Katie (Byron Kathleen Mitchell) is an American self-help teacher who developed a method of self-inquiry she calls The Work after a dramatic personal turning point in the late 1980s. Before this shift, she has described herself as suffering from years of deep depression, rage, agoraphobia, and suicidal thoughts, often isolating herself and struggling in her second bad marriage. In 1986, while in a residential treatment facility, she reports experiencing a sudden awakening in which her sense of identity and suffering dissolved, accompanied by a profound realization that her distress stemmed not from reality itself but from believing her thoughts about reality. Waking up one morning as a cockroach crawled over her foot, she discovered that somehow her identity had just slipped away like an eye mask overnight, leaving nothing but pure consciousness. From this insight, she began formulating a simple process of questioning stressful beliefs, what would later become The Work, which she went on to teach publicly, gaining a wide following through workshops, books, and media appearances.
As part of my research for a book, I was at Esalen to learn The Work. Byron Katie sat up on a stage, looking statuesque and regal, with violet eyes and white hair. First, she taught us a self-inquiry practice based on the idea that our suffering is not caused by external events, but by the thoughts we believe about those events, thoughts we can change by questioning them and turning them around. It invites people to identify stressful beliefs, often about other people, and write them down, especially in moments when we feel hurt, angry, or upset. The process is designed to challenge those beliefs and loosen their grip, with the aim of creating inner peace by changing one’s relationship to one’s thoughts rather than trying to change external circumstances.
At the heart of The Work are four questions applied to a specific stressful thought:
Is it true?
Can you absolutely know it's true?
How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
Who would you be without that thought?
After answering these, the practice includes “turnarounds,” where you reverse the original statement (toward yourself, the other person, or the opposite perspective) and look for examples of how those reversals might also be true. The intention is to question yourself, disrupt certainty, reduce reactivity, and open up alternative ways of seeing a situation. In this phase, the person practicing The Work takes the original belief, which is often a stressful judgment about another person, and gently turns it around in several directions- toward the self, toward the other, and toward the opposite of the original thought.
For example, “She doesn’t listen to me” might become “I don’t listen to her,” “I don’t listen to myself,” or even “She does listen to me.” Rather than forcing these reversals to be universally true, the exercise asks the practitioner to find specific, concrete examples where each turnaround might hold some validity. This process encourages a loosening of rigid narratives, inviting a more nuanced and participatory view of relational dynamics.
By actively searching for evidence that challenges the original story, the turnaround process aims to “get you out of your “victim story,” shifting attention from external fault-finding to internal reflection, often revealing ways in which the practitioner may be enacting similar behaviors or overlooking alternative interpretations. At its best, this can foster humility, empathy, and a greater sense of agency. However, it also relies heavily on the individual’s capacity for discernment, as the same mechanism that opens perspective can, if misapplied, cause us to gaslight ourselves and let perpetrators of wrong-doing off the hook.
To be fair, there are moments when The Work can offer relief, especially when it’s used gently, voluntarily, and after reality has been fully acknowledged, not bypassed. For example, imagine someone who has already done the necessary and healthy grieving and boundary-setting after a painful breakup. They are no longer in contact with their ex, no longer in denial about what happened, and no longer blaming themselves for the harm they endured. But they find themselves looping on a thought like, “I will never be loved like that again.”
At this stage, The Work might offer a soft place to land, not to deny the loss, not to excuse any mistreatment, but to loosen the grip of a belief that is adding unnecessary suffering.
They might ask, Is it true? Can I absolutely know it’s true? And perhaps, with some distance and support, they can begin to see that while the relationship was meaningful, the certainty of never being loved again is a story, not a fact. When they explore, “Who would I be without that thought?” they might glimpse a version of themselves that is more open, more spacious, less defined by the past.
And in the turnaround—“I can be loved again,” or even “I can offer love to myself now,” they may find small, genuine examples that don’t invalidate their grief, but gently expand their sense of possibility. In this context, The Work isn’t being used to override reality, silence anger, or collapse power differences. It’s being used after the nervous system has settled, after truth has been honored, as a way of easing the mind’s tendency to turn pain into permanence.
The “Judge Your Neighbor” Worksheet
In “The Work,” if you ever find yourself feeling hurt or angry because someone behaved in a way that was not okay, you get shamed for “being in your victim story.” You’re supposed to challenge your thinking and fill out the “Judge Your Neighbor” worksheet, something I once let Martha Beck do when I was co-leading a workshop with her for doctors.
When engaging with the Judge Your Neighbor worksheet, you’re asked to write down who angers, confuses, upsets, or disappoints you, and then you complete writing prompts such as why you’re upset, what you want that person to do differently, what advice you would give them, and what you think about that person (often revealing harsh or reactive beliefs). The idea is to bring hidden or suppressed thoughts fully into conscious awareness.
Once these judgments are written down, each statement becomes material for inquiry using the four questions of The Work, followed by “turnarounds,” where the original belief is reversed or redirected. Judging your neighbor basically means you’re supposed to find out how you are the very thing you are judging in the other. Like if you’re upset at someone who just raped you, you’re supposed to figure out how you just raped them, or how you just raped yourself, or how you somehow are guilty of raping your rapist. So if you’re at a Byron Katie workshop and you’re judging your rapist (as you should, so you can call the police,) you’re going to wind up so gaslit your head will spin.
Yes, owning our projections and displacements can be helpful. But to suggest that you are the one which you judge is just a twisted way to blame you for the ways in which you might be getting your boundaries violated, getting bullied, getting overpowered, and being legitimately victimized by someone who is abusing their power. And then what? You’re supposed to ignore the boundary violating behaviors of what the other person did to hurt you and beat yourself up instead?
The Work Is Just A Distortion Of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Sure, it can be helpful to question your thinking when you’re looping and ruminating on negative thoughts about something that happened long ago. Byron Katie didn’t make up that idea. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy(CBT) is based on just such a concept. When applied by a trained therapist, CBT and other self-inquiry methods can sometimes be quite helpful. But one difference between CBT and The Work is that CBT allows for critical thinking, and it has space for the fact that some of your thoughts might be true, not distortions. But some teachers, like Byron Katie, who is not a therapist, and many unlicensed, unregulated coaches, like those trained in The Work in Martha Beck’s coach training program and many people in the addiction recovery space, take this way of questioning thoughts to an abusive and dangerous extreme.
As Morton Tolboll pointed out in his critique of Byron Katie and The Work, she’s even been known to dismiss as “what is” babies who were thrown by Nazi’s into firepits during the Holocaust. This is an example of the “turnaround.”
If Someone (God, ‘what is’), pulls my baby from me - if that's what it takes, I'm there. Take the baby. Tear my baby from me. Throw it in the fire....My discomfort is my war with God. [...]
You see, there are NO choices. What is, is. [...]
But when we get to the baby thing, we're getting down to our sacred little concepts now....You take my baby from me, you're messing with the illusion of I'm the mommy, this is the baby, there's the daddy...
But tearing the baby away- that's the higher. That's the higher, because it snatches your story from you and makes it apparent in your face - nothing's real short of reality.... That's it. That's what is. That's love. That's absolutely Un-describable love. That you, God, would even give me that.
Can you know that Hitler didn't bring more people to realization than Jesus? On your knees - God. God! God! But our stories of reality keep us from the awareness of God is Everything. And God is Good. [...]
There has never been evil and there never will be. Evil is simply a story about what's not...
But I have trashed the baby when I have trashed the Nazi... I am the baby going into the pit. I am the one throwing the baby in the pit...
-Byron Katie, Losing The Moon
Gaslight The Grieving Widow
At one workshop I attended, Byron Katie demonstrated “The Work” on a Latinx woman whose husband had just died unexpectedly the week before the workshop.. The widow was shocked and grieving but decided to come to the workshop anyway. What she needed was compassionate support for her totally normal and legitimate grieving process. Yet Katie told her she was only suffering because she had the false belief that her husband should still be alive and that arguing with reality works 0% of the time. She communicated the following messaging.
“Let’s say someone you love dies. If you’re doing The Work and feel any sadness about it, you may want to ask yourself, ‘Why is that death a good thing for him or her? Why is it a good thing for me? Why is it a good thing for the world?’ But if you don’t question your thinking, someone dies and it’s all about you. You may think it has to do with them and with how much you love them, but if you look more closely, it’s really pure ego. I love to say, ‘No one can leave me. They don’t have that power.’ If you are fearful, you’re living in the future, if you are depressed, you’re living in the past. When your mind is clear, no one lives beyond identity and that is the end of what has never lived. It is the end of ‘death.’”
-Byron Katie
When a grieving widow is told that her suffering comes from the belief that her husband should still be alive, what is happening is not liberation. It is a profound invalidation of healthy attachment. When an attachment ruptures, all healthy, normal humans grieve. To suggest that you shouldn’t grieve after someone you’re attached to dies glorifies detachment, dissociation, and disembodiment, which can be related to mental illness or avoidant attachment, not some kind of false enlightenment.
Sure, it’s an easy sell to suggest that if we simply change our thinking, our pain will stop. But suggesting so is a denial of the biological, psychological, and relational truth that we are wired to bond, and that loss of a loved one registers as a real injury, not a cognitive error. From an attachment perspective, grief is not optional. It is the cost of love. It only hurts so much because we love so much.
To frame grief as ego, or as a failure to align with reality, is to shame one of the most loving and human experiences we have. It subtly trains people to mistrust their own hearts, to override their own emotional truth in favor of a kind of imposed detachment that mimics enlightenment but often functions more like dissociation. The abusive gaslighting, lack of empathy, and clear misunderstanding of the natural grieving process that I witnessed in a room with 300 people, aimed at a legitimately suffering and appropriately grieving widow in the name of some spirituality and enlightenment teaching left me so sick to my stomach that I had to leave the room (after I offered the woman a hug, an “I’m sorry,” a validation that her pain was natural and healthy, and a referral to a good empathic grief counselor.)
This way of gaslighting suffering people after the death of a loved one contains several layered distortions. First, it pathologizes healthy grief as ego. To suggest that sadness after the death of a loved one is “really pure ego” reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of attachment. Grief is not self-centered. It is relational. It arises because we are wired to bond, to love, to depend on one another. When someone dies, the nervous system registers a profound rupture. Mourning is how we process that rupture. To call that ego is not just inaccurate; it is shaming and cruel.
It also forces premature cognitive reframing. Many of us have had the experience of serial losses that turned out to be blessings in disguise. For example, had I not lost my father and my dog while my brother was sick in the hospital within two weeks of my baby being born, I might never have left the hospital and pivoted my career to being a writer. I can see it that way now, the blessing in the loss. But asking someone in acute grief to immediately find reasons why the death is “a good thing” bypasses the natural Elisabeth Kübler-Ross 5 stages of grief- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance- stages of mourning.
In trauma healing and grief work, timing matters. Meaning-making can emerge organically over time, and we may perceive that someone’s death, in retrospect, was a reset in our life or the source of deeper meaning. But when it is imposed too early, it can become a defense against feeling. This kind of forced positivity can lead to dissociation or even psychosis, rather than healing.
“No one can leave me. They don’t have that power.” This utterly denies the reality of loss. It’s meme-able, for sure, and maybe some people think it sounds spiritually profound, but psychologically it can function as a denial of reality. People do leave- through death, through abandonment, through choice. And those losses matter. Pretending otherwise does not liberate the heart. It often just numbs it.
Fear Is Not The Enemy
It also collapses emotional states into time-based errors. “If you are fearful, you’re living in the future. If you are depressed, you’re living in the past.” This is an oversimplification that ignores how trauma actually works. Trauma is not just “thinking about the past.” It is the past living in the present, in the body, in implicit memory, in nervous system patterning. It’s the present flashing back to the past to moments that are stuck in the past until we get the right kind of empathic witnessing and healing.
Similarly, fear is not just a future fantasy. It is often an adaptive response to real or anticipated danger based on lived experience. For example, if you’re a young BIPOC man and a cop pulls you over when you’ve done nothing wrong, or if you’re an immigrant in Minneapolis, it’s natural and protective to feel afraid- because way too many innocent young BIPOC men have been harmed by racist cops and way too many immigrants are being disappeared by ICE. To suggest that their fears are because they’re living in the future is tone deaf, racist, and utterly lacking in empathy.
People who are born with brain damage that makes them unable to feel fear typically do not survive. They might just walk in front of a speeding car because they’re not afraid of it. Sometimes our fears are real, and we need to respond to them in protective ways, rather than shaming and invalidating them. Reducing fear or depression to temporal thinking errors minimizes their complexity and can make people feel defective for having legitimate and healthy emotions.
It spiritualizes away death itself. “When your mind is clear… this is the end of ‘death.’” This moves into metaphysical territory that may hold meaning in certain contemplative traditions. But when applied to grieving individuals, it can feel like an erasure of their lived reality. Even if one holds a spiritual belief that consciousness continues, the relational loss is still real. The body, the voice, the shared life- those are gone. Grief honors that. Taken together, these teachings encourage people to distrust their emotional responses, override their nervous system signals, reframe pain prematurely, collapse external reality into internal cognition, bypass grief, anger, and desire, and adapt to what is, rather than discern when change is needed or possible.
This is where the social justice lens matters. Because who benefits from a worldview where wanting change is hopeless, where stress is always a thinking error, and where grief is ego? Not the people who are suffering harm because of systemic injustices. Not the people whose boundaries are being violated. Not the people living under unjust conditions. Those people need access to their anger, their grief, their clarity, their desire for something different. They need support in feeling and responding, not just questioning their thoughts until their distress disappears.
No, the people who benefit from teaching that anger, fear, and grief are just your ego are raking in the cash while they shame people for having normal human emotions that are actually protective and necessary as “action-requiring neurological programs,” according to Karla McLaren, the author of The Language Of Emotions.
As we deconstruct why The Work may be harmful, let’s try finding some quotes we can use as turnarounds that feel more honest, empathic, sensitive, and trauma-informed than the Byron Katie quotes. Like this one…
“Grief is just love with no place to go.” — Jamie Anderson
The Boy Whose Name Was Joe (Or Was It?)
I also saw Byron Katie get a teenage boy up on stage. She asked him what his name was. He said it was Joe. She started doing The Work on him. Was it true? Yes, he said. Was it really true? Yes, he repeated. “Well, Joseph on his birth certificate,” he clarified. Could he be absolutely 100% certain that his real name was Joseph?
He looked confused, glancing at his mother on his left and his father on his right.
Katie went on. “What if your father and mother got it wrong, and your real name is Walter, and they just tuned into the wrong frequency and downloaded your name incorrectly from the field of all knowing?”
Watching that unfold, I felt my stomach drop. This wasn’t a gentle exploration of thought. It was not only a disgusting power trip, it was a full-on undermining of a child’s sense of reality. To stand on a stage, in front of dozens of people, and be told by an authority figure some people believe is enlightened that something as basic and foundational as your own name might be “wrong” is to unsettle the very ground beneath a person’s feet. For a teen whose identity is still forming, whose confidence is still fragile, this was not an inquiry into a ruminating thought that was causing suffering; it was one-upping disorientation disguised as spirituality. It was a subtle but intense form of gaslighting, and it hit me immediately how easily it could leave lingering doubt in a young mind or even lead to a psychotic break.
The Cultic Tools Of Manipulation
I also realized that this scenario mapped onto many of the same structural flaws I’ve seen in The Work more broadly. The teaching assumes that truth is negotiable, that certainty is always suspect, and that reality itself is malleable if only we question it hard enough. It encourages people practicing The Work to doubt not just their thoughts, but their own perceptions, memories, and bodily experiences. That is what narcissists do- they leave people in their orbit questioning their reality, doubting their perceptions, distrusting their memories, and ignoring their bodily experiences. That is how you manipulate people. It’s what cult leaders do to shut down any dissent and keep cult members from holding leadership accountable.
What becomes especially concerning is how easily this framework can slide from a tool of inquiry into a mechanism of self-silencing, particularly for those who have already been conditioned to override their instincts in order to survive. When someone has a history of trauma, gaslighting, or marginalization, the reflex is often not rigid certainty but chronic self-doubt. In those cases, inviting further questioning of one’s reality doesn’t liberate; it destabilizes. It can train people to abandon the very internal signals that are trying to protect them, to reinterpret harm as misunderstanding, and to locate the problem not in what happened, but in their response to it. Over time, this doesn’t just soften suffering; it can erode self-trust, making it harder to recognize danger, assert boundaries, or stand firmly in one’s own lived truth.
In a workshop full of vulnerable people, this reality-distorting approach can feel like permission to ignore boundaries, to gaslight yourself, to disrespect your own agency and autonomy, to invalidate intuition, and to destabilize inner knowing. It reminded me viscerally that spiritual frameworks, no matter how well-intentioned, can become psychologically unsafe when authority figures, cognitive pressure, and performative questioning are prioritized over care, attunement, and consent.
While Joe/Walter was getting challenged, I felt helpless and powerless, not knowing what to do, so I excused myself to go take a walk. But I wish I’d stood up and called her out for bullying this child and questioning his reality. Instead, I fawned the guru, because I hadn’t yet healed enough to speak up. (I’ll be writing about the fawn response as it relates to guru relationships soon, so subscribe if you want to make sure not to miss it.)
Can You Imagine Telling Epstein’s Victims To Get Out Of Their Victim Story?
What a convenient way to let boundary violators, abusers, coercive controllers, racists, sexists, rapists, and cult leaders off the hook of accountability! Can you imagine anyone saying to Epstein victims who are outraged over the misogyny and patriarchy of the Epstein files and the powerful men who knew what was going on and kept silent that they should turn their thoughts around and blame themselves? Can you imagine suggesting that it’s their perceptions of the events that need to be challenged, and that if they only shift their thoughts, all their pain will go away? The audacity!
Can you imagine a rich white woman in a position of authority saying that BIPOC people do not have a right to be angry at white supremacists, that they shouldn’t suffer when they watch the Charlottesville march with unhooded white supremacists brandishing their racism because it’s just their distorted thoughts about it that are the problem, that shouldn’t judge those people, but rather they should blame themselves instead? The nerve!
Teachings like The Work are anger-phobic, spiritual bypassing, boundary-wounding, and abusive to traumatized, suffering individuals who actually need real trauma healing. The Work and other teachings like it can cause people to passively tolerate abusive behavior in the name of “I’m so compassionate and spiritual,” a tendency which lies at the heart of spiritual bypassing.
Taking Responsibility For Our Projections Doesn’t Mean Letting Perpetrators Off The Hook
Getting gaslit and then having my “victim story” questioned when I was protesting a behavior that felt harmful is what just happened to me when I was planning a webinar I was going to co-teach with Gabor Maté in response to Deepak Chopra and the Epstein files. When I named “patriarchy” and “misogyny” as foundational to any conversation about the Epstein files, I was shut down so abruptly that I felt intimidated and destabilized. I could also recognize, in real time, that my reaction was stronger than the immediate moment warranted.
When I checked inside, I found a 22-year-old part of me, shaped by years of bullying, gaslighting, and harassment during medical training. I spoke up on behalf of that frightened part, taking responsibility for how my past was amplifying my response. Taking responsibility for my past trauma matters. It wasn’t Gabor’s fault that I carry unresolved trauma, and I followed up with an IFS session with Dick Schwartz to tend to that younger part so it wouldn’t keep hijacking me. But tending to my projections does not eliminate the need for accountability in the present. Healing the past does not close the conversation about harm.
This is where self-inquiry can both help and harm. Practices like IFS or other forms of reflection can help us locate and care for wounded parts that get activated. But we cannot stop there. The presence of an old wound does not mean no boundary was crossed in the present. It does not mean we shouldn’t go back and say, “That was not okay.”
When I later expressed that I felt frightened- and also bullied, invalidated, and attacked- my experience was reframed as mere “perception.” The focus shifted from the impact of the behavior to the accuracy of my language. This kind of move is not neutral. It redirects attention away from harm done and onto the person who was hurt, creating confusion and self-doubt. In many cases, that confusion is the point. If you can get someone to question their own reality, you effectively shut down protest and avoid accountability.
Please go here to continue the original article: https://lissarankinmd.substack.com/p/why-byron-katies-the-work-gaslights
.jpg)
