Re: The Work/Byron Katie-strong concerns
Posted by:
The Anticult
()
Date: February 24, 2008 07:12AM
The Work gets Worse and Worse...
it seems that Byron Katie also likes to blame victims of child-rape for the abuse.
This is very common with sociopaths, they believe that if a child is raped, they asked for it, they wanted it to happen.
So if you get scammed out of your house and give all your money to Byron Katie when she tells you to do so...then you were ASKING for it. Right honey?
If Byron Katie hurts you, and scams you, because she is ONE with you, then YOU wanted her to do it to you. Right angel?
She is only commiting Mind-Rape and Thought-Reform on you, as you want her to do it.
See how it all works? (sarcasm alert)
---------Some QUOTE excerpts from relevant Amazon reviews below-----------
A 9 year old is responsible for being raped?, Jan 11 2006
I have never felt compelled to write a review in my life -- but I found this book completely offensive.
She speaks to a woman, Dianne, a suvivor of incest, and gets her to do the "work" and "turn it around" getting her to say "I abused him" and admitting that "after it happened... I could basically get anything I wanted from him" somehow making the conclusion that she was responsible for the abuse. Incest is a complex issue and people spend years trying to get rid of the shame of feeling that they brought on the abuse-- when the reality is that an adult was taking advantage of their power over a child.
...
The transcripts in the book are nothing more than watching a cult in action. Cults are known to use any rationalization in order to use their methods. Byran Katie seems to work very hard to make everything add up finding excuses for bad behaviour. I suggest to take a look at "what is" in this book.
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Ghastly, May 18 2003
If no stars were available, I'd choose that. This self-help book is aimed primarily at helping the author. I found it preposterous, and downright dangerous. I don't think this woman has any credentials; rather, she seems to tout her qualifying experience as the fact that she had a nervous breakdown when she was 43 years old. Katie's "help" is presented as a series of questions that branch from her initial query of "Is it [the situation, feeling, etc.] true?" Nothing intended to help people break out of lifelong conditioning works as fast as Katie would have one believe. Especially annoying parts of the book are the intro by her husband (who has no more credentials than his wife) where he belabors Katie's lecturing on the ideas in her book for free (the book certainly is not free; thank goodness I borrowed it from a library), the many times Katie showcases her approach in a cult-like way as "The Work," Katie pretending to be an objective participant when she is clearly steering people toward her sometimes-dangerous ideas, and Katie using endearments that just seem patronizing with her interview subjects in the dialogue transcripts (e.g., "Nice Work, honey"). I was muddling through the book and wondering when I'd get to something helpful when I read her exchange with a woman who was repeatedly raped as a child (around age 8 or 9) by her stepfather. Then the author, through a series of questions, ended up turning the blame for the rapes around on the victim, culminating in the idea that rape was the woman's way of receiving love. All this was done in front of an audience. Brainwashing and abuse in the guise of therapy. Ghastly.
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Oh, my, God., Jun 6 2007
...
I was busy gagging on the pretentious, overblown name The Work, when I realized the whole thing is just transcriptions of conversations with clients (or devotees, or disciples). She talks and talks and talks at them, until she arm-wrestles them around to her way of thinking. Even implying that a child sexual abuse survivor had anything to do with causing the abuse is heinous and morally corrupt, but Byron doesn't care. It sells books to make provocative statements, and if you don't get it, then there is something wrong with YOU.
Even more cloying and sickening is her insistence on calling these people "sweetheart" and "angel". Just what is she trying to do here? It's a massive breach of boundaries to use a personal endearment on someone you don't know very well. But it implies, to me, that she is exempt from all these rules, and that Byron (I refuse to call her Katie, even though everyone else does)believes she is bestowing a great gift on them by calling them these insulting names. Hey, what if one of them called HER "sugar-lips" or "sweetie-buns"? (Or how about Oh, Great Master? How about God Incarnate?)I think she's trying to convey the fact she "loves" these poor little, unenlightened people, but it is so condescending as to border on the contemptuous.
A psychotherapist recommended this book to me, and I did try, but I gagged on it from the introduction. To say we create reality is only true in a very limited way. The Jews did not "create" Auschwitz, and anyone who even implies that they did is horrifyingly insensitive and even racist.
If we approach life with the belief that everyone creates their own problems, then we have no responsibility towards the poor, the disenfranchised, hungry children, women forced by dire poverty into prostitution, and too many others to name. We don't really need to do anything about the environment, because these slobs did it to themselves, so leave them to it. It is this kind of infantile, utterly selfish thinking that has got us into this mess, and practicing it now will only lead us into disaster.
The truth is, we only have a partial hold on reality. Things can suddenly fall apart, through absolutely no fault of our own. To me, it is much more courageous to face our lives on these terms: no, I didn't create this, it happened to me for reasons I'll never understand: but nevertheless, it is part of my life, and I must face it to the best of my ability. To even imply that we create every situation through our own thoughts is childish, egotistical, and just plain wrong.
Ms. Byron, I am sorry so many people have made you into a god, as it feeds your massive ego needs and insistence that you have All The Answers. When something overwhelming happens to you (and it will), I think The Work will fall down like the house of cards it really is.
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