August 14, 2006

• “My wife makes too many demands on me ”

  
  

   

  
  

  The following dialogue is between Byron Katie and a man from her book, I Need Your Love, Is That True?  We can all learn something from this conversation. 

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

  MAN:  My wife makes too many demands on me. 

  
  

   

  
  

  KATIE:  Is that true?  Who lives the life that says yes when he means no?  How does she make you do the things that she demands?

  
  

   

  
  

  MAN: I feel I have to do them. 

  
  

   

  
  

  KATIE:  Another words, you say yes to her.  You lie.  You give her what you don’t want to give.  And you hurt yourself when you do that and then you call it her fault.  If you are honest to her, you might even say, “I want to want to do that for you honey and the truth is that I don’t want to do it yet and I may never want to.  I’m working on it.”  OR “I don’t want to do that.  Can we put our head together and find another solution?”  There are so many kind and honest ways to say no.  But you say yes to her because you believe you need something from her and you do it because you are afraid that she’ll withhold it from you.  Egos don’t love.  They want something.  You lie to yourself and to her when you say yes and you mean no.  You lie in order to get something that you want her to give you.  So who’s more demanding?  Your wife or you? 

  
  

   

  
  

  MAN: I see that. I do demand her approval. 

  
  

   

  
  

  KATIE:  She could make demand of you one hundred times a day and you could say, “I love you.  And no.”  And if she says, “If you don’t do it, I’ll leave you” and you could say, “I understand.”  And then wait to see what happens.  Will she leaves?  Will she stays?  But if you tell her yes and you mean no, you’ve lost your integrity.  You’ve lost yourself.  If you say yes to her and it’s a lie, you loose yourself sweetheart and you may loose her anyway.  My ex-husband could make any demand he wants of me and if it wasn’t right, I would tell him the truth.  I would say, for example, “I love you and I am not able to do that.”  I didn’t have to tell him the part where it wasn’t within my integrity to do that.  Often he’d yell and curse and threaten to leave me and I’d say I understand that.  And he’d say, “You’ll be sorry.”  And I’d say, “You could be right.  I love you and I can’t do what you are asking.”  But if I’d have told him yes when I mean no, I’d have lost myself again.  And I am the one I live with.  If I’d say yes to him and it was a lie, I’d have lost my marriage to myself.  And he would have been living with a façade of a wife. 

  
  

   

  
  

  MAN: My wife has an expectation or wish about what she should get from me and she expresses that and I want her to love and appreciate me so I fulfill her expectation.  If I try to stop that whole cycle, then she could leave me and that’s extremely scary.

  
  

   

  
  

  KATIE:  Yes.  But you’ve lost her anyway.  You’re not living with anything but an illusion.  You’re living with a monster in your mind, the one who will leave you if you don’t do everything she wants.  You haven’t even met your wife yet.  You’re just living with a story of who she is.  It’s the story that scares you, not your wife. 

  
  

   

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