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Comment by adolph | Hacker News Reader

Note: the article is from 2015.

“Like other psychological models, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), “The Work” technique assumes that feelings (such as sadness, anger, and pain) emerge from an attachment to a stressful thought, which leads to behavior. This means that thought precedes feelings and behavior and should be focused on as the primal cause of stress and suffering. However, unlike cognitive restruc- turing that encourages an individual to use deliberative thinking to answer questions, “The Work” uses it only for asking questions and “relies on one's witnessing awareness to listen for a response to arise naturally from within.””

The “questions: (1) Is it true? (2) Can I absolutely know that it is true? (3) How do I react when I believe that thought? (4) Who would I be without the thought?“”

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The line of inquiry is not dissimilar to CBT, which instructs the practitioner to identify the negative belief that's troubling them, identify evidence for and against it, and finally consider whether alternative explanations may exist. Which is more or less what you're doing in The Work's first two questions, only more rigorous.

I don't think CBT has an analogue to The Work's latter two questions. I don't know whether these questions have additional value, but one advantage of The Work might be that you can just buy the book and practice it on your own. CBT seems to be hard to do alone due to a dearth of quality resources for self-study.

The Work was invented by a woman named Byron Katie who used to be a real estate agent and claims to have solved her own alcoholism and overeating with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Katie

Notably CBT doesn't work for everybody (perhaps because if you can't convince yourself that your original negative belief was wrong, it's probably going to keep bothering you).

Short version: Last year, The Work as taught in Loving What Is by Byron Katie gave me perspective and tools that enabled me to function professionally and personally through/despite deep emotional pain/fear/grief--and be open and generous with the person close to me whose life choices were generating the pain while standing firm in my own choices. (Katie would say, I had thoughts about this person's life choices that generated the pain.)

I had already and pretty recently attended almost a full course of CBT skills classes (accompanying a person for whom they were prescribed), which I had found mostly to include codified, acronym-ized versions of techniques I had already been taught growing up or had independently discovered.

I thought the CBT stuff was pretty good, and it was helpful for the person I was accompanying, but it wasn't enough for me to deal with the pain last year.

Katie teaches that you don't have to convince yourself that your original belief was wrong. Often you do find that it's wrong, but often you just find that you're not sure. Once you've achieved some epistemic humility (I might not really know this), the third and fourth questions give you a different perspective, looking at the consequences of holding on to this belief (which I just realized I'm not so sure about) and letting you imagine a world where you weren't being hurt by the belief. You don't try to convince yourself not to hold the belief: you just do The Work and let your mind do its thing.

She includes lots of example dialogs where she plows straight in to hard cases, too. It's worth a read, especially if there's anything you're having a hard time coping with.

Isn't that pretty much Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (which is often referred as part of CBT as the 'umbrella' concept above it)?

I find it reassuring that CBT, OP, and this thread agree. I find it reassuring that many times similar concepts were re discovered. For those who do too, I recommend the book Happiness Hypothesis, which delves into psychology, biology, evolution, anthropology, religion and tries to unify some themes. It does very well and backs with decades of studies.

One common mechanism found in effective psychological treatments[1] is creating awareness to a negative thought(often below awareness) and it's sorrounding emotion and creating a positive emotion around it .

You get that in therapy - unaware thought gets exposed, challenged, in an emotional atmosphere of care.

The work works similarly - you start with a negative thought. You question it - that's an awareness process. While doing so other related negative thought sometimes rise to the surface.

And the second part - the 2 last question - creating awareness to attached negative emotion , and creating a new positive emotion.

That's how it feels to me, from long and very helpful use.

And also, the simplicity, only four questions - makes it easier for this to become a habit.

On the other side, just from reading about CBT ,it feels like a worthwhile addition to the work, because it's more in-depth treatment of more complex thought patterns like "mind reading" which we do when we try to understand others, and should be done to a reasonable amount .

In the work, it's easy to go to the other side and doubt the value of some mind reading at all, which is less valuable for social situations.

[1]https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therap...

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