By the time Sophie arrived for her session, she had already broken up with her partner, reconciled with him, and broken up with him again. None of this had happened out loud.
It had started the night before, when Ben left his cereal bowl on the kitchen bench. Not in the dishwasher. On the bench, approximately 40 centimetres from the dishwasher.
“I’ve told him a hundred times,” Sophie said. “He just doesn’t care about me.”
I asked whether she would explore that last sentence using Byron Katie’s inquiry process, The Work. Sophie agreed, although she reserved the right to remain annoyed about the bowl.
When the brain goes to war
For Sophie, the bowl was no longer just a bowl. It had become evidence in a case against Ben. Her mind began collecting supporting exhibits: the socks he left on the floor, the towel on the bed, the mysterious inability to replace an empty toilet roll.
This is a relatable example of negativity bias—our tendency to give negative information more attention and weight than positive information. In that moment, Sophie could recall the towel instantly. Ben making her tea when she was ill last week? That detail did not enter into the equation at the moment of the bowl!
The amygdala is one part of the brain involved in noticing emotionally significant information, including possible threats. If Sophie interprets the bowl on the bench as “Ben doesn’t care about me,” the meaning she gives it may contribute to a stress response: tight shoulders, a racing mind and an urge to defend herself. That does not mean a cereal bowl is a threat, or that we can know what Sophie’s amygdala did without measuring her brain activity. It means an ordinary moment can feel much bigger as the belief creates the fear of being not cared for, or that she does not matter. Issues that may have not been metabolised from childhood now playing out in the form of a bowl being left on a bench.
By breakfast, Sophie’s brain had assembled a battle plan. Ben, meanwhile, thought they were having breakfast.
The thought under the argument
I invited Sophie to write down one thought: “Ben doesn’t care about me.”
“Is it true?” she asked.
“Yes,” Sophie replied. “Exhibit A: the bowl.”
“Can you absolutely know it’s true?”
Sophie paused. Ben had made her tea when she was ill. He had driven across town to collect her from a delayed flight. “I know he left the bowl out,” she said. “I don’t actually know what that says about how much he cares.”
“How do you react when you believe the thought?”
“I become a detective. Every sock is new evidence. Then I make sarcastic comments, and when he asks what’s wrong, I say ‘Nothing’ in a voice that means prepare your defence.”
“Who would you be in that moment without the thought?”
“Still a person who wants the bowl in the dishwasher,” Sophie said. “But I could ask for that without conducting a domestic crime scene investigation.”
These are the four questions at the heart of The Work. They had not changed what Ben did. They had helped Sophie notice the difference between an observable event—he left a bowl on the bench—and her painful conclusion about what it meant.
Another way to see it
Next came the turnarounds. Sophie tried alternative versions of her thought, looking for honest examples of where it is truer rather than forcing herself to think positive.
| Turnaround | What Sophie noticed |
| “Ben does care about me.” | He had shown up when she was sick and stranded at the airport. The bowl did not erase those moments. |
| “I don’t care about Ben.” | When Sophie was hurt, she sometimes saw Ben as a collection of annoying habits rather than asking what was going on with him. |
| “I don’t care about me.” | Sophie had been swallowing her frustration for weeks instead of clearly saying what she needed. |
“So I’ve been expecting him to read my mind,” Sophie said, “when he apparently can’t even read the dishwasher.”
The turnarounds didn’t prove Ben was right, or that Sophie should accept cleaning up after Ben. They gave her more than one possible interpretation to work with.
Neuroscience offers a useful parallel here. Research on cognitive reappraisal—reconsidering what a situation means—shows that interpretation can influence emotional responding. It does not prove that this specific inquiry switched off Sophie’s amygdala or that The Work has one established brain mechanism. But it helps explain why moving from “He doesn’t care” to “I need to talk to him about the dishes” might change the conversation.
The conversation at home
That evening, Sophie did not open with “You never care about me.” She said, “I’m getting frustrated about the dishes. Can we work out who’s doing what?”
Ben listened. Then he admitted he had assumed putting dishes near the dishwasher counted as progress. Sophie informed him that, in her household classification system, it did not.
They talked about the dishes and about the resentment Sophie had been carrying. Ben did not instantly become a man who could detect an abandoned teaspoon from three rooms away. But Sophie no longer had to argue as though a cereal bowl had delivered a final verdict on their relationship.
Inquiry had not asked her to ignore the problem. It had helped her put down the imaginary sword, the emotional charge and assumptions, long enough to say what she actually needed.
