Telling Yourself the Truth: Find Your Way Out of Depression, Anxiety, Fear, Anger, and Other Common Problems by Applying the Principles of Misbelief Therapy

191 Pages·2000·1.07 MB·English

by  William Backus

TELLING
YOURSELF
THE
TRUTH
Books by Dr. Backus

The Healing Power of a Christian Mind
Learning to Tell Myself the Truth
Telling Each Other the Truth
Telling the Truth to Troubled People
Telling Yourself the Truth (with Marie Chapian) What Your Counselor Never
Told You
Books by Marie Chapian

Telling Yourself the Truth (with William Backus)
TELLING
YOURSELF
THE
TRUTH
WILLIAM
BACKUS
MARIE
CHAPIAN
Telling Yourself the Truth
Copyright © 1980, 1981, 2000
William Backus and Marie Chapian Cover by Koechel Peterson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—
without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed
reviews.
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-76422325-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Backus, D. William
Telling yourself the truth.
1. Christian life—1960-2. Happiness. I. Chapian, Marie, joint author. II. Title.
BV4501.2.B25 248.4 80-10136
ISBN 0-7642-2325-9 CIP
WILLIAM BACKUS founded the Center for Christian Psychological Services,
was a licensed consulting psychologist, and an ordained minister of the gospel.
Dr. Backus did follow-up studies of his clients that showed a 95 percent
improvement rate compared to a 67 percent success rate for other methods of
therapy. He claimed that the difference was the truth of God as revealed in His
Word. Dr. Backus died in June 2005.
MARIE CHAPIAN, Ph.D., is known around the world as an author and speaker.
She also is a Christian counselor and a familiar personality to radio and TV
audiences. She has written more than thirty books with translations in fifteen
languages.
Contents
1. What Is Misbelief?
2. Do We Really Want to Be Happy?
3. Misbelief in Self-Talk
4. Misbelief in Depression
5. Misbelief in Anger
6. Misbelief in Anxiety
7. Misbelief in Lack of Self-Control
8. Misbelief in Self-Hate
9. Misbelief in Fear of Change
10. Misbelief in Never Taking a Chance
11. Misbelief in Our Relationships With Others
12. Misbelief in Being Indispensable
13. More Misbeliefs Guaranteed to Make You Miserable
I Want It, Therefore I Should Have It
It’s Terrible to Have Hurt Feelings
In Order to Be Happy I Must Be Loved by Everybody
Things Have to Go Right
I Should Always Be and Act Happy in Spite of All Hardship or Trouble
That Comes My Way
14. What Must I Do to Be Miserable?
Or, When the Truth Does Not Set Us Free
Study Guide
Introduction to the
Twentieth-Anniversary Edition
Much has happened since Telling Yourself the Truth was published in 1980. It
was the year Mount St. Helens erupted, John Lennon was shot, Ronald Reagan
debated Jimmy Carter for the presidency of the United States, Iraq invaded Iran,
and Darth Vader came back to the screen leading a counterattack for the empire.
In 1980 Marshall McLuhan died after sounding his cryptic warning about the
state of truth: “The medium is the message.”
Few realized then what was to befall the truth during the next two decades.
The attack on the truth, begun in academia, had not yet hit full stride. Few
people realized that the public square would, in two decades, be purged of even
the faint shadow of God, that facsimiles of Pontius Pilate taunting Jesus with
“What is truth?” would launch a vicious assault against those who dare to
believe that truth exists. Already truth was said to be personal, dependent on
your point of view, your culture, your society, your group. As the inroads on
truth became more and more totalitarian, ordinary people lost their compasses
and had no idea in which direction their truth detectors were pointing.
Frequently this resulted in emotional derailment and intellectual confusion. As a
result, they came in great numbers to psychologists, believing that they could
help orient them, point them in the direction of truth and health; and to
psychiatrists who were beginning to offer medicine for the brain as a restorer of
healthy emotions and chemical substitutes for truth. Hardly any of us realized
fully what was happening. Few were able to foresee the incredible delusions
presaged as the doctrines of relativism and nihilism replaced the idea of truth.
Who could predict then that the United States military would bestow on
witchcraft full religious parity with Christianity, that Christian churches would
bless abortion and sexual perversion? Nobody prophesied that very soon high
school teachers would worry about massacre of their pupils at the hands of other
pupils. Today devotees of evil preach the doing of evil for evil’s sake. Richard
Neuhaus has not overstated the case by labeling the result barbarism and the
devotees of postmodernism and its ugly progeny barbarians.
Telling Yourself the Truth helped to make evident in 1980 that individual
emotional pathology, warped behavior patterns, and painful emotions, resulted
from cognitive displacement of God’s truth by warped beliefs. Cultural history
over the past twenty years has demonstrated that public displacement of God’s
truth has pumped out a surge of cultural evils so destructive that some thinkers
have announced that we have reached the end of civilization itself.
The point to be made here is this: Truth is functional! The injunction to tell it
to yourself is not a bit of abstract moral doctrine but a necessary condition of
vitality and life. Life lived in the truth makes for joy and peace. Existence
without the truth is a kind of death and a pathway to eternal death. The success
of Telling Yourself the Truth is told not merely in numbers sold but in countless
letters and face-to-face expressions by readers. From all over the world, they
have written and telephoned to express gratitude for their experience of the life-
changing power of truth activated in the self-talk.
The book’s phenomenal longevity in a market that changes at a dizzying pace
must be chalked up to its effectiveness. And to the fact that it is a true book
about truth. But more, it is a book easily read and enjoyed. For that my coauthor,
Marie Chapian, deserves hearty thanks and congratulations for her important
contribution. Her sparkling prose made Telling Yourself the Truth a pleasure for
its countless English-speaking readers and has, doubtless, aided the translators
who have made the book talk in their own tongues.
May God, who is the Truth, give new wings to His Word as this twentieth-
anniversary edition reaches a new generation of readers!
In Christ Jesus, whose infallible Word declares: “The truth shall make you
free.”
William Backus, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist