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

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 meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout 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 978-0-7642-2325-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Backus, D. William
Telling yourself the truth.

1. Christian life1960- 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

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 evils 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 Gods truth by warped beliefs. Cultural history over the past twenty years has demonstrated that public displacement of Gods 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 books 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

Introduction

This book has been written to help you live with the one person you must live with for lifeyou. The precepts set forth here are not new; in fact, theyve been around since the time of King Solomon and before. People become happy and contented by learning how to practice the habits this book describes.

The current writings of the cognitive therapists such as Albert Ellis, A. T. Beck, M. J. Mahoney, D. Meichenbaum and Arnold Lazarus and their scientific points of view, the writings of philosophers such as Titus and Marcus Aurelius, the findings of psychological researchers as well as the probings of the greatest minds of history bring us to the truths set forth in the Holy Scriptures and the principles we share here with you. These principles are so practical and time-tested-in fact, Gods own method for destroying the strongholds of evil in the minds of men and women-that it is amazing the average reader has never heard of such things!

Most of us want to be honest-to-goodness happy human beings who can handle life well and manage to feel good in spite of ever-increasing odds against us. Ironically, we use methods of achieving happiness that make us