Telling Yourself the Truth by William Backus and Marie Chapian, Bethany House Publishers, 1980, most recent reprint 2000.
I read this book about 30 years ago when I was an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. One of my assignments to my freshman comp class was to write a book review, and one of my students wrote about this book. It’s funny how vividly I remember discussing its ideas with her and how little I tried to put them into practice!
The premise of this book is so simple as to seem simplistic: change your beliefs, your thoughts, so that you are telling yourself the truth, and your life will change.
You can’t change others; you can only change yourself. (Where oh where have you heard that before?) My student said in her discussion with me, “There sure is a lot about God in this book!” Hmmm, I thought. Interesting. Maybe I should read it. And I did. Just now I took another look at it and find these great statements in the first few pages:
“What you think and believe determines how you feel and what you do” (22).
“A very nice thing about changing your misbeliefs in order to be a happier person is that it will work for you now. You don’t have to wait for months and years for a grand breakthrough. You can begin to change negative and unwanted persistent feelings immediately. You have an advantage in working with a book like this. A misbelief that is frequently encountered in psychotherapy is that it is the therapist’s job to make a client a well-adjusted and happy person” (23).
“As long as you’re convinced that you can’t change, you won’t try” (24).
I would say that this is one of those books that has its core insights in the first few chapters, with the rest of it containing elaborations and applications. But that’s okay. Read the introduction and first three chapters and then pick the topics from the rest that seem to apply the most to you: depression, anger, fear, etc.
As I sat working on this post my son Gideon called. If you read my blogs you’ll know that he went through cancer treatment last year. He’s supposed to have classes until 9:15 PM on Mondays and Wednesdays, but he was calling to say that he was coming home early. He’s not feeling good, mostly from lack of sleep, but, more worrying, he’s having pain and tingling in his left leg and foot. It was his left leg that was most affected by the tumors on his spine, but he’s seemed back to normal for some time. His latest PET scan of just a few weeks ago showed no tumor growth at all. So what on earth is wrong? Jim and I prayed about it, Jim called the neurologist, and I sat there kind of staring into space. Finally I said, “Well, there’s no point in my just sitting here. I might as well go back and finish my blog post.” I guess I’d better take the good advice of the book I’m reviewing. Since this won’t be sent out until tomorrow, I’ll include an update below. But I had to kind of laugh at myself: Practice what you preach, Debi!
And an update, as promised: Gideon was feeling better this morning and went off to school, but he said his leg still felt “funny” and had some tingling. We have an appointment with the neurologist on Friday. I think he may be in for spine surgery after all, but we’ll hope not. The truth is, we just don’t know what’s going on, so there’s no point in catastrophizing.
(I do think a note about the authors of the book is appropriate here. Dr. Backus died in 2005. He wrote a number of other books on the “telling the truth” theme and ran a Christian counseling practice. Marie Chapian is still going strong and has the website and books to prove it, but some of her stuff seems a little . . . strange. So no recommendation is implied of anything else she’s written.)