Take Captive Every Thought by Dr. Brian Campbell 15

Transcript: “Take Captive Every Thought”

Dr. Brian Campbell

Hello, My name is Dr. Brian Campbell.

I would like to welcome you to this presentation entitled: Take Captive Every Thought.

In this talk, I will introduce you to a cognitive-behavioral approach to Christian Counseling. This approach is based solidly on God’s word, and is consistent with the scriptures as contained in the Holy Bible. The presentation is intended for Christian Counselors and for individuals currently receiving counseling.

During the course of the presentation, I will teach you the basic techniques utilized in a cognitive-behavioral approach to Christian counseling. I will also show you how cognitive-behavioral techniques can be used to help you change your thinking, behavior, and your underlying beliefs. Finally, I will show how your beliefs, when they are brought in line with God’s Word, will bring mental health and freedom from psychological problems. Now let’s turn to focus on the most important concept in this presentation, the concept of “beliefs.”

The key to understanding mental health and mental illness can be summed up in one word, the word “Beliefs.”

What is a belief?

A belief is something you consciously or unconsciously accept or assume to be true.

For example, you may believe you are dumb or stupid. Or, you may believe there is no hope for this world.

Now it is important to understand that just because you “believe” that something is true, does not necessarily make it, in reality “true.” Many things we believe in are actually false beliefs, or lies.

All beliefs can be separated into two basic categories: Irrational beliefs, or lies, and

rational beliefs, or truths.

Irrational beliefs, or lies, are associated with sin, and psychological problems, such as misery, unhappiness, and suffering.

For example, if I accept as being true the irrational belief that “Nobody could possibly love me,” this could result in a lifetime of hurt, sadness and psychological problems.

Fortunately, even though we are often taught lies, we do not have to continue to believe them. We, as Christians, can focus on Rational Beliefs, or truths, as revealed in God’s Holy word. When we start believing the truth, we immediately start becoming more mentally healthy. Our thinking is literally transformed and we begin to experience the fruits of the spirit, such as Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self-control.

For example, what do you think would happen if you stopped believing the lie that “nobody could possibly love me” and started believing the Biblical truth that: God created me and loves me more than I can every know or understand. As you might guess, if you reject the lie and start believing the biblical truth, this new belief would have a profound influence on your mental health and happiness.

If beliefs are so important to mental health, where do they come from?

For the most part, we learn our beliefs through our experience in the world.

As children, our parents have a strong influence on what we believe.

Later on, the world around us starts to have an ever-increasing influence on forming our basic beliefs.

Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world, and not everything parents teach children to believe in is actually true. Many parents—either intentionally or unintentionally--teach children lies, or false beliefs, about themselves and about the world.

Not only do parents sometimes teach lies, or irrational beliefs, the world around us is notorious for teaching false beliefs. In fact, when we stand back and look at the history of mankind, we start to see that many of the so-called “scientific” truths of bygone years, are now seen as “false beliefs” in modern society. Let’s take a moment to look at a few of these false beliefs.

At one point in our history, we believed that sun gods and moon gods could influence our crops. We also believed that the earth was flat, and that the earth was the center of the universe. We now know that these and other popular beliefs of the past were false.

In fact, it is not hard to imagine that many of the so-called scientific facts that are taught in our schools today, will be considered to be fiction in years to come. Therefore, as Christians, we must continually evaluate what the world teaches us to “believe,” and hold it up to the light of the Truth, as revealed in God’s word.

Another source of irrational beliefs that the world teaches us can be seen in the form of man’s superstitions. Our superstitions reveal that many things we assume to be true are downright silly and obviously “false.” Superstitions are clear examples of irrational beliefs that make no sense. Let’s take a moment to look at some of the most common superstitions.

A black cat crossing the road brings bad luck.

A rabbit’s foot brings good luck.

Walking under a ladder is bad luck.

Although you may feel that superstitions such as these are funny or silly, many of you are probably guilty of having one or more of your own “favorite” superstitions.

Although superstitions are relatively “harmless” and typically have little effect on our lives, other “false beliefs” are clearly toxic and are very harmful to our mental health and can have damaging long-term effects.

I will use the term “toxic beliefs” to refer to beliefs that can be extremely damaging and harmful to our mental health. If left unchallenged or uncorrected, these toxic beliefs can have a significant impact throughout our lives. For example, if your parents and the “world” teach you that you are dumb or stupid, this belief can influence you negatively throughout your lifetime.

By now, I hope you are starting to see that our beliefs are very important to our mental health. In fact, virtually all psychological problems have underlying “false” beliefs associated with them. Anxiety, depression, and all mental health issues stem from irrational beliefs “or lies” that have been taught to us and that we have accepted as being true.

Given the argument that our beliefs are so important to our mental health, why does it seem that we often just accept what is being taught to us, “hook, line and sinker,” without evaluating the truth of what we are learning? Well, the fact is that our brain doesn’t always evaluate the “truthfulness” of what is being taught. It very often just accepts that what it is is learning as true, without questioning. Young children are especially susceptible to simply believing what they are taught, without evaluating whether what they are learning is, in reality, true or false.

For example, when I was young, about four years old, my mother saw me eating the peel from an orange. She told me to “Stop eating that, that’s poison.” Well, I believed her, and over the years I observed that everyone else must have known that orange peels were poison, because everyone else carefully took them off the orange and threw them away. Because my belief was never disconfirmed or challenged, I continued to believe that orange peels were poison until I was 28 years old. At that time, my wife of one year was making icing for a cake and started to grind some of the outside of the orange peel to put in the icing. I watched in horror as she put what I believed to be poison orange peel into the icing. When I confronted her, she looked at me in a very concerned way, and probably wondered how and why she ever married such a strange person. Fortunately, we’re still married, and fortunately my belief that “orange peels are poison” did not have much impact on my life. However, as I have emphasized previously, many of the things we have “bought into,” without evaluating them, are far from harmless. In fact, they can have far-reaching consequences on our lives and mental health.

Our underlying beliefs are like the ocean tide. The ocean tides are deep, and their influence is very broad and wide. In a similar manner, our underlying beliefs are often deep and broad based. They can develop slowly over a lifetime, and they can be difficult to fathom, or discern. In fact, they are often so deep and far-reaching, we can find it extremely hard to identify or label these beliefs and put them into words. For too long, we have simply accepted them as being true, and we are often unaware of how they affect many different aspects of our lives.

Discovering our underlying beliefs is an extremely important part of Christian counseling. The reason this process is important is that our underlying beliefs have a profound influence on “what” we think and “how” we think. Using the analogy of the ocean, our thoughts “flow out of” and are formed by our underlying beliefs (which are represented by the tides). That is, just as the tides determine whether there are any waves on the beach, so our underlying beliefs affect the formation and content of our thoughts

Unfortunately, we do not always see the connection between our underlying beliefs and our thoughts. A big part of Christian counseling is aimed at helping people discover the connection between “thoughts” and underlying beliefs. It is not an exaggeration to say that vast majority of what we think about and how we think about ourselves and our world can be traced back to our underlying beliefs.

We have just seen that our underlying beliefs affect our thinking—that is, the formation of our thoughts and the content of our thoughts. But beliefs don’t just influence our thinking; they also have a significant influence on our behavior. Using our ocean analogy, just as our thoughts “flow out of” our underlying beliefs, so our behavior “flows out of” our thinking. Try to visualize the relationship between our thoughts and our behavior by thinking of our behavior as being represented by the action or movement of the wave. That is, the way the wave “behaves” is influenced by our thinking, and our thinking, in turn, is influenced by our underlying beliefs. Thus, our beliefs, our thinking, and our behavior are all related. Let’s take a moment to look at an example of how our thoughts can influence our behavior.

Let’s start, once again, with the underlying belief that “the world is not safe”

In a previous slide, we have shown how this underlying belief can result in thoughts such as “everyone’s out to get me.” Now let’s go one step further. If you think such thoughts on a regular basis, it is not difficult to see how they can significantly influence your behavior. In fact, you may stop going outside and start avoiding people altogether as a result of this thinking. This is a clear example of how our thinking can affect our behavior.

Now, let’s continue with our analogy. Thus far, we have seen how underlying beliefs affect our thinking and how our thinking, in turn, can affect our behavior. But in addition to affecting our behavior, there is another powerful influence that our thinking has on our lives, namely: our thinking significantly influences our emotions. Once again, using the analogy of the ocean, we have seen that our behavior “flows out of” our thinking. In a similar manner, our emotions also “flow out of” our thinking. That is, there is a direct relationship between our thinking and our emotions. In our analogy of the ocean, think of our emotions as the waves crashing into the shore. Many of our strongest emotions flow directly out of our unhealthy thinking. Now let’s return, once again, to the example we have been using to see how our thinking can clearly influence our emotions, or feelings.

If we believe that the world is not safe, this can cause us to think that “everyone’s out to get me.” In a sort of cascading effect, this thought, and others like it, can trigger powerful emotions such as fear and anxiety. To some extent, all of us are already aware of the influence of thinking on emotions. For example, we all know that we can make ourselves more frightened by thinking frightening thoughts. We can also make ourselves more depressed by thinking depressing thoughts, such as “There’s no hope,” “The world is going to Hell.”

Let’s take a moment to summarize what we have been learning. Thus far, we have seen how our underlying beliefs can have a powerful affect our thinking, our behavior, and our emotions. In addition to these influences, our underlying beliefs also affect three important areas: Our perception—how we look at and process the world;

Our self-talk—how we talk to ourselves and what we say to ourselves; and, finally, our underlying beliefs, ultimately, affect our very Salvation. Let’s look first at how our underlying beliefs affect our perception of the world.

What we believe, or accept to be true, can have a powerful influence on how we perceive the world. In fact, the way we look at the world and process information is often significantly influenced by our underlying beliefs. Although we are not always aware of it, our brain tends to “look for” evidence to support what it already believes to be true. For example, if you believe that you are fat, you may tend to look in the mirror and see yourself as fat, even when you have lost a lot of weight. This occurs in the disorder called Anorexia.

The tendency to “look for” evidence to support our beliefs is called “selective attention.” During the process of selective attention, the brain selectively attends to information that will support what it already believes to be true. For example, if you believe that people are out to get you, you will tend to find evidence to support your belief.

Once the brain has found evidence to support its belief, it tends to confirm its own bias.

In a sense, the brain says: “Uh-huh! I knew I was right!” This process, which is called “confirmatory bias,” gives further support to the brain’s underlying belief.