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many doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists are treating depression and anxiety with medication or psychotherapy that simply treats the symptoms; they never get to the root cause.
    Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
    Dr. Aaron Beck was a psychiatrist trained in the standard psychiatry of his day. Decades ago, he used analysis of his patients’ dreams in order to find clues to their depression, anxiety, and anger. He also used free association, which was a standard Freudian tool to have a patient discuss their thoughts as they occur.
    By the 1960s, Dr. Beck was dissatisfied with this approach. He found that when his patients let their thoughts run free, they typically left their sessions feeling worse instead of better, but when he helped patients develop a practical approach to problem solving, they tended to improve significantly faster.
    Based on these findings, Dr. Beck began to work with his patients to help them recognize, dispute, and reprogram their automatic thought patterns. This later became known as cognitive therapy or cognitive-behavioral therapy.
    In cognitive-behavioral therapy, a patient learns to examine his thinking and question any negative beliefs, assumptions, or feelings. When negative thought patterns—“If something bad is going to happen, it will happen to me”—are broken, the painful expectations that accompany them lose their self-fulfilling power, and most people experience a dramatic improvement.
    What I have learned over the years in referring patients to a cognitive-behavioral therapist is that many improve, but most still need to be programmed with the Word of God (the Bible).
    In Matthew 13, in the parable of the wheat and the tares, the parable states that the kingdom of heaven is like a farmer planting seeds in his field, but at night after the workers left, his enemy came and planted weeds among the wheat.
    Distortional thoughts are like weeds planted in your mind and heart. They grow up to become huge strongholds that can have you literally imprisoned in depression and anxiety.
    To defeat these strongholds, you have to learn to recognize and pull up these weeds and then plant the “incorruptible seed” of God’s Word, which prevents more weeds from growing. When this seed of the Word of God is planted in your mind and heart, it literally produces a harvest of peace, joy, gratitude, and all of the remaining fruit of the Spirit. (See Galatians 5:22–23.)
    You should not be content to merely read God’s Word; you need to have it “planted” in your heart. This means you need to have certain Scripture verses committed to memory so you can recall them anytime you need to spiritually combat any negative, distortional thoughts.
    The good news is that there are only ten major distortional beliefs that need to be reprogrammed. I’ve listed some of these in my books Stress Less and Deadly Emotions. The distortional thought patterns listed below are the ten most common patterns I encounter in my patients. They are similar to ten distortional thought processes identified by Dr. David Burns, a renowned psychiatrist and author of Feeling Good . Some of these distortional beliefs are associated with depression, some with anxiety, and some with both.
    Following each distortional thought pattern below, I’ve added a confession based on God’s Word that you can say to yourself each time you are being caught up in one of these negative thought patterns.
    Distortional Thought Patterns
    1. “What if” thinking
    This distortional thinking is very common with anxious individuals. Examples include: “What if I lose my job?” “What if I lose my home?” “What if my children get hooked on drugs?” “What if I have a heart attack?” “What if I get cancer?”
    Realize that “what if” thinking breeds anxiety and fear. If you focus on “what if,” your fear grows ; however, if you focus on God’s Word, your fear goes . Eliminate this “what if” thinking. It shatters faith, and without