David Stoop

David A. Stoop was born in 1937 and worked for more than four decades as a clinical psychologist, author, and broadcaster at the intersection of psychology and Christian counselling.

He held a master's degree in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and a doctorate from the University of Southern California, and that combination shaped everything he wrote. He founded and directed the Center for Family Therapy in Newport Beach, California, served as an adjunct professor at Fuller, and sat on the executive board of the American Association of Christian Counselors.

He was familiar to a large audience as a co-host of New Life Live, the nationally syndicated radio and television program, where he took calls and gave counsel on marriage, family, and emotional health for many years.

He published more than thirty books, several of them Gold Medallion winners. You Are What You Think, first issued as Self-Talk and later reissued under the newer title, applies cognitive principles to the internal commentary people run underneath their experience, organized around the line from Epictetus that men are disturbed not by things but by the views they take of them.

Rethink How You Think, published in 2013, argues that most behavioral patterns are established by around age six and that lasting change requires sustained meditation instead of a decision.

His other titles include Forgiving the Unforgivable, Forgiving Our Parents Forgiving Ourselves, Forgiving What You'll Never Forget, and The Emotionally Healthy Marriage, several written with his wife Jan.

The consistent criticism of his psychological work is that the scriptural material becomes dominant in the later chapters in ways that readers who came for the psychology find abrupt. He would probably not have regarded that as a criticism. He died in 2021 at eighty-three.