Aaron Beck: The 8 Best Phrases
In this article we wanted to present some sentences by Aaron Beck that we believe contain the fundamental meaning of his thinking on cognitive distortions, on convergent thinking and on the way in which it affects the various disorders of the soul and personality.
During the 1960s, this American professor and psychiatrist made one of the most important contributions to current psychotherapy: he helped shape Cognitive Therapy or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TCC).
Among the many goals he achieved, he was the only psychiatrist to have published articles with both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. In fact, the latter called him one of the 5 most influential psychotherapists of all time.
Aaron Beck’s sentences talk about how an oriented and precise restructuring of our cognitive patterns allows us to enjoy a better state of mental health and a better emotional balance. By changing our mental patterns and filters, in fact, we can obtain the qualities we need to move forward and survive, overcome our problems and learn with and from our partner.
8 phrases from Aaron Beck
It is the interpretation that hurts, not the fact itself
Aaron Beck’s thinking, within the framework of cognitive therapy, is based on the idea that people suffer because of their particular interpretation of the events they experience, not the facts themselves. In other words, most of our suffering would depend on the meaning and importance we attach to what happens to us, not the fact itself.
Beck believes that the psychotherapist should help the person to identify his distorted beliefs as an antecedent and fundamental step to change them. Its purpose is, therefore, to recognize the cognitive schemes implemented by the subject, so as to be able to modify them and make them less rigid. This cognitive restructuring allows the person to change his way of interpreting and validating what happens to him according to a subjective plan.
His theory applied to couples
The way we interpret reality affects all areas of our life. Our thoughts disturb and also affect the partner, on an individual and couple level.
His book Love is not enough. How to solve relationship problems with cognitive therapy can serve as a reference. In it Beck gives information on how to educate the two members of the couple, from a cognitive perspective, so that they can identify and transform those patterns.
The aim is to be able to identify the patterns that are putting the relationship at risk and find an alternative one. Only with this awareness can the couple thrive and develop. This is one of Aaron Beck’s quotes that best explains the concept:
A model for depression
As a child, Aaron Beck suffered from a serious illness that generated multiple fears in him that he had to cope with. This cognitive method of dealing with problems inspired him and led him, years later, to develop his therapeutic theory focusing, specifically, on depression.
According to Beck, the symptoms of depression begin with the activation of negative cognitive patterns and the resulting distortions. His study and analysis of depression was so thorough that one of the most widely used tools today to measure the severity of this disorder bears his name: “Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI)”. It was a fundamental contribution to psychiatry and psychology, as his method became one of the most powerful psychoanalytic conceptualizations of depression.
The application extended to other ailments
He also deepened the effectiveness of his Cognitive Therapy by applying it to another wide variety of problems, such as anxiety, substance abuse and various personality disorders. This is one of Aaron Beck’s most enlightening and didactic quotes to understand his perspective:
As for schizophrenia, his contribution consisted in establishing how patients’ dysfunctions were the result of vulnerability. For this, he believed that the specialist’s job should be to develop more realistic alternatives to the patient’s beliefs, delusions and hallucinations.
Starting point for your personal transformation
Beck’s model can be taken as a basis for promoting personal change. Very often, even if we cannot decide the contexts or the facts that will happen to us, we still have in our hands the ability to consciously intervene on our spontaneous interpretation of what we experience, and which often proves to be compromising.
We can choose what to internalize and what not and how, choose to keep the positive or negative things… It all depends on how our mind processes the facts and allows itself to be influenced. Likewise, we can also choose how to act, i.e. what our response will be.
All of these Aaron Beck phrases have a fund of hope. Many times we feel unable to find an alternative, more hopeful point of view to make sense of what is happening to us. In doing so we do not realize that the awareness of how we interpret what happens to us helps to modulate the intensity of our suffering.
