Explainer | Cognitive behavioural therapy alters the way you behave by changing the way you think about your life
- Aaron Beck died in November, aged 100, leaving behind a valuable legacy in the form of cognitive behavioural therapy, now used globally in mental health care
- Our interpretation of a situation, not the situation itself, triggers reactions was his breakthrough idea; CBT changes behaviour by altering the way we think
Even if you haven’t heard of the man behind it, you’ve likely heard of his contribution to psychology: cognitive behavioural therapy – CBT for short.
American psychiatrist Dr Aaron Beck developed this form of talking therapy in the 1960s which can help people manage mental health problems by changing the way they think and behave. He died in November, aged 100.
The Post spoke with his daughter Judith Beck, 67, about his legacy. She followed in his footsteps and is president of the Beck Institute and clinical professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.
CBT’s beginnings
Aaron Beck trained in Freudian analysis, a years-long process in which patients talk about their dreams and childhood memories. But in the late 1950s, Beck began asking patients to consider that the way they thought about things, not old conflicts or childhood issues, could be giving rise to their mental health problems.
A Buddhist quote says: ‘‘What we think, we become.” Beck sought to reverse this: “If our thinking is bogged down by distorted symbolic meanings, illogical reasoning and erroneous interpretations, we become, in truth, blind and deaf,” he wrote.
When her father began his research, Judith Beck says his goal was to validate psychoanalysis and its methods, as it was the dominant way of helping psychiatric patients at the time. He felt it needed to be scientifically proven for it to be taken seriously in the medical and scientific community.