Aaron Beck

Albert Ellis, one of the founders of cognitive therapy, quoted that exact line from Epictetus in his 1962 book and taught it to his clients.

Aaron Beck, the other big name, wrote in his 1979 treatment manual that the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy go back to the Stoics.

They weren't rediscovering this by accident.

They went and they intentionally read it.

So cognitive behavioral therapy, the cornerstone of cognitive therapy is not very helpful in OCD.

Although Aaron Beck, Tim Beck was a brilliant cognitive treatment, all those cognitive distortions that we talked about for so long that we use for social anxiety and panic disorder and other places is not that useful.

13 of them.

And that last one on the list is called maladaptive thinking.

Um, the problem was there was no real direct path to doing that, which is why psychoanalysis developed this reputation as taking forever.

And in a lot of ways, not being very effective, um, like skilled psychoanalysts are great, but a lot of psychoanalysts are not skilled much like a lot of therapists actually, um, So anyway, in the 50s, guys like Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck come along and start thinking, man, I happen to notice that when I'm talking to my patients in therapy, yeah, I don't know.

They might have all this unconscious gunk.

That might be a thing.

Can you tell me, is there much credible research to show that the therapy you're providing me really helps people with my type of problem? A good therapist will say, sure.

It'll bring down a book by, let's say, Aaron Beck on cognitive therapy for depression.

or many other treatment manuals are available.

Like Gail Stecchetti has written a wonderful book on helping persons with OCD and another well-structured book on the help of treatment for people with hoarding.

It's perfectly understandable.

That's not going to help them overcome their fear of snakes.

So a second ago, you talked about Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy, and I hear a lot of controversy around CBT.

In my grad program, it was said a number of times that if you're a heterosexual white man, cognitive behavioral therapy can be an effective treatment, but it is inappropriate to use for women and racial minorities, and it's often a form of gaslighting.

Oh, sure.

When I went to the Beck Institute, which is kind of the mecca for CBT, it's where Aaron Beck and his daughter Judith teach everybody, there were nurses, there were physicians, lots of LPCs, lots of LCSWs, PhD-level psychologists.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So tell me kind of what the broad definition of

cognitive behavioral therapy is.

Interestingly enough, the guy that developed it, Aaron Beck, he passed away probably, he was probably 80-something, passed away a few years ago.

He started out as a psychodynamic therapist.

Cognitive scientists call some of these patterns cognitive distortions.

The entire field of cognitive behavioral therapy from Aaron Beck is built on these cognitive distortions.

They're catastrophizing, mind-reading, fortune-telling, things like that.

I call it giving your brain's first draft too much authority.

Okay.

In the field of psychology, which is kind of the field for thinking right or wrong, there's a thing that goes way back to Dr. Aaron Beck, and then after him, Dr. David Burns, that is called the cognitive distortions and irrational beliefs.

And depending on which source you check, there's 10 to 14 of these.

You can boil them down to eight or 10, though.