8 Fantastic Quotes From Aaron Beck
In this article, we take up quotes from Aaron Beck regarding cognitive disorders and congruent thoughts. They also address their influence on the personality disorders. In the 1960s, this American psychiatrist and professor created one of the most relevant contributions to psychotherapy. He helped create the cognition therapy.
Beck is the only psychiatrist to have published articles for both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. In fact, the latter sees him as one of the 5 most influential psychotherapists ever.
Aaron Beck’s quote addresses how a proper restructuring of our cognitive models gives us better mental health and better emotional balance. This change means that we can have the qualities we need to move forward and survive, overcome our problems and learn with and from our partner.
According to these quotes from Aaron Beck, it is the interpretation that hurts, not the fact itself
Beck’s thinking is based on the idea that people suffer because of the interpretation they have when a certain thing affects them, not because of the fact itself. Most of our suffering had been due to the meaning and weight we give to what is happening to us. Not what actually happens to us.
Beck believes that psychotherapists must help the person identify their distorted perceptions in order to modify them. Their goal is to understand the cognitive models that the person uses to modify them and make them less strict. The cognitive restructuring makes it possible to change the interpretation of what has happened.
Aaron Beck and his theories applied to couple relationships
The way we interpret reality affects every part of our lives. These thoughts both disturb and affect couple relationships, both on an individual level and within the relationship itself.
His book Love is Never Enough: How couples can overcome misunderstandings, resolve conflicts and solve relationship problems through cognitive therapy is a reference. It gives us guidelines on how to instruct couples from a cognitive perspective so that they can identify and transform these models.
The goal of this is for them to try to identify harmful patterns and look for alternatives that can be a replacement. It is only by being aware of this that the couple will be able to develop. Here is one of Aaron Beck’s quotes that explains this:
Quote from Aaron Beck: A model for depression
As a child, Aaron Beck suffered from fears that he then had to face. This cognitive approach to problem solving inspired him to develop his therapeutic theory many years later. His specific focus was depression.
For him, the symptoms of depression began with an activation of negative cognitive schedules and disorders. He studied depression at such a depth and was so good at describing it that one of the instruments used to measure the degree of depression still bears his name: the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). It was a very important contribution in the world of psychiatry and psychology. It became one of the strongest alternatives to psychoanalytic depression treatment.
Use in other disturbances
Beck also examined the effectiveness of his cognitive therapy in many other problems, such as anxiety, substance abuse, and various personality disorders. Here is another quote that will help us understand this approach.
When it comes to schizophrenia, he considered that these people’s dysfunctional patterns were simply vulnerabilities. He showed us that the psychiatrist’s job was to develop more realistic alternatives to their perceptions and hallucinations.
A starting point for your personal transformation
Beck’s model can be used to achieve major personality changes. It is true that we cannot choose the contexts and events that will occur in our lives. But we can consciously intervene in the interpretation we make of what is happening to us. We can also apply this to the things that sometimes hurt us.
We can choose what we want to internalize when it comes to what is happening; choose to focus on the positive or the negative.
All of this depends on how our mind handles things. We can also choose how we want to act and how our response will be. All of these phrases by Aaron Beck have very hopeful undertones. We often feel incapable of finding an alternative approach to understanding what is happening to us. We do not realize that by being aware of how we interpret things, we can modulate the intensity of our suffering.
