Aaron T. Beck > Quotes

“Stop it, and give yourself a chance.”
― Aaron T. Beck

“The manners that apply specifically during courtship come to be replaced over the course of marriage by a different set of manners, embodying the residual pettiness, complaining, and faultfinding of childhood.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Love Is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstanding – A Psychiatrist's Guide to Saving Your Marriage Through Better Communication

“As applied to substance abuse, the cognitive approach helps individuals
to come to grips with the problems leading to emotional distress
and to gain a broader perspective on their reliance on drugs for
pleasure and/or relief from discomfort.”
― Aaron Beck

“First, strive for a solid foundation of trust, loyalty, respect, and security. Your spouse is your closest relative and is entitled to depend on you as a committed ally, supporter, and champion.   Second, cultivate the tender, loving part of your relationship: sensitivity, consideration, understanding, and demonstrations of affection and caring. Regard each other as confidante, companion, and friend.   Third, strengthen the partnership. Develop a sense of cooperation, consideration, and compromise. Sharpen your communication skills so that you can more easily make decisions about practical issues, such as division of work, preparing and implementing a family budget, and planning leisure-time activities.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Love Is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstanding – A Psychiatrist's Guide to Saving Your Marriage Through Better Communication

“Egocentricity is a problem, however, when it becomes exaggerated and is not balanced by such social traits as love, empathy, and altruism, the capacity for which is probably also represented in our genome. Interestingly, very few of us think to look for egocentricity in ourselves, although we are dazzled by it in others.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Prisoners Of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence

“The stronger person is not the one making the most noise but the one who can quietly direct the conversation toward defining and solving problems.”
― Aaron T Beck

“What has stripped their conversation of its richness and enjoyments? First, despite the apparent success of their numerous discussions, they may have arrived at the solutions to family problems at a great cost to the relationship. In many relationships, a whole sequence of little kinks gradually adds up to produce stress. These kinks may also be a sign of important differences between the partners in their outlook and values—differences that their surface agreements never resolve. Thus, the free flow of conversation is inhibited by the threat of intrusions of unresolved conflicts. Perfectly tuned conversations are interrupted by signals of possible discord that introduce static into the communications. Second, although the partners may get along when they are dealing with practical problems, their conversation may be devoid of references to the more pleasurable aspects of the relationship. The partners have not learned to demarcate problem-solving discussions from pleasant conversations. Thus when one partner starts a conversation with a loving comment, the other may decide that this is a good time to bring up some conflict. As a result, there is a dearth of conversation that revolves simply around expressions of caring, sharing, and loving.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Love Is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstanding – A Psychiatrist's Guide to Saving Your Marriage Through Better Communication

“The cost of survival of the lineage may be a lifetime of discomfort.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Anxiety Disorders and Phobias

“The intercommunication system also includes the expectations and demands that people place on themselves and others—something that has been labeled “the tyranny of the shoulds.” 2 It is important to recognize these injunctions and prohibitions because rigid expectations or compulsive attempts to regulate the behavior of others are bound to lead to disappointment and frustration.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Prisoners Of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence

“Sometimes a spouse, in trying to relieve a partner’s distress, accomplishes just the opposite. Judy is an artist. One evening she was quite upset by her problems in getting ready for a show, and she started to tell her husband, Cliff, about them. She wanted his support, encouragement, and sympathy. But Cliff instead fired off a barrage of instructions: “One, you’ve got to get all the people together in the group. Two, you have to call anyone else who is involved. Three, you want to get your accountant in on it—check with the bank to see how much money you still have. Four, you could contact the PR people. Five, call the gallery and see about the time.” Judy felt rejected by Cliff and thought, “He doesn’t care about how I feel. He just wants to get me off his back.” But in his eyes, Cliff thought that he was filling the bill. He had given her his best advice—he thought that he was being supportive. To Judy, however, Cliff was being controlling, not supportive. She was seeking sympathy and emotional rapport, while he was tuned in to problem solving. How can you find the appropriate channel? One point”
― Aaron T. Beck, Love Is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstanding – A Psychiatrist's Guide to Saving Your Marriage Through Better Communication

“When married people develop such an intense but inappropriate fixation to somebody other than their mate, they may be driven to jeopardize or even destroy a reasonable marital relationship. In the heat of passion, they seem incapable of attaching any real weight to the potentially disastrous consequences of their infatuation—the possible breakup of their marriage. They cannot “turn off” their infatuation even if they want to! Yet, when enough time has elapsed without their seeing “the other woman (or man),” they generally find that their infatuation dies down.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Love Is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstanding – A Psychiatrist's Guide to Saving Your Marriage Through Better Communication

“There presently exist three recognized conceptualizations of the antisocial construct: antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013), dissocial personality disorder in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10; World Health Organization, 1992), and psychopathy as formalized by Hare with the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003). A conundrum for therapists is that these conceptualizations are overlapping but not identical, emphasizing different symptom clusters.

The DSM-5 emphasizes the overt conduct of the patient through a criteria set that includes criminal behavior, lying, reckless and impulsive behavior, aggression, and irresponsibility in the areas of work and finances. In contrast, the criteria set for dissocial personality disorder is less focused on conduct and includes a mixture of cognitive signs (e.g., a tendency to blame others, an attitude of irresponsibility), affective signs (e.g., callousness, inability to feel guilt, low frustration tolerance), and interpersonal signs (e.g., tendency to form relationships but not maintain them). The signs and symptoms of psychopathy are more complex and are an almost equal blend of the conduct and interpersonal/affective aspects of functioning. The two higher-order factors of the PCL-R reflect this blend. Factor 1, Interpersonal/Affective, includes signs such as superficial charm, pathological lying, manipulation, grandiosity, lack of remorse and empathy, and shallow affect. Factor 2, Lifestyle/Antisocial, includes thrill seeking, impulsivity, irresponsibility, varied criminal activity, and disinhibited behavior (Hare & Neumann, 2008). Psychopathy can be regarded as the most severe of the three disorders. Patients with psychopathy would be expected to also meet criteria for ASPD or dissocial personality disorder, but not everyone diagnosed with ASPD or dissocial personality disorder will have psychopathy (Hare, 1996; Ogloff, 2006).

As noted by Ogloff (2006), the distinctions among the three antisocial conceptualizations are such that findings based on one diagnostic group are not necessarily applicable to the others and produce different prevalence rates in justice-involved populations. Adding a further layer of complexity, therapists will encounter patients who possess a mixture of features from all three diagnostic systems rather than a prototypical presentation of any one disorder.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders

“If your spouse is collaborating with you, you both might want to start with making changes in communication (Chapters 14 and 15), reducing anger (Chapter 17), and introducing new methods of solving problems (Chapter 16). If you are able to cooperate to determine more precisely what your spouse legitimately wants or doesn’t want, likes or dislikes, you are in a better position to make those changes (Chapters 12 and 16).”
― Aaron T. Beck, Love Is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstanding – A Psychiatrist's Guide to Saving Your Marriage Through Better Communication

“SADNESS VERSUS ANXIETY”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“The common factor for arousal of anger is the individual’s appraisal of an assault on his domain”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“Plato referred to this phenomenon as an “internal dialogue.” Self-monitoring of behavior may be involved in maladaptive reactions. Overmonitoring can lead to self-consciousness and over-regulation to excessive inhibition. Cautionary signals tend to interfere with spontaneous self-expression.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“dichotomous thinking” or “bipolar thinking”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“HYPOMANIC STATE The thought content of the hypomanic or manic patient is the reverse of that of the depressive. The manic or hypomanic patient perceives a significant gain in each of his life experiences.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“OBSESSIONS AND COMPULSIONS The content of obsessions is generally concerned with some remote risk or danger expressed in the form of a doubt or warning.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“psychological problems can be mastered by sharpening discriminations”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“The phenomenon of self-consciousness and attention-binding in acute neurosis is similar to reactions experienced by many people in realistically threatening situations.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“Another group of physical disorders with psychological overlay is lung disease. Such patients may be conscious of every breath”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“prototype of anger is the reaction of a primitive organism to destroy or repel a noxious agent. This analogy illuminates one basic pattern in humans: When a person is attacked (physically or verbally)”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“When people identify their own individualistic and sociophilic strivings with the goals of the group, they are subject not only to the benefits of group identification but also to its dark side: xenophobia, chauvinism, prejudice, and intolerance. They also exhibit the same thinking toward other groups that they show toward individuals within their group who have offended them. This involves such errors as overgeneralization and dichotomous thinking, as well as the fixation on “single-cause” explanations—seeing the outgroup as the sole cause of their distress, otherwise known as scape-goating.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Prisoners Of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence

“by asking the patient what he feels sad about and by encouraging him to express his repetitive ideas.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“Consideration of automatic thoughts leads naturally to the question: What general principles shape the content of these internal signals? We know from our own observations that people may behave quite differently in identical circumstances. We find that they interpret the situation differently and evidently issue different “self-instructions.”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“hopelessness was the best indicator of how serious the person was about terminating his life (Minkoff,”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“ANXIETY NEUROSIS The thinking of the anxious patient is dominated by themes of danger to his domain; that is”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“The therapist helps a patient to unravel his distortions in thinking and to learn alternative”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

“PESSIMISM Pessimism sweeps like a tidal wave into the thought content of depressed patients. To some degree”
― Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders