Nobody likes me. I’m a failure. I’m too ugly to love.

Our thoughts are so convincing that we often mistake them for truth.

We confuse feelings for facts, invent fictions on behalf of others, and cling to our own distorted interpretations of events. And when we act on our misguided thoughts, we typically wind up on the wrong side of truth — because the mind lies.

It’s absurd!

And until 50 years ago, psychology had no systematic way to help people stop it.

In the 1960s, the psychiatrist Aaron Beck was watching his depressed patients play a simple card-matching game. According to everything he'd learned in medical school, success should have made them feel worse. Freudian theory insisted that depressed people had an unconscious "need to suffer"—so achievement would threaten their psychological equilibrium and deepen their misery.

Instead, Beck's patients grew more confident, and their moods improved with each correct match.

This shouldn't have happened. It violated the fundamental principles of psychoanalysis that had dominated psychiatry for decades. But Beck couldn't ignore what he was seeing: his patients' moods weren't being controlled by mysterious unconscious drives. They were being hijacked by the thoughts they were having right now, in real time.

Beck had stumbled onto something that would revolutionize how we understand human misery: Depression isn't a disease. It's a con game your mind is running on you.

Aaron Beck, the psychiatrist who died on November 1, 2021, at the age of 100, is considered one of the five most influential psychotherapists since Freud—and not just in my household.

Dr. Beck changed the face of American psychiatry and is the reason that so many of us who struggle with mental anguish (I am NOT a fan of the term “mental illness” and will write about that another time) are not simply standing, but thriving in ways we honestly never believed we could.

His contribution to psychology and mental health will outlast him by centuries.

Known as the “Father of Cognitive Therapy,” Aaron Temkin Beck—called Tim by his close friends and family, and ATB by his colleagues—was born in Rhode Island to Jewish Russian immigrants in 1921, the youngest of five children and arriving two years after his parents lost two children amid the influenza pandemic.

His mother, who suffered from mood swings, was still grieving her lost babies and remained profoundly depressed when Aaron was born. Beck’s mother was loving but fiercely and understandably overprotective after losing two children.

As he became more consciously aware of his place in his family, he became convinced that he was a replacement for his sister, who died in 1920, the year before he was born—he believed his mother was disappointed that he’d not been born a girl.

Despite suffering from chronic asthma, Beck was a typically active young child, a Boy Scout who spent most of his time outside in the woods or with friends playing sports.

His parents encouraged his interest in science and his love of nature. He credited these early explorations with bird watching, learning to identify plants and trees, and becoming a naturalist and a camp counselor as the origin of his curiosity about “what makes people tick; particularly what makes them happy or sad, and confident or insecure.”

Yet, like many children throughout the history of time, especially the outdoorsy types, he broke his arm when he was around 7—an injury that greatly impacted his quality of life. Instead of racing around with his friends and playing sports, he was relegated to more sedentary indoor activities, like reading (my favorite athletic sport).

To add injury to injury, because of his physical inactivity and perhaps the less sophisticated medical care of the time, Beck developed a near-fatal blood infection at the site of his broken bone and was immediately hospitalized.

But this early experience in the hospital proved to be a traumatic and formative one: Beck would learn much later that his blood infection had a 95% mortality rate, and that he’d nearly lost his arm to amputation.

He missed so much school that he was asked to repeat first grade while the rest of his friends advanced.

And, if things weren’t bleak enough, during one of his stays, the surgeon began his incision before young Beck was fully anesthetized, triggering the first cascade of several phobias—hospitals, surgery, blood injuries, and the smell of ether.

Because of the severity of his injury, he understood that he’d not be able to avoid hospitals, and all the attendant sights, sounds, and smells. So this young stoic decided on a rational approach—he’d treat it himself. "I learned not to be concerned about the faint feeling, but just to keep active,” Beck was quoted in a New York Times profile. Through exposure and willpower, he slowly faced his fear of hospitals.

He would soon discover how to use his resilience as fuel to conquer his demons.

From the Boy Scouts, he learned he’d have to do difficult things, like finding his way through a complicated forest and swimming a mile. While the Scouts showed Beck that he could accomplish complex tasks, it was his injury and the trauma of becoming critically ill that revealed to him just how resilient he was and how driven he was to conquer all that stood in his way.

Yet he felt demoralized by having to repeat the first grade—it left a deep internal wound because he strongly suspected it was because he was stupid. (As someone held back in 6th grade, I strongly relate to this.

The sense that I'm not as smart as everyone else has always been with me has only begun to dissipate in the last few years.) It would be years before he’d work up the courage to ask his mother why he was held back, and only then would he learn that it had to do with how frequently he was sick and not with his intelligence at all.

Beck was miserable without his classmates. He couldn’t move past the shame of having to repeat a grade, so he didn’t.

Determined to stick with his friends, he enlisted the help of a tutor and his older brothers and studied and worked without distraction. Not only did he catch up, but he advanced a grade ahead of his original classmates.

This was a psychological turning point for him. "It did show some evidence that I could do things, that if I got into a hole, I could dig myself out. I could do it on my own," wrote Beck.

When he caught whooping cough, made worse by his chronic asthma, Beck developed a second phobia: suffocation. It emerged when he began to drive in the form of tunnel phobia, manifesting as a panic attack while he was behind the wheel.

His fear of suffocation in tunnels sprouted other fears—of heights and public speaking. As he’d done when he was much younger, he resolved to treat these fears himself, approaching each phobia cognitively.

In 1938, Beck graduated from Hope High School at the top of his class, headed to Brown University, and then earned his MD from Yale Medical School. This was a truly trying period, as he had to confront his phobia of the sights, sounds, and smells of hospitals, blood, and surgery.

But once again, he relied on self-treatment— whenever he felt faint, he would expose himself to the operating room to desensitize himself. When he had to assist with surgery, he distracted himself by continuously keeping busy. “I wasn't fazed at all as long as I was... doing something.

I learned an awful lot from my own experience,” he wrote. “As long as you're actively involved in something, anxiety tends to hold back."

When he eventually overcame his fear, he would pinpoint this as the possible root of his belief that it was possible to overcome the symptoms that paralyze and upend a life.

During his residency at the Cushing Veterans Administration Hospital in Massachusetts, Beck did a rotation in psychiatry, when he became interested in the treatment of mental illness and psychoanalytic theory, particularly Freudian theory, to which he subscribed wholeheartedly.

This inspired him to become a psychotherapist, and he used his research to bolster Freud’s claims that disorders were rooted in unconscious fears and conflicts.

What Beck didn’t anticipate was that his studies did not match Freud’s theory at all.