CBT's origins can be traced back to the mid-1950s, when Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck developed the basic principles of this form of psychotherapy. CBT made a radical departure from psychoanalysis, which sought to probe and understand how past events shaped the workings of the unconscious mind. Beck and Ellis understood the significance of the past but decided the cure lay in working in the present and being focused on the future. They developed similar methodologies and shared many of the same beliefs.

Today, CBT is the fastest-growing type of psychotherapy, with one in four practitioners employing it. CBT is based upon the concept of personal responsibility: How we think and the way we feel are responsible for our behaviors. External events and other people are not.

Aaron Beck

Psychiatrist Aaron Beck is considered to be the father of CBT, which he called cognitive therapy. His early work was in psychoanalysis or psychodynamic therapy, but as he saw more and more clients who described their depression in ways that didn't fit into psychodynamic theory, he sought another approach.

As he explained in a conversation with Albert Ellis, hosted by PBS in 2004, he believed in the Give/Get balance of life: Output in terms of worries, obligations, and other actions needed to equal the input of satisfaction and happiness. If this balance was out of whack, depression could ensue.

As he studied his client sessions, Beck discovered that his depressed patients harbored irrational thoughts that drove their behaviors. He called these thoughts systematic distortions. Beck was a student of the Greek philosopher Epictetus, who taught that it's not things that make us either happy or unhappy. It's in the way that we perceive these things that create happiness or depression.

The key is to stop trying to change the world, and instead, change our perceptions of the world. Once we've mastered this, we have corrected those systematic distortions.

Beck worked with his patients to help them discover what thinking distortions they harbored. He found that depressed people weren't aware of how these “automatic thoughts” — habitual negative beliefs — influenced their behavior. As with any habit, these thoughts came readily and easily. Patients were accustomed to them, didn't question them, and were victims of them.

Once the patient recognized one of these automatic thoughts, the next step was to test it out to see if it was accurate. If it proved to be inaccurate, then it needed to be corrected. For Beck, the therapist became a coach, actively involved in the patient's progress.

Albert Ellis

Ellis was a practicing psychoanalyst when he began to develop his own approach to cognitive therapy. In an article published in the New York Times in 2004, he explained that, while much psychotherapy helped you feel better, you weren't necessarily getting better. He labeled his approach to psychotherapy rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) and said the most important aspect of it was simply work, work, work.

At the American Psychological Association's conference in 2000, REBT was recognized for its pioneering approach to psychotherapy and as the foundation of all modern cognitive behavior therapies. In 2003, the American Psychological Association named Dr. Ellis the second most influential psychologist of the 20th century, second only to Carl Rogers.

Albert Ellis drew on personal experience as he formulated his approach to CBT. He used himself as a guinea pig, working to cure his shyness by forcing himself to make social contact with a specific number of women while he sat on a park bench in the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx. Once a woman sat down, he began to talk. It worked.

He attributed the effectiveness of his experiment to its causing him to think, feel, and act differently. He became so successful at approaching women that he became a sexologist (a scientist who studies human sexual behavior) and wrote books in that field, incorporating that knowledge into his therapeutic approach.

Ellis was confrontational in his approach to psychotherapy. He would tell patients to stop complaining and deal with the problem. He used the term awfulise to describe the tendency of people to make a difficult situation worse than it was. His approach, in simple terms, was “Deal with it.”

During Friday night meetings at the Albert Ellis Institute in New York, to which he invited guests and colleagues, he'd conduct two half-hour sessions of “stand-up therapy” with volunteers chosen from his guests. He encouraged the audience to comment during these sessions. He could be abrasive and vulgar, characteristics that came to define him.

Like Beck, Ellis believed that irrational thoughts led to self-destructive feelings and behavior. Ellis held that you can control your feelings if you make a conscious effort to do so. You must confront those events that have challenged you and rework the way you think about them.

Events are neutral. It's your interpretation of these events that causes all your problems. He believed that rational people know this and operate accordingly. A person who is depressed, doesn't. However, everyone still has the choice as to how to react. You control your response because you can't control the event, and you go on with your life by deciding to go on with your life.