Dr. Jesús Salas completed his psychology undergraduate studies at UCAB in Caracas, Venezuela and his doctorate in clinical psychology at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (PCOM). He is board-certified in behavioral and cognitive psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology and is a Beck Institute Certified Clinician and faculty member. Dr. Salas taught Psychology at UCAB, Caracas, and URU, Maracaibo, both in Venezuela, and at PCOM in Philadelphia for nineteen years. Currently, he works in a private practice, supervising third-year psychiatric residents from the Jefferson/LVHN psychiatry program, and providing clinical supervision and training for the Beck Institute.
We recently spoke with Dr. Salas to learn more about him, both personally and professionally.
Beck Institute: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. To begin, what drew you to CBT?
Dr. Salas: As an undergraduate student in Venezuela, I became interested in CBT because it emphasized the empirical validation of theories and interventions, leading to constant revisions and improvements. I still feel the same about modern CBT, which has many interesting paths for growth. Studying and reflecting on how CBT can be optimized to improve the efficacy and efficiency of the interventions in my clinical practice feels almost like a hobby.
Beck Institute: What do you find most rewarding about being a therapist?
My practice primarily focuses on anxiety, OCD, trauma and stress-related disorders, and depressive disorders in late adolescents, adults, and seniors. CBT offers an integrative conceptual framework, along with assessment and intervention tools, that make clinical practice effective and fascinating. Years ago, my wife asked how I could come home happy after listening to people’s problems for nine or ten hours. I replied that it is just part of what I do. I also identify their resources and opportunities for change, help them set treatment goals, design and apply interventions to achieve them and assess their progress—always working as a team. Most sessions are steps forward towards improving the quality of their lives. To help them in that journey is an honor and a rewarding experience.
Beck Institute: We receive a lot of questions from trainees about the use of new technology in therapy. We understand this is an area of interest for you—could you tell us more?
Dr. Salas: I am interested in technical innovations in delivering CBT interventions that may optimize their benefits. One is using Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET), which allows more control over the exposure process and customizes the stimulus and context to clients’ needs. Virtual reality is likely to engage clients’ attention and elicit strong distress reactions. It allows the exposure of situations difficult to do in real life and conducts repeated exposures in a single session, facilitating the learning speed of reappraising, feeling, and behaving in the desired way. I am exploring incorporating AI into virtual reality to expand its applications.
Beck Institute: Aside from your clinical practice, are there any other professional activities or accomplishments you’d like to share?
Dr. Salas: For the past twenty years, I have conducted professional workshops and webinars nationally and internationally and supervised psychologists and psychiatrists in CBT practice. I enjoy collaborating with colleagues globally on various professional projects and as a clinical supervisor or instructor.
I have published several research papers, book chapters, and three books: Social Intelligence (1996) in Spanish, Panic Disorder (2000) with co-author F.M. Dattilio, and Getting Better Every Day (2020). My latest publications were an entry on depression and another on CBT for depression in the Sage Encyclopedia of Mood and Anxiety Disorders (2025) by D.G. Friedman-Wheeler and A. Wenzel, Eds.
Finally, I have considered enriching Beck’s Cognitive Meditational Model by integrating it with the Parallel Distributed Processing Model (PDPM). According to PDPM, the same incoming information can generate multiple simultaneous representations in memory involving different neural pathways. Some representations are explicit and knowable, whereas others are implicit, learned through association, and not available to consciousness. PDPM helps explain why a client can change a rational interpretation of a stimulus from threatening to non-threatening but continues to have an emotional and physiological reaction of anxiety. Such desynchrony among emotion response systems can be targeted by using experiential interventions to modify clients’ hot cognitions and their implicit associative processes.