Ari Ben Ortega Aguilar, PhD
Community Development Director
A clinician and educator whose career has been spent making evidence-based psychotherapy accessible across Mexico and Latin America.
Ari Ben Ortega Aguilar is a licensed clinical psychologist in Mexico and the founder and director of Centro de Psicoterapia Cognitiva, known across the field as CPC. Co-founded with Dr. Sikandar Ortega Aguilar in 2009, CPC has grown into one of the largest evidence-based psychotherapy training communities in Latin America. The mission has been steady from the start: improve the quality of psychotherapy in Mexico, and make rigorous, research-informed practice available to clinicians who otherwise might never encounter it.
The training credentials are international, and the firsts are not minor.
Ari is the first Mexican clinician to be certified by The Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies, and the first to complete the two-year extramural program in cognitive therapy at the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research. Advanced training has continued at the Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre, the Schema Therapy Institutes of New York and New Jersey, and The Gottman Institute. Each of those threads has been pulled into clinical and teaching work, rather than collected as a credential and set aside.
CPC is the only institution in Mexico accredited by The Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies.
That accreditation reflects more than fifteen years of work. CPC offers accredited master’s and postgraduate programs in cognitive-behavioural therapy, alongside diplomas, workshops, and conferences, and has trained more than three thousand students and professionals through its programs over the years. The institution stands as the only one in the country to meet the Academy’s standards for CBT training, which is the kind of distinction that takes longer to earn than to describe.
Ari's work has reached well beyond the walls of CPC.
For more than fifteen years, Ari has been presenting and lecturing on evidence-based interventions across more than twenty Mexican states. The dissemination work has helped build a national community of clinicians committed to rigorous, research-informed practice, and has carried CBT and Schema Therapy into regions where neither had a meaningful foothold before. Scholarly interests include cognitive-behavioural therapy, forensic psychology, and process-based therapies, with publications in regional and national outlets.
Across every role, the focus stays in the same place.
Whether the title in front of his name is clinician, educator, or program director, the question Ari is asking tends to be the same. How can high-quality, evidence-based psychotherapy reach more people, and reach them well? The answer has shaped two decades of training, supervision, and institution-building, and it continues to shape the work today.