Building a Life Worth Living

Product description Marsha Linehan tells the story of her journey from suicidal teenager to world-renowned developer of the life-saving behavioral therapy DBT, using her own struggle to develop life skills for others. Growing up in the early 1960s, Marsha Linehan was a popular teenager from a big, Catholic family in the Midwest. Then, at the age of eighteen, she began an abrupt downward spiral to a depressed, suicidal, young woman. During several years in a psychiatric institute, Linehan made a vow: if she could get out of hell, she would find a way to help others get out, too. And she did. In this book she tells how she did it, and she says, "If I can do it, you can too." This is the inspiring life story of the woman who established the first meaningful therapeutic treatment for some of the most desperate people in the world: individuals suffering from suicidal thoughts and borderline personality disorder. After putting herself through night school and university, living at the YWCA and often scraping together spare change to buy food, Linehan went on to get her PhD in psychology, specializing in behavior therapy. In the 1980s, she achieved a breakthrough when she developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy: a therapeutic approach that combines mindfulness, acceptance of the self, and ways to change. Throughout her extraordinary scientific career, Linehan remained a woman of deep spirituality, eventually leaving the Catholic Church for the Eastern practice of Zen, and becoming a Zen master. Her powerful and moving story is one of faith and perseverance. Marsha Linehan is living proof that the principles of DBT really work--and that, using her life skills and techniques, people can build a life worth living. Review “Shocking and heart-wrenching on one end, triumphant on the other, and an inspiration of hope all the way through.” —Goop “In Building a Life Worth Living, Marsha Linehan shares her experience of suicidal depression to help others who may be experiencing this themselves or in someone they love. Since using what happens to us to help others is the final stage of healing, this book is a victory on both sides of the page.” —Gloria Steinem, New York Times bestselling author of My Life on the Road “A brilliant memoir by one of the greatest pioneers in psychotherapy history . . . Marsha Linehan holds absolutely nothing back, making good on the vow she made as a young woman to escape hell and help others do the same. This book—in its fierce honesty and, for the careful reader, its practical advice—will help anyone who has struggled to build a life worth living.” —Angela Duckworth, New York Times bestselling author of Grit “To read this book is to understand how a life is built. In dark, there is light. Everything in Marsha Linehan’s life and remarkable memoir uncovers the dark—the hell of the unhappy self and the hell of inadequate help—and brings us into the light, with humor and detail in describing her grappling and growth, and her courage and vision of how to create a treatment for even the most unhappy of us.” —Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of White Houses “Powerful and intimate . . . Linehan ably guides readers along her roller-coaster life as she conquers the male-dominated world of academia while hiding her physical and emotional scars. . . . Readers looking to overcome their past will find inspiration in this dramatic, heartfelt narrative.” —Publishers Weekly “Practical and engaging . . . Linehan leads readers through her life and details how key moments brought her to develop DBT [Dialectical Behavior Therapy], bringing mindfulness into psychotherapy. Weaving the instructive with the personal, she alternates anecdotes with universal tools for approaching life with a combination of acceptance and motivation to change.” —Booklist “Gripping . . . An inspiring account of healing and helping.” —Kirkus Reviews About the Author DR. MARSHA LINEHAN, the developer of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, is a professor o