Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

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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 Timesbestselling author of White Houses For a lot of people starting DBT, when their therapist asks them what their goals are for therapy (another way of asking “What are your dreams?”), it’s not so easy to answer. THERAPIST: You know, there is absolutely no evidence that you will feel better when you are dead. Why take the risk?”

DBT was developed to have a close, genuine and equal relationship between therapist and client, rather than focusing on “fragilizing” the pathology of the client. Marsha wrote the DBT manual in a “personal rather than academic voice,” removing any unhelpful medical jargon which is perhaps why most of those who use the manual refer to her as “Marsha.” Linehan was trained in spiritual directions under Gerald May and Tilden Edwards and is a Zen master (Roshi) in both the Sanbo-Kyodan-School under Willigis Jaeger Roshi (Germany) as well as in the Diamond Sangha (USA). She teaches mindfulness via workshops and retreats for health care providers. I just didn’t want to keep living the way I was living – a fact that is a little tough to comprehend when you’re in the face of such adversity. And I know it may sound simple (and that’s a good thing!). But it’s tough to understand that just because your life is not worth living, that doesn’t mean you aren’t worth being alive . So if I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to keep living like I was, I was left with one last choice: get better . Heal. Mend. Recover . Wanting to be alive i128907368 |b1060006331770 |devg |g- |m |h3 |x2 |t0 |i6 |j70 |k200122 |n09-28-2022 15:06 |o- |a618.92 |rLIN I have done many hard things in my life, most prominent of which was having to come to terms with a totally unexpected complete and devastating breakdown of me, of who I was in the world, which you will get a glimpse of shortly. As a result of that episode, I had to fight to rebuild my high school education, which required me to go to night school while doing a day job to support myself. It was a day-­job-­and-­night-­school life again for me as I then strove to be a university undergraduate. By this time I had spent a lot of time living in small rooms in YWCAs in different cities. Most of the time I was friendless. And at almost every step of the way, I faced rejection after rejection that might easily have derailed me on my journey. Later, in my professional life, I had to battle to have my radical ideas and approach to therapy accepted by my peers and by the world of psychiatry more generally, and struggle as a female in male-­dominated academia.Throughout her extraordinary scientific career, Marsha Linehan remained a woman of deep spirituality. Now that I was there, in front of several hundred people, I wondered, “What have I gotten myself into?” I was worried that I would not be able to make it through the talk without tears, and I absolutely did not want to cry. Because I didn’t want to die a coward. Continuing to keep quiet about my life seemed to me a cowardly thing to do. The remarkable memoir of the woman who developed DBT--the true story of how she transformed herself from a suicidal teenager to a world-renowned psychologist thanks to her own lifesaving therapy.

Her journey in this book is covered quite thoroughly and her story delivered in conversational tone. It was easy reading, which was helpful given some tough content. Often, she would refer to others experiences to tell parts of the process, such as ‘I will let him explain’, so then, her opinion from others was also there for us to see. Often quirky folk can’t describe themselves, but by the end I got to know her very well.After going through the one-year program myself, I noticed that the phrase “building lives worth living” and all of its variations seem to be thoroughly integrated into every DBT therapist’s vocabulary – it has certainly wiggled its way into mine. But what exactly does it mean? It seems like a pretty ambiguous statement, and I think it is. It’s one of those things that can mean anything to anybody. Maybe what my therapists’ think it means is completely different than how I interpret it. Maybe Dr. Linehan intended something else entirely. Nevertheless, it’s a statement that can make an impact. And honestly, if we take time to really think about what it means to build a life worth living, I think we can all reflect a little upon our lives. Through the journey of recovery, I’ve begun to learn what it means for me. This list is simplistic, but it’s also encompassing. When you consider the things worth living for, you must also consider what’s worth suffering for, celebrating for, and, ultimately, what is or isn’t worth dying for. Mark Manson’s limiting beliefs concept is a good one to apply toward doing exactly that. Proceed mindfully, by evaluating the most effective option to take, given the goals, and finally following that option.” When is your life worth living? What makes it that way? I could ask you a million questions to suss out a set of answers to sell you tools, but the truth of it is so much smaller— and so much more massive.

Being self-aware is great, and important part of one’s emotional journey toward self-improvement (you can’t improve what you’re not aware of), but it’s not the end. You can be self-aware and still unhappy, still unfulfilled. She’s a really poor writer. This memoir felt very disjointed and fragmented. She often ended sections without elaborating on the experience or the words she was quoting. Then jumped to a new topic. Large sections of her chapters were just verbatim quotes from people in her life whom she would quote in full but not elaborate on afterwards. Other chapters had large sections of very technical descriptions about the research process without including any of her own personal or emotional reactions. This review contains themes of suicide and suicidal ideation. The treatment designed by the author was created to keep people alive. She succeeded. i128907356 |b1060006331789 |deve |g- |m |h1 |x0 |t0 |i3 |j70 |k200122 |n12-04-2020 18:16 |o- |a618.92 |rLIN CLIENT: My life is so horrible. I am so miserable. I just want to be dead, to escape all this pain!She went on to put herself through night school and college, living at a YWCA and often scraping together spare change to buy food. She went on to get her PhD in psychology, specializing in behavior therapy. In the 1980s, she achieved a breakthrough when she developed dialectical behavioral therapy, a therapeutic approach that combines acceptance of the self and ways to change. Linehan included mindfulness as a key component in therapy treatment, along with original and specific life-skill techniques. She says, "You can't think yourself into new ways of acting; you can only act yourself into new ways of thinking." When you look at your whole self with acceptance instead of shame, you give yourself the gift of recognizing the truths you need as well as the tools that don’t serve you. Your fundamental truth, right here and now, is that you deserve the life you long to create. Through Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), you can give yourself that gift. It won’t be easy, but it will be liberating.