Building a life worth living : a memoir / Marsha M. Linehan.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Foreword by Dr. Allen Frances -- Part one. Building a life experienced as worth living -- Descent into hell -- I will prove them wrong -- A traumatic invalidating environment -- A stranger in a strange land -- I had to leave Tulsa -- Part two. On my way to Chicago -- Intellectual and spiritual transformations -- The path to thinking like a scientist -- My enlightenment moment in the Cenacle Chapel -- I have proved my point! -- Love that came and went, came and went -- A suicide clinic in Buffalo -- The development of behaviorism and behavior therapy -- Fitting in at last: small fish in a big pond -- What have I done? -- Finding a nurturing community -- Like a fish on a hook -- Finding a therapist, and an ironic twist -- Part three. A thumbnail sketch of DBT -- Finding my feet in Seattle and learning to live an anti-depressant life -- My first research grant for behavior therapy and suicide -- Science and spirituality -- My fight for tenure -- The birth of dialectical behavior therapy -- Dialectics: the tension, or synthesis, between opposites -- Learning acceptance skills -- Not just acceptance-radical acceptance -- Good advice from Willigis: keep going -- Becoming a zen master -- Trying to put zen into clinical practice -- Mindfulness: we all have wise mind -- DBT in clinical trial -- Part four. The circle closes -- A family at last -- Going public with my story: the real origins of DBT.

"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." -- Publisher