Building a Life Worth Living Quotes

“If you are with someone who is in hell, keep loving them, because in the end it will be transformative. They are like someone walking in a mist. They don’t see the mist, and you may not see it, either. They don’t see that they are getting wet. But if they have a pail for water, you put it out in the mist. Each moment of love adds to the mist, adds to the water in the pail. By itself, each moment of love may not be enough. But ultimately the pail fills and the person who has been in hell will be able to drink that water of love and be transformed. I know. I have been there. I have drunk from that pail.”
― Marsha M Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“You can't think yourself into new ways of acting;
You only can act yourself into new ways of thinking.”
― Marsha Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“Acceptance is the freedom from needing your cravings satisfied.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“Marsha, wouldn't you rather have the freedom to not have what you want, whatever it is? Wouldn't you feel better if you were free not to have all the things you think you want?" .. Pat was right. We are better off accepting what life has to offer, rather than living under the tyranny of having to have things we don't yet have. This is not to say that we are to be completely passive—not at all. It means that we should strive for important goals, but we must radically accept that we might not obtain them. It is letting go of having to have. And accepting what is.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“If you want to get out of hell, you have to get through the fire to the other side. It’s like you are in a house, and it’s on fire. There are flames all around, especially at the front of the house, surrounding the door that is the only way out. Your impulse is to retreat into the house, try to find someplace safe. But, of course, you will just die there. You’ve got to find the courage to go through the flames at the front of the house, the flames around the door. Then you can get to the other side. You have to go through your anger, open up to your therapist, keep going through the pain. It isn’t overnight that you are going to feel better. But you will.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“You can’t think yourself into new ways of acting; you can only act yourself into new ways of thinking.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“Somehow I lost all ability to regulate not only my emotions but my behavior as well.... It was an alarmingly rapid and complete descent into hell.”
― Marsha Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“If you’re a tulip, don’t try to be a rose. Go find a tulip garden.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“When I reflect on my life, I often realize that there is no amount of happiness in the universe that could ever balance the searing, excruciating emotional pain I experienced those many years ago.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“Tolerance and acceptance of reality are not the same as approval of that reality.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“We knew you were gone. We figured out it was something problematic. But mum was the word.” According to Margie Pielsticker, “All of a sudden she was gone. We were told that she was at home, sick. No one knew why. Those were the years when you didn’t talk about mental illness.”
― Marsha M Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“The best way I can describe it is to say that it is a little bit like when you have someone whom you love and who loves you, and they especially like you in a particular dress, so you wear that dress because you know it makes them happy.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“We thought the sentiment expressed was so pertinent to our work as therapists: Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness….Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.*”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“I was amazed, because she had seemed so fit psychologically. She was a rock in the best sense of the word, strong. So, yes, I was surprised. But then it began to make sense: her interest in suicide, her subsequent interest in borderline personality disorder. There’s that old saying, “We study what pains us.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“Peace and joy in God!!!! May her blessings be with you. Marsha”
― Marsha M Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“years later, one of the original site visitors told me that the actual reason for the funding was that I was so passionate about my work. The committee believed that if anyone could develop an effective behavior therapy intervention for suicidal people, it would be me. IN 1978, ABOUT a year after I arrived in Seattle, I attended a summer program at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, in Washington, D.C., to learn how to be a spiritual director.”
― Marsha M Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“me a site visit in Seattle. Barry remembers the visit. “The committee were Hans Strupp, from Vanderbilt, who was one of the premier researchers from the psychoanalytic point of view, and Maria Kovacs, a child behavior therapist at University of Pittsburgh, very prominent.” These visitations can be quite intimidating, especially with scholars of that caliber. And for me, this was a big one. I was so nervous that I dropped a pot of coffee in my office. It went everywhere, a terrible mess. Did they want me to make another pot? I asked sheepishly. No, they did not! It was “Let’s get on with business here.” They discussed whether”
― Marsha M Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“freedom to offer guidance, something that later bureaucratic rules would make very difficult. “So, despite the conclusion that this application wasn’t going to fly, we thought Marsha had a lot of talent,” says Barry, “and we decided to work with her.” A colleague of Barry’s, who was not directly involved in my grant proposal, recalls, “We thought Marsha was very courageous working with this population, because most therapists wanted to avoid them if at all possible.” Over the next”
― Marsha M Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“bought her share. I stayed in that house for almost twenty years, almost always sharing it with at least one other person. I had learned that particular lesson well—that I was happier living with people, not being alone.”
― Marsha M Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“My only requirement was that the house have a basement so we could provide housing for the poor. Kelly”
― Marsha M Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“1981, Kelly Egan, my first graduate student when I arrived in Seattle, and I bought a house together on the 5200 block of Brooklyn Avenue. Kelly was getting divorced at the time and needed somewhere”
― Marsha M Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“gift.”
― Marsha M Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir

“saw that my clients very probably had experienced an invalidating environment for much of their lives, and probably a traumatic invalidating environment.”
― Marsha M Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir