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Building a Life Worth Living

A Memoir

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Building a Life Worth Living

Written by: Marsha M. Linehan
Narrated by: Hillary Huber, Stephen Mendel
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About this listen

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.

"This book is a victory on both sides of the page." (Gloria Steinem)

"Are you one of us?" a patient once asked Marsha Linehan, the world-renowned psychologist who developed dialectical behavior therapy. "Because if you were, it would give all of us so much hope."

Over the years, DBT had saved the lives of countless people fighting depression and suicidal thoughts, but Linehan had never revealed that her pioneering work was inspired by her own desperate struggles as a young woman. Only when she received this question did she finally decide to tell her story.

In this remarkable and inspiring memoir, Linehan describes how, when she was 18 years old, she began an abrupt downward spiral from popular teenager to suicidal young woman. After several miserable years in a psychiatric institute, Linehan made a vow that if she could get out of emotional hell, she would try to find a way to help others get out of hell, too, and to build a life worth living.

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."

Throughout her extraordinary scientific career, Marsha Linehan remained a woman of deep spirituality. Her powerful and moving story is one of faith and perseverance. Linehan shows, in Building a Life Worth Living, how the principles of DBT really work - and how, using her life skills and techniques, people can build lives worth living.

©2020 Marsha M. Linehan (P)2020 Random House Audio
Professionals & Academics Psychology Religion & Spirituality Mental Health Young Adult
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What the critics say

"In Building a Life Worth Living, Marsha Linehan shares her experience of suicidal depression to help others who may be experiencing this themselves or 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 best-selling 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 - with its fierce honesty and, for the careful reader, practical advice - will help anyone who has struggled to build a life worth living." (Angela Duckworth, New York Times best-selling 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 her grappling and growth, and in her courage and vision of how to create a treatment for even the most unhappy of us." (Amy Bloom, New York Times best-selling author of White Houses)

What listeners say about Building a Life Worth Living

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Living with BPD

This book has been so helpful in understanding and dealing with BPD. Marsha Linehan is so insightful. Loved listening.

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Relief

I will be listening over and over again. Marsha made me understand that emotional turmoil is something she has experienced and that there is life after love, tragedy, traumas, more traumas and damages.

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Amazing story of pain, science, Zen, and making a life

This was an amazing book from a pretty amazing women who revolutionized much of psychotherapy and pejorative thinking and treatment in mental health. She described her own pain and being “an outsider” to figuring out how to build a life that she wanted to live from her experiences, failures, science, behaviorism, and Zen (with the help of a lot of caring people along the way). I couldn’t stop reading the thing until the end!!

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Very insightful

Good narration and story. Thank you for your openness and details of your suffering. It has helped me to better understand and help someone I love. You have given me hope.

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Love it! must read

I absolutely loved it! not only inspiring but helpful! thank you Marsha! will read it again and again...

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It helps.

This book helped relativise my own experience of bpd. But it is more than a fruitless comparison. I have learned tools to mitigate the pain, I know and hope that I can make it better. The reader is clear and didn't feel judgmental to me, this is so important. 🔥 Beware however of your own relation to spirituality, listen to this with kindness and open-mindedness.

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This book kept me going.

This book was the reason I kept going when I had nothing left to fight for. If she could get out of hell, I can too. Being diagnosed late in my early 30s, it came to me as a pile of bricks with no blueprints to make something off of it. I felt helpless with no one to turn to only the empty hopes of love ones that it’ll get better. How would they know? Do they know what I’ve been going through? How does it compare to being normal? Many questions run through my mind while I run away from my situation. This book will keep your head above water during heavy days giving you hope that IT shall pass. IT will always be there but IT can be tamed. IT will always test you but IT is surpassable. IT may be how YOU are but IT is not who YOU are. Borderline Personality Disorder, it’s never the end, it’s always to be continued.

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