Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir
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 eighteen 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.
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Community Reviews
I really wanted to connect with this book because I respect Marsha Linehan’s work so much, especially as the creator of DBT. Learning that the person who developed such a life-changing therapy had her own history of severe mental illness was genuinely inspiring and meaningful to me.
That said, the book itself just wasn’t my cup of tea, and I ended up DNF’ing it.
My biggest struggle was the memoir format. Because Linehan experienced memory loss from the horrific treatment she endured, a lot of the book relies on other people’s memories of her rather than her own. I understand why that was necessary, and I don’t want to minimize what she went through, but as a reader, it made the memoir feel emotionally distant in a way I wasn’t expecting.
I also struggled with the pacing and the heavy religious framing. I respect that her faith was meaningful to her, but the repeated focus on her vow to God and the guilt around “disappointing God” was personally difficult for me to sit with and made the book harder to engage with.
So while I don’t think I’d personally recommend the memoir, I would absolutely recommend learning about DBT. The book didn’t work for me, but the therapy model behind it is powerful, practical, and, in my opinion, deeply worth exploring.
Rating: 1/10 for the book
DBT itself: 10/10, no notes. Aggressively recommend.
“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…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.”
☁️☁️☁️☁️
I honestly would not have read this book if 1) I hadn’t been working on a presentation about DBT for class, and 2) I hadn’t found out that Selena Gomez read & endorsed it!
Because both of those things did happen, though, I ended up with my own copy of Marsha Linehan’s memoir. She covers a lot of ground within the book, ranging from her childhood up through her professional career and into her work with DBT.
This is one of those books that I think liking the author’s voice is necessary to enjoying the book. You never forget that it’s Marsha telling her story, and—similarly to DBT—it’s very rooted in her personal philosophies. I grew to appreciate and agree with most of what she was writing, but I think it will vary for each reader.
☁️☁️☁️☁️
I honestly would not have read this book if 1) I hadn’t been working on a presentation about DBT for class, and 2) I hadn’t found out that Selena Gomez read & endorsed it!
Because both of those things did happen, though, I ended up with my own copy of Marsha Linehan’s memoir. She covers a lot of ground within the book, ranging from her childhood up through her professional career and into her work with DBT.
This is one of those books that I think liking the author’s voice is necessary to enjoying the book. You never forget that it’s Marsha telling her story, and—similarly to DBT—it’s very rooted in her personal philosophies. I grew to appreciate and agree with most of what she was writing, but I think it will vary for each reader.