Marsha Linehan Quotes

People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.

The bottom line is that if you are in hell, the only way out is to go through a period of sustained misery. Misery is, of course, much better than hell, but it is painful nonetheless. By refusing to accept the misery that it takes to climb out of hell, you end up falling back into hell repeatedly, only to have to start over and over again.

The great thing about treating borderline patients is that it is like having a supervisor always in the room.

Build a life worth living. I stare at this phrase on my ceiling every morning before I decide to get out of bed. I painted it a few years ago after completing a few months of dialectal behavioral therapy. It is a quote by Marsha Linehan, who created DBT. After therapy, I impulsively decided to paint it on my ceiling in black, as some sort of reminder to build a life worth living. I don’t regret painting it up there - well, not yet, at least.

There’s never a good time for Mindfulness, and there’s never a bad time. Mindfulness is one of those things you simply do, because if you practice being aware - completely open to the universe, just exactly as it is - you will transform your life in time.

Acceptance can transform but if you accept in order to transform, it is not acceptance. It is like loving. Love seeks no reward but when given freely comes back a hundredfold. He who loses his life finds it. He who accepts, changes.

I honestly didn’t realize at the time that I was dealing with myself. But I suppose it’s true that I developed a therapy that provides the things I needed for so many years and never got.

It is hard to be happy without a life worth living. This is a fundamental tenet of DBT. Of course, all lives are worth living in reality. No life is not worth living. But what is important is that you experience your life as worth living—one that is satisfying, and one that brings happiness.

The desire to commit suicide, however, has at its base a belief that life cannot or will not improve. Although that may be the case in some instances, it is not true in all instances. Death, however, rules out hope in all instances. We do not have any data indicating that people who are dead lead better lives.

You can't think yourself into new ways of acting; You only can act yourself into new ways of thinking.

Acceptance is the only way out of hell.

When we are free, we can look in the face of our cravings and desires and say "I don't have to satisfy you.

Keeping a stiff upper lip may be needed while around the person invalidating you, but on your own, there is every reason to be compassionate and self-­soothing. It does hurt to be invalidated.

Acceptance is the freedom from needing your cravings satisfied.

A patient's passivity must not be unilaterally interpreted as lack of motivation, resistance, lack of confidence, or the like. Many times, passivity is a function of inadequate knowledge and/or skills.

Wisdom and freedom require the ability to allow the natural flow of emotions to come and go, experiencing emotions but not being controlled by emotions. Always having to prevent or suppress emotions is a form of being controlled by emotions.

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.

Responding to a suicide attempt by insisting that it must stop, and devoting the full resources of therapy to preventing it, is a communication with compassion and care at its very core.

Our friend and colleague Marsha Linehan often says, “Emotions love themselves.” Feeling down tends to elicit actions that are consistent with feeling down.

People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.” -- Dr. Marsha Linehan

The Dialectical Dilemma for the Patient The borderline individual is faced with an apparently irreconcilable dilemma. On the one hand, she has tremendous difficulties with self-regulation of affect and subsequent behavioral competence. She frequently but somewhat unpredictably needs a great deal of assistance, often feels helpless and hopeless, and is afraid of being left alone to fend for herself in a world where she has failed over and over again. Without the ability to predict and control her own well-being, she depends on her social environment to regulate her affect and behavior. On the other hand, she experiences intense shame at behaving dependently in a society that cannot tolerate dependency, and has learned to inhibit expressions of negative affect and helplessness whenever the affect is within controllable limits. Indeed, when in a positive mood, she may be exceptionally competent across a variety of situations. However, in the positive mood state she has difficulty predicting her own behavioral capabilities in a different mood, and thus communicates to others an ability to cope beyond her capabilities. Thus, the borderline individual, even though at times desperate for help, has great difficulty asking for help appropriately or communicating her needs. The inability to integrate or synthesize the notions of helplessness and competence, of noncontrol and control, and of needing and not needing help can lead to further emotional distress and dysfunctional behaviors. Believing that she is competent to “succeed,” the person may experience intense guilt about her presumed lack of motivation when she falls short of objectives. At other times, she experiences extreme anger at others for their lack of understanding and unrealistic expectations. Both the intense guilt and the intense anger can lead to dysfunctional behaviors, including suicide and parasuicide, aimed at reducing the painful emotional states. For the apparently competent person, suicidal behavior is sometimes the only means of communicating to others that she really can’t cope and needs help; that is, suicidal behavior is a cry for help. The behavior may also function as a means to get others to alter their unrealistic expectations—to “prove” to the world that she really cannot do what is expected.

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.

El camino para salir del infierno pasa por el sufrimiento. Si te niegas a aceptar ese sufrimiento que forma parte de salir del infierno, volverás a caer en él.

Many, if not most, therapeutic errors are assessment errors; that is, they are therapeutic responses based on faulty understanding and assessment of the problem at hand.

You can’t think yourself into new ways of acting; you can only act yourself into new ways of thinking.

Radical acceptance is a psychology term coined by Marsha Linehan and rooted in ancient Buddhist teachings. It doesn’t mean you approve of your problems or deem them as okay. Radical acceptance is about avoiding unnecessary suffering by accepting rather than resisting what is. You need all your strength to teach, and practicing radical acceptance will keep you from wasting energy on perpetual outrage.

The path out of hell is through misery,” writes University of Washington psychologist and researcher Marsha Linehan, the founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. “By refusing to accept the misery that is part of climbing out of hell, you fall back into hell.” The path out of hell is through misery. Excuse me? What is that supposed to mean? It means that you have to start by “radically accepting” where you are right now. Radical acceptance means that you don’t fight what you’re feeling in this moment.

The way in which I do this, the tools that I use, derive from a school of psychology known as dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, developed in the 1990s by Marsha Linehan. Based on the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, which seeks to teach patients new ways of thinking about or acting on their problems, DBT was developed to help individuals with more serious and potentially dangerous issues, such as an inability to regulate their emotions and a propensity to harm themselves or even attempt suicide.

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.

For a psychiatrist who holds the keys to this “kingdom of the sick,” there is rarely comfort about committing a patient to care that they refuse. Yes, the near-term gain is clear, because treatments can control the symptoms and prevent a suicide. But the long-term gain is less clear. The gifted therapist Marsha Linehan, who was one of my advisors at NIMH, used to say that there is nothing worse that hospitalizing a suicidal patient. “When you commit a patient, you are saying they are hopeless. You are saying, ‘I can’t help you.’ A suicidal person does not need a locked unit. He needs a reason to live.

Dr. Marsha Linehan (1993a), who has developed an effective treatment for BPD (dialectical behavior therapy, discussed in chapter 8), has put the nine symptoms of BPD into five easily understandable categories: (1) emotion dysregulation, (2) interpersonal dysregulation, (3) behavioral dysregulation, (4) identity or self dysregulation, and (5) cognitive dysregulation.

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.

gift.

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.

saw that my clients very probably had experienced an invalidating environment for much of their lives, and probably a traumatic invalidating environment.

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

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

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.

Peace and joy in God!!!! May her blessings be with you. Marsha

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

My only requirement was that the house have a basement so we could provide housing for the poor. Kelly

Build a life worth living. I stare at this phrase on my ceiling every morning before I decide to get out of bed. I painted it a few years ago after completing a few months of dialectal behavioral therapy. It is a quote by Marsha Linehan, who created DBT. After therapy, I impulsively decided to paint it on my ceiling in black, as some sort of reminder to build a life worth living. I don’t regret painting it up there - well, not yet, at least.

La forma en que lo hago, las herramientas que utilizo, derivan de una escuela de psicología conocida como terapia dialéctica conductual, o TDC, desarrollada en los años noventa por Marsha Linehan. Basada en los principios de la terapia cognitivo-conductual, que trata de enseñar