March Book Club

Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir by Marsha M. Linehan

“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.

Veronica will be moderating this month. Hope you can join us for some thoughtful discussion.

Upcoming books: (March is the next book selection month.)
TBA

Not selected this time:
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds by Paul Farmer
Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O'Connell's urgent mission to bring healing to homeless people by Tracy Kidder
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling
High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amanda Ripley
Life Is a Lazy Susan of Sh*t Sandwiches by Jennifer Welch