Marsha M. 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.”
― Marsha Linehan

“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.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training: Manual

“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.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder

“The great thing about treating borderline patients is that it is like having a supervisor always in the room.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder

“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.”
― Marsha M. Linehan

“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.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training: Manual

“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.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder

“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.”
― Marsha M. Linehan

“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.”
― Marsha Linehan

“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

“When we are free, we can look in the face of our cravings and desires and say "I don't have to satisfy you.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training: Manual

“Acceptance is the only way out of hell.”
― Marsha M. Linehan

“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.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training: Manual

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

“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.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training: Manual

“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.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder

“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

“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.”
― Marsha M. Linehan

“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

“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

“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.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets

“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

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

“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.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder

“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

“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

“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