Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 183-184 | Added on Monday, September 20, 2021 5:49:02 PM
Because I didn’t want to die a coward. Continuing to keep quiet about my life seemed to me a cowardly thing to do.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 200-201 | Added on Monday, September 20, 2021 5:51:20 PM
“In reality, the seeds of DBT were planted in 1961,” I continued, “when, at age eighteen, I was admitted here, to the Institute of Living.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 223-225 | Added on Monday, September 20, 2021 5:54:16 PM
Two things make DBT unique. The first is the dynamic balance between acceptance of oneself and one’s situation in life, on the one hand, and embracing change toward a better life, on the other.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 232-233 | Added on Monday, September 20, 2021 5:55:20 PM
This emphasis on acceptance as a counterbalance to change flows directly from the integration of Eastern (Zen) practice, as I experienced it, and Western psychological practice.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 241-243 | Added on Monday, September 20, 2021 5:56:46 PM
I designed DBT to help individuals who are at very high risk for suicide, who are difficult to treat, have multiple other serious psychological and behavioral problems, and often are on the “no admit” lists of hospitals. Principal among these disorders is borderline personality disorder (BPD),
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 248-250 | Added on Monday, September 20, 2021 5:57:23 PM
DBT is a behavioral treatment program, not so much an individual psychotherapy approach. It is a combination of individual psychotherapy sessions, group training, telephone coaching, a therapist consultation team, and the opportunity to help change the client’s social or family situation as well
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 268-269 | Added on Monday, September 20, 2021 5:59:59 PM
I tell clients what to do all the time. This is another way in which DBT is different.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 269-270 | Added on Monday, September 20, 2021 6:00:11 PM
“You know what you need in your life, but you don’t know how to get what you need. Your problem is you might have good motives, but you don’t have good skills. I will teach you good skills.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 390-392 | Added on Monday, September 20, 2021 6:15:05 PM
Cutters see it as a solution to emotional pain. And from a medical point of view, we now know that when a person cuts themselves like this, endorphins, which can be thought of as natural opiates, are often released in the blood, and their effect is to reduce stress and induce a sense of well-being.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 728-730 | Added on Tuesday, September 21, 2021 11:03:57 PM
I told her it was very hard for me to change my behavior if she did not tell me when I said or did something that was upsetting to her; her response was that she thought she had told me.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 951-953 | Added on Thursday, September 23, 2021 12:24:26 AM
The way I describe the situation is that Mother saw me as a tulip and desperately wanted to make me into a rose. She thought I’d be happier as a rose. But I did not have what it took to be a rose, not then and not now. This tulip/rose conflict eventually became part of the way I talk to my clients in DBT.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 954-955 | Added on Thursday, September 23, 2021 12:24:33 AM
If you’re a tulip, don’t try to be a rose. Go find a tulip garden.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 967-969 | Added on Thursday, September 23, 2021 12:26:16 AM
The very thought of committing suicide can fill the mind with the belief that death can soon end pain. This belief can be so soothing that suicide becomes the only solution. (Of course, I tell clients that there is no evidence whatsoever that suicide will end their suffering.)
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 995-995 | Added on Thursday, September 23, 2021 12:29:18 AM
“Marsha, your big problem was that you didn’t fit in—anywhere!”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1100-1101 | Added on Thursday, September 23, 2021 11:24:11 PM
The combination of the biological predisposition and a toxic home environment proves to be a psychologically deadly mix.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1103-1104 | Added on Thursday, September 23, 2021 11:24:42 PM
Being hospitalized and overmedicated likely played an important part in my descent into hell. It sent the message that no one at home could help me.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1153-1154 | Added on Thursday, September 23, 2021 11:31:36 PM
Imposing this rule on myself, to prevent destructive behavior and stay in a place that was at least tolerable, is an example of what I later termed “building a life experienced as worth living.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1154-1155 | Added on Thursday, September 23, 2021 11:31:46 PM
This is the overall goal of DBT. Even if you can’t create an ideal life for yourself, you have sufficient control to live a life that has enough positive elements to it that it is indeed worth living.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1225-1226 | Added on Friday, September 24, 2021 3:22:58 PM
I wanted to work with the most miserable people in the world, and if you want to die, you must be very miserable indeed.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1234-1235 | Added on Friday, September 24, 2021 3:23:59 PM
It is hard to explain, but it was as if a new and happier me emerged from the cocoon of the anguished old me. And, remarkably, the metamorphosis just happened, unprompted by anything I said or did.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1279-1280 | Added on Friday, September 24, 2021 3:28:21 PM
Believe, whether you believe or not.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1391-1393 | Added on Friday, September 24, 2021 3:40:38 PM
This sleight of mind, convincing yourself that something is true when in fact it is not, turned out to be a very helpful skill. It ultimately became an important DBT skill, particularly for people with addictions, a skill I named adaptive denial.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1466-1469 | Added on Friday, September 24, 2021 3:48:23 PM
When you’re in distress, and the meeting or phone call eventually ends, it is one of the worst moments of your life. The other person has hung up the phone, you cannot call back, and now you are alone again, alone with the hell that is your life. It’s the same with a meeting in person. One of the worst moments is walking down the hall after a meeting or a session, and now you won’t see the person who is helping you for a whole week and you’re unbelievably alone.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1498-1500 | Added on Friday, September 24, 2021 3:51:57 PM
So what is circular thinking? Essentially, it is when you attempt to prove something by beginning with an assumption that what you are trying to prove is already true.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1519-1519 | Added on Friday, September 24, 2021 3:52:51 PM
Opinions, I now knew, were no substitute for hard evidence.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1527-1528 | Added on Friday, September 24, 2021 3:54:01 PM
Emotion, rather than cool calculation, plays a large part in assessments of probabilities.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1572-1573 | Added on Friday, September 24, 2021 11:16:02 PM
I said out loud, “I love myself.” The minute the word “myself” came out, I knew I had been transformed. If anyone had asked me up to that point, “Do you love yourself?” I might have responded, “I love her.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1730-1731 | Added on Sunday, September 26, 2021 11:57:58 AM
knowing that I would never walk back over the line to the seeming insanity of my previous life didn’t mean that I wouldn’t still suffer moments of depression.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1730-1731 | Added on Sunday, September 26, 2021 11:58:04 AM
knowing that I would never walk back over the line to the seeming insanity of my previous life didn’t mean that I wouldn’t still suffer moments of depression. Still, the experience wouldn’t destroy me, not anymore.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1765-1765 | Added on Sunday, September 26, 2021 1:34:51 PM
Walter Mischel’s Personality and Assessment.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1773-1773 | Added on Sunday, September 26, 2021 1:35:48 PM
Principles of Behavior Modification, by Albert Bandura,
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1783-1783 | Added on Sunday, September 26, 2021 1:36:51 PM
this is what I tell my clients: “It doesn’t matter how many times you fall; what’s important is that you get up.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1883-1885 | Added on Sunday, September 26, 2021 1:47:34 PM
“Reasons for Staying Alive When You Are Thinking of Killing Yourself” measure. We found forty-seven reasons that could fit into at least one of six sets: survival and coping beliefs, responsibility to family, child-related concerns, fear of suicide, fear of social disapproval, and moral objections.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 1907-1908 | Added on Sunday, September 26, 2021 1:50:04 PM
The work of behavior therapists, then, is to figure out which behaviors are causing problems in their clients’ lives, and then work to change them.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2051-2052 | Added on Tuesday, September 28, 2021 11:24:00 PM
There’s that old saying, “We study what pains us.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2101-2104 | Added on Tuesday, September 28, 2021 11:30:13 PM
I had a model that understood suicide as a cry for help—that suicidal people can’t get the help they need. Learning assertiveness is learning to be effective in the world, to be able to get what you need through effective behavior, while at the same time maintaining good relationships and maintaining your self-respect. If I could teach suicidal individuals how to be assertive, how to be effective, they would then be able to get the help they need.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2107-2108 | Added on Tuesday, September 28, 2021 11:30:45 PM
DBT skills fall into one of two major categories: acceptance skills and change skills.)
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2116-2118 | Added on Tuesday, September 28, 2021 11:31:57 PM
one that clients appreciate a lot, is DEAR MAN. (I love acronyms.) The goal of this set of skills is to be as effective as possible in achieving a desired objective. You will see what I mean when you read the following: DEAR MAN stands for “describe, express, assert, reinforce, (stay) mindful, appear confident, negotiate.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2159-2159 | Added on Tuesday, September 28, 2021 11:35:11 PM
In DBT, getting information is the skill we call “check the facts.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2165-2167 | Added on Tuesday, September 28, 2021 11:35:52 PM
Staats’s theory says: Change your behavior and you will change your emotions. (Fear is an emotion.) When the facts say that what you are afraid of is not actually dangerous, the trick is to do just the opposite of your fear.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2170-2171 | Added on Tuesday, September 28, 2021 11:36:17 PM
In opposite action, you force yourself to do the very thing you don’t want to do.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2184-2184 | Added on Tuesday, September 28, 2021 11:37:28 PM
You can’t think yourself into new ways of acting; you can only act yourself into new ways of thinking.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2238-2238 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:07:00 PM
Seeking Support Is a Positive Skill
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2241-2242 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:07:13 PM
for most human beings, being part of a group of “friendly others” is vital to their emotional and spiritual health.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2242-2243 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:07:23 PM
Achieving that state can require effort and social skills. And it’s important not just for those who struggle with behavioral problems. It is important for all of us.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2263-2265 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:10:20 PM
when you are overwhelmed by what is happening in your life, it can be very hard to do what you need to do, even though you know what you need to do, even though you have the ability to do it.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2271-2272 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:11:24 PM
An important distinguishing factor of DBT is its emphasis on learning how to tolerate and accept distress.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2272-2275 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:12:05 PM
Why take this path? Two reasons. First, pain and distress are part of life; they cannot be entirely avoided or removed. A person who cannot accept this will find herself in more pain and more suffering in the long run. Second, in the larger context of life and how you might want to improve yourself, learning how to tolerate and accept distress is part of that general change toward self-improvement.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2280-2283 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:12:52 PM
I developed four TIP skills that help people damp down their emotions when facing a crisis. These are physical actions designed to reduce the level of arousal in the nervous system. They are: temperature manipulation, intense exercise, paced breathing, and paired muscle relaxation.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2292-2293 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:14:04 PM
Breathing in activates your sympathetic nervous system and increases arousal, while breathing out activates your parasympathetic nervous system, decreases arousal, and calms you.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2293-2295 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:14:18 PM
The key is to take longer to breathe out than to breathe in: five seconds for the inhale, seven seconds for the exhale. Done for ten minutes, it produces a significant calming effect that can help you cope with hard-to-control emotions and do the things you need to do in the moment.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2308-2309 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:16:29 PM
I was firmly in what psychologists call an intermittent reinforcement schedule,
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2310-2311 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:16:46 PM
the possibility of a jackpot at any given moment keeps them hooked. It is also why people often stay in abusive relationships. “Maybe it will be different this time.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2318-2319 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:17:34 PM
“Marsha, you are really lucky, because you know that you are capable of loving someone else. You know you are capable of great love. And many people don’t know that about themselves.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2358-2359 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:21:51 PM
“Marsha, you must grieve, you must not avoid this, do not suppress this. You must cry. Do not stop it.” I was talking to myself as though there was me, who was grieving, and at the same time I was the therapist talking to me.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2393-2396 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:25:44 PM
“When you go through what Marsha went through, your definition of yourself becomes damaged,” Allan says. “You begin to see yourself as defective, unworthy, a whole lot of negative things. So a lot of the work is to improve the sense of who the person is, to get rid of all that negative self-definition, to recognize the good qualities, and that is what you build on. This is what a behavior therapist does: to look at dysfunctional behaviors and look at functional behaviors, to reduce one and increase the other.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2434-2435 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:30:15 PM
At the core of DBT is the dynamic balance between opposing therapeutic goals: acceptance of oneself and one’s situation in life, on the one hand, and embracing change toward a better life, on the other.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2440-2441 | Added on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:31:01 PM
Learning skills is central to the effectiveness of DBT: skills help a client find a way to make her life bearable.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2452-2453 | Added on Thursday, September 30, 2021 11:58:10 PM
Borderline individuals typically have a limited ability to control their emotions, which, as a result, are volatile in the extreme—volcanic, even.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2454-2456 | Added on Thursday, September 30, 2021 11:58:35 PM
Imagine navigating life when the most innocent of remarks can provoke paroxysms of despair, crushing shame, or perhaps hyper-exuberant joy. These people are the very definition of severely behaviorally dysfunctional individuals.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2456-2457 | Added on Thursday, September 30, 2021 11:58:51 PM
The role of DBT skills is to give clients practical ways of, first, accepting the problems they have and then, second, solving the problems they have.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2460-2462 | Added on Thursday, September 30, 2021 11:59:26 PM
The first two offer the path to acceptance of reality as it is, while the last two, taken together, are change skills that help clients embrace the changes they need to make in their lives.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2472-2474 | Added on Friday, October 1, 2021 12:01:03 AM
You will remember that I developed these skills (mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness) in the context of treatment for severely dysfunctional people. But, as I have said, these are also life skills that can help every one of us live more fulfilled and emotionally stable lives.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2477-2478 | Added on Friday, October 1, 2021 12:01:35 AM
if someone was attacking me (verbally and sometimes physically), that would be a reason why she needs to be in therapy, not a reason for me to decide I can no longer keep doing it.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2488-2492 | Added on Friday, October 1, 2021 12:02:46 AM
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.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2492-2493 | Added on Friday, October 1, 2021 12:02:57 AM
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.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2492-2493 | Added on Friday, October 1, 2021 12:03:05 AM
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.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2659-2661 | Added on Saturday, October 2, 2021 2:31:06 AM
living an anti-depressant life. This simply means taking steps to include things in your life that make you smile, make you feel happy, and also taking steps to avoid, where possible, those things that cause you unhappiness and depression.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2782-2783 | Added on Monday, October 4, 2021 1:06:55 AM
“Love may have kept me alive, but it didn’t treat my suffering.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2804-2806 | Added on Monday, October 4, 2021 1:09:48 AM
But we have to remember that where therapists see suicide and intentional self-injury without death as the problem, the people doing it regard it as a solution. Research shows that self-injury can be very calming.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2885-2886 | Added on Monday, October 4, 2021 11:27:35 PM
we were given simple questions that in reality were rather deep, somewhat like koans (riddles meant to provoke enlightenment)
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2929-2930 | Added on Monday, October 4, 2021 11:33:05 PM
“Willingness,” says Gerald May, “is saying yes to the mystery of being alive in each moment.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2930-2931 | Added on Monday, October 4, 2021 11:33:32 PM
The opposite of willingness is willfulness. With willfulness, the focus is on controlling reality, it is “my way or the highway,”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2948-2949 | Added on Monday, October 4, 2021 11:35:44 PM
After it was all over, I had to figure out why opposite action had not worked. I realized that you can’t treat willfulness with willfulness (commanding it to get down like a dog, my saying, “Down, willfulness! Down, willfulness!”).
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2959-2961 | Added on Monday, October 4, 2021 11:37:13 PM
your feelings sculpt your overall posture. That is the power of mind over body. Research shows that the reverse is also true—that if you adopt the posture of anger or happiness, you have a tendency to experience that same feeling.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 2989-2990 | Added on Monday, October 4, 2021 11:40:20 PM
To be successful, science requires willingness to accept findings in your research that go completely against what you predicted—a
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3105-3107 | Added on Monday, October 4, 2021 11:53:17 PM
For these clients, it was as if they didn’t have emotional skin. As if they had suffered from third-degree burns all over their body. Even the lightest touch was excruciatingly painful, and they lived in environments where everyone kept poking at them.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3138-3139 | Added on Monday, October 4, 2021 11:56:25 PM
a core problem for my clients was their inability to tolerate distress.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3149-3155 | Added on Monday, October 4, 2021 11:57:49 PM
Stop the urge to act immediately. Take a step back and detach from the situation. Observe, so you can gather information on what is happening. Proceed mindfully, by evaluating the most effective option to take, given the goals, and finally following that option.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3215-3217 | Added on Tuesday, October 5, 2021 12:04:04 AM
Being irreverent is saying the unexpected. Research shows that unexpected information is processed more deeply than expected information. It gets the client’s attention, maybe jolts them out of their mental rut—hating therapy, for example, or being consumed with self-loathing.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3291-3293 | Added on Saturday, October 9, 2021 12:53:35 AM
Dialectics allows opposites to coexist: you can be weak and you can be strong, you can be happy and you can be sad. In the dialectical worldview, everything is in a constant state of change. There is no absolute truth, and no relative truth, either; no absolute right or wrong.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3305-3306 | Added on Saturday, October 9, 2021 12:55:29 AM
We are often stuck in either the thesis or the antithesis, unable to move toward synthesis.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3313-3314 | Added on Saturday, October 9, 2021 12:56:38 AM
If you know the cause behind a certain behavior—no matter how unpleasant or hurtful that behavior might be—then that behavior makes sense.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3319-3320 | Added on Saturday, October 9, 2021 12:57:32 AM
The therapist must help find the syntheses of opposites, to look for what is being left out. I have spent many a session saying to myself, “Look for the synthesis. What am I missing?”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3328-3329 | Added on Saturday, October 9, 2021 12:58:44 AM
“If we could find a way to solve the same problems that are upsetting you without self-injury, would you be willing to make the switch?”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3330-3331 | Added on Saturday, October 9, 2021 12:59:02 AM
Therapy is the process of going up and down, each of us sliding back and forth on the teeter-totter, trying to balance it so we can get to the middle together and climb up to a higher level, so to speak.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3338-3342 | Added on Saturday, October 9, 2021 1:00:32 AM
The therapist must be able to speak for both sides: “You are miserable and want to die; I can understand how you feel, how painful your life is at times and how hard it is to stay alive. On the other hand, I can also imagine the tragedy of your dying by suicide. I know you often think no one cares, but I am pretty sure you know that I care, that your cat cares, and, if you really think about it, that your parent cares. I totally believe that you can build a life that you will view as worth living. Even in your tears, you have to believe whether you believe or not, letting go of disbelief, holding on to hope.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3477-3477 | Added on Saturday, October 9, 2021 11:22:52 PM
Acceptance is the freedom from needing your cravings satisfied.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3484-3484 | Added on Saturday, October 9, 2021 11:23:36 PM
I am always telling my therapists to make sure they are doing what is good for the client, not what makes them feel good as a therapist.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3552-3552 | Added on Saturday, October 9, 2021 11:28:25 PM
When someone is in distress, the best compassion you can give is to be effective in helping them.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3606-3608 | Added on Sunday, October 10, 2021 11:56:05 PM
When a client says, “I’m done with this…I am going to get another therapist,” she usually doesn’t actually want to get another therapist. What she really wants is help in relieving her anguish. My response is “Would you like me to help you find one?”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3609-3611 | Added on Sunday, October 10, 2021 11:56:39 PM
This is the illusion of freedom in the absence of alternatives. It is the illusion of having a choice—of accepting the offered assistance to achieve a stated goal—but not really wanting the stated goal.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3612-3612 | Added on Sunday, October 10, 2021 11:56:54 PM
Irreverent answers force clients to focus on what they really want.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3636-3638 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:00:05 AM
That new rule I imposed on myself—“If you go down a road once, and it is the wrong road, you cannot go down that same road again, because it will still be the wrong road”—was an example of radical acceptance, which, until that point, I had failed to follow.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3658-3660 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:01:59 AM
My idea is to get them to the point where they can say, “I know this is a dandelion.” In other words, a problem that isn’t going to go away easily, so the best way forward is to work with it as best you can.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3660-3661 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:02:12 AM
Radical acceptance is complete and total openness to the facts of reality as they are, without throwing a tantrum and growing angry.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3662-3666 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:02:33 AM
Acceptance is acknowledging or recognizing facts that are true, and letting go of fighting your reality (and of throwing tantrums). Radical acceptance is accepting all the way, with your mind, your heart, and your body—accepting something from the depths of your soul, opening yourself to fully experiencing reality as it is in this one moment.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3671-3672 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:03:26 AM
Learning that bad things and good things coexist. I can have a really bad day today and still go out and take my dogs for a walk.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3679-3681 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:04:27 AM
Accepting the client has to come from the depths of the therapist’s soul. That isn’t always easy. These are people whom most therapists won’t treat; most therapists kick them out of therapy. So I have to accept my client for who she is. I have to accept the unbelievably slow rate of progress. And I have to accept the fact that she could kill herself the next day, and I might be sued.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3686-3687 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:05:13 AM
“Look, you can’t dislike your clients for having the problems that we’re here to help them with. That’s all this is. The problems we’re here to treat have shown up in your office. That’s good news. It’s not bad news. But, yes, it’s hard.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3688-3689 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:05:24 AM
acceptance is the first step toward change. In order to change who/what you are, you must first accept who/what you are.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3692-3692 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:05:56 AM
Let go of fighting reality.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3699-3699 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:06:17 AM
To accept something is not the same as judging it as being good.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3701-3705 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:06:39 AM
Don’t say, “Why me?” Whatever has happened has happened. To radically accept something is to stop fighting it. The problem is, telling you what radical acceptance is and telling you how to do it are two different things. Radical acceptance can’t really be completely explained. It’s something that is interior. It’s something that goes on inside of you. You could say it is the will of God. Accept with grace. You might not have an enlightenment experience like I did, but you can move forward in your life, grow, and be transformed through embracing radical acceptance.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3715-3716 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:07:56 AM
Suffering gets less intense. Suffering goes down to being ordinary pain.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3721-3727 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:09:09 AM
So you get your cards; other people get their cards. And one of the players gets mad about their cards, doesn’t like them, throws them down and says, “I don’t like my cards. I want different cards.” You say, “Well, those are the ones you got dealt.” And he says, “I don’t care. It’s not fair!” You say, “Well, those are your cards.” He won’t listen. “No! I’m not playing these cards.” What would you think? Would you want to play with that player? Probably not. And who do you think is going to win the card game? Not the person who threw their cards on the floor. In order to have a chance of winning the game, you have to be in the game, playing the cards you are dealt. Accepting that reality is willingness.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3729-3729 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 12:09:29 AM
If you’re a tulip, don’t try to be a rose. Go find a tulip garden.
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Suzane: assassina e manipuladora (Ullisses Campbell)
- Your Bookmark on Location 346 | Added on Monday, October 11, 2021 6:08:10 PM
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 3945-3947 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 12:24:49 AM
“I’ve stopped crying.” He said, “Oh, do you know what was going on?” I said, “No.” He said, “Okay.” And rang his little bell. Out again. It was the same thing. You don’t think in Zen. Everything comes and goes, comes and goes. Zen is seeing and experiencing reality as it is.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4015-4017 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 12:32:28 AM
“Marsha, wouldn’t you rather have the freedom to not have to have what you want, whatever it is? Wouldn’t you feel better if you were free not to have 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.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4090-4092 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:40:42 PM
Mindfulness practice is the repeated effort of bringing the mind back to awareness of the present moment; it includes the repeated effort of letting go of judgments and letting go of attachment to current thoughts, emotions, sensations, activities, events, or life situations.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4103-4104 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:41:59 PM
Psychologists have long recognized that each of us possesses two opposing states of mind: “reasonable mind” and “emotion mind.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4104-4106 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:42:20 PM
You are in reasonable mind when reason is in control and is not balanced by emotions and values. It is the part of you that plans and evaluates things logically. When you are completely in reasonable mind, you are ruled by facts, reason, logic, and pragmatism.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4107-4108 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:42:35 PM
You are in emotion mind when emotions are in control and are not balanced by reason. When completely in emotion mind, you are ruled by your moods, feelings, and urges. Facts, reason, and logic are not important.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4113-4114 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:43:23 PM
There is a third state of mind that takes the middle path; this is what I call “wise mind.” Wise mind is the synthesis of emotion mind and reasonable mind. Wise mind adds intuitive knowing to emotional experience and logical analysis.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4128-4130 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:46:11 PM
It’s a label that sticks and seems to define. My message to clients is “No, you are more than that. You have made bad decisions in the past, no doubt about that, but you still have the capacity for wisdom, you have the capacity to know what is right for you. You just don’t know how to access it
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4131-4133 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:46:22 PM
“All humans have wise mind, and the fact that you don’t feel it does not mean you don’t have it.” It is like saying you don’t have a liver just because you don’t feel it.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4135-4136 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:46:56 PM
“What is the dialectic here? What is the functional opposite of these behaviors?” The opposite of dysfunction, I decided, is wisdom.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4137-4138 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:47:14 PM
But I had made an error in my calculation. The opposite of dysfunctional behavior is not wisdom; it is functional behavior. By the time had I realized this distinction, though, the concept was firmly rooted in our DBT practice.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4146-4147 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:48:03 PM
Wise mind creates a new context where a person can access effective behavior or wisdom. Whether or not one chooses to follow wise mind is a separate question.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4156-4158 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:49:37 PM
Finding wise mind is like searching for a new station on the radio. First you hear a lot of static and you can’t make out the lyrics of the song, but if you keep adjusting the dial, the signal gets louder.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4163-4164 | Added on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 11:50:14 PM
you can’t be certain you are in wise mind without giving it time, and without getting feedback from other people. If you believe you are in wise mind, it doesn’t always mean you are. You have to check to make sure you are right.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4191-4193 | Added on Wednesday, October 13, 2021 12:02:16 AM
Ellen Langer, a social psychologist at Harvard. Since the late 1970s, she had been working on the notion that most of us operate from a position of mindlessness, and that to be effective in the world one needed to be mindful.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4208-4210 | Added on Wednesday, October 13, 2021 12:04:45 AM
For the client, the idea is that we often don’t experience the moment we are in, because we are focusing on something different from the moment. Teaching clients mindfulness skills will lead to other behavior changes that help clients function more effectively in the world.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4461-4461 | Added on Wednesday, October 13, 2021 11:41:09 PM
I don’t think of myself as treating a disorder. I treat a set of behaviors that gets turned into a disorder by others.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4526-4528 | Added on Wednesday, October 13, 2021 11:47:26 PM
CAMANO ISLAND IS about an hour’s drive north of Seattle. On a clear day, you can see Mount Baker in the far distance. It is one of the highest mountains in the northern Cascades, and one of the snowiest places in the world. It
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4750-4751 | Added on Thursday, October 14, 2021 9:20:45 PM
My relationship to my past is one in which it feels like it was another person who went through hell, and I feel very sad for her. It’s just so sad that anybody would go through what I went through. I’m a very different person now than I was then.
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4784-4785 | Added on Thursday, October 14, 2021 9:24:23 PM
I was where you are now. And here’s where I am now. You, too, can get out of hell. You can be where I am. I want to tell you this because I want you to realize how much hope there really is and how important it is not to give up.”
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Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (Marsha M. Linehan)
- Your Highlight on Location 4877-4878 | Added on Thursday, October 14, 2021 9:32:18 PM
So my last message to you is that I hope that you will develop the skills you need and that you will also help others have the skills they need to experience life as worth living—if I can do it, you can do it, too.
