Building a Life Worth Living by Marsha Linehan

 I bought this book for work, but found it of personal impact, too, hence it's inclusion here. Marsha Linehan is the founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, an evidence-based treatment for several hard-to-treat mental health diagnoses including chronic suicidality, borderline personality disorder, and more. "Building a Life Worth Living" chronicles both her life story and the development of DBT, as they are intertwined. DBT would not exist were it not for Marsha's personal experiences. 

I expected to find such a personal stake kind of trite-- I know DBT is effective but I don't need to know the events of her life to believe it. At times, I was annoyed by the tone of the book. "I made it and so can you." She writes with the confidence of a second wave feminist and boomer and that did annoy me several times. Yes, she suffered, but she also had tremendous privilege, and I wish there had been more reckoning with that. Yet, many times I found her honesty refreshing. She does not cut corners; she calls it like it is. She is unapologetic about the influence of her Catholic faith and the power of a commitment, like those DBT invites participants to make to themselves. DBT is instructive and so is this book. "Building A Life Worth Living" reminded me to bring my whole self to my work as a therapist; my work as a therapist will be for some and it won't be for others. But the authenticity that results from looking at ones's self clearly and making no excuses creates space for even more authenticity and possibility both in and outside the therapy room. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott

Imperfect Birds is the third book in the "Rosie" series and one I appreciated for its tension. Rosie and her parents are having two very different experiences for most of the book and it's not clear who is right and who is wrong. Rosie is a good kid, but she's also making some dangerous choices. Elizabeth and James love her and want her to thrive, but their efforts sometimes miss the mark. I admired how we were kept in the middle; there was no clear winner in all their conflicts. Sometimes Rosie is right, sometimes her parents are right, and that push and pull is what being a teenager, and raising a teenager, is about in so many ways.  It's because I loved that the reader gets to see the best and worst of each character that I had a strong aversion to the ending. I think the ending suggests someone was right and someone was wrong and I disagree. Imperfect Birds is where we see Rosie most grown up, Elizabeth and James most a team; I wanted to end our time together ...
Read more

The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke

Sam Bush gave me this book for Christmas-- I believe it was a blind recommendation from a bookstore employee-- and I'm grateful to them both for a memorable read. Written by a doctor, this book pieces together the story of a heart transplant from one child to another. It introduces readers to the families, the tragedies, the hospital stays, the medical challenges, and the sweeping developments in medicine that culminated in a few tense hours in an operating room, saving one life by sharing another.  While parts of this book are all history and do well explaining complex medical procedures in lay person's terms, the heart of this book is very human. Clarke always brings us back to the two kids involved, one donor and one recipient. She includes their parents and siblings and the very hard truth at the heart of transplant medicine; part of one person's body goes into another and in a heart transplant, this means one person is dead. When both the donor and the recipient are ch...
Read more

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

 Josh got me this book for Christmas 2023 when he gifted me several dog-centered books. He wanted to find books that were well-written and centered on dogs, without being overly sentimental. The Friend is not overly sentimental, and it is well-written, but it is not really centered on dogs. It's much more about writing and suicide than it is about dogs, even though Apollo, the dog in the book, is one of the few characters with a name.  It still has thoughtful meditations on a dog's emotional life, how dogs manage the inevitable changes and stress that come their way because they depend on humans for security and sustenance, and the narrator in the book loves Apollo and is dedicated to him in ways I respect and understand. I said aloud several times that the author is doing tricky things with the writing, and maybe she did do tricky things. The Friend features a dog, but the dog is less a character or theme in and of himself than a conduit to illustrate other ideas- mostly idea...
Read more