Brief Biography
Marsha Marie Linehan was born in 1943 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Linehan earned her bachelor’s degree cum laude in psychology in 1968 from Loyola University Chicago, Illinois.
She went on to obtain her master’s degree in 1970 and her PhD in in 1971, both in psychology with a specialization in social and experimental personality psychology, also from Loyola University.
Upon graduating, Linehan served during the 1971–1972 academic year as a Postdoctoral Clinical Intern with Suicide Prevention and Crisis Service Inc., while working as a Lecturer at Loyola.
The following year, 1972–1973, Linehan was first a Postdoctoral Fellow in Behavior Modification, and later Adjunct Professor, at the State University of New York in Stony Brook.
In 1973, Linehan obtained her regular academic position as Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
In 1977, she was hired as Assistant Professor of Psychology—and later Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences—at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Beginning in 1989, Linehan reverted to the status of Adjunct Professor of Psychology, as well as Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, at the University of Washington.
During 1991, she was a Visiting Scientist in the Applied Psychology Unit of the Medical Research Council at Cambridge University in the UK.
Linehan retired from her adjunct position at the University of Washington in 2019, assuming the title of Professor Emeritus of Psychology there.
Linehan is best known as the creator of the widely used therapy for the treatment of patients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD)known as “dialectical behavior therapy (DBT).”
DBT is based on two insights that Linehan had about mental health. First was the fact that accepting one’s life situation is crucial to leading a meaningful and happy life. The other was that change is necessary for the personal growth necessary to achieve acceptance.
DBT is oriented towards helping the patient to understand these facts, which presupposes acquiring the ability to look at one’s own life with a degree of objectivity. For this reason, DBT incorporates a number of the insights of cognitive behaviorial therapy (CBT).
In addition to BPD, DBT has also proven to be therapeutically useful for similar illnesses, such as eating and substance abuse disorders.
Linehan has published some 180 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.
Linehan has also authored, co-authored, or co-edited around 10 academic monographs and anthologies, as well as popular books, workbooks, and manuals. Several of her books have been translated into multiple foreign languages.
Linehan, who has publicly shared her own personal struggles with mental illness, has also trained as a teacher of Zen meditation.
Notable Quotes
Note: The original sources of the following quotations attributed here to Marsha M. Linehan are provided where known. If no specific source is mentioned, then the attributed quotation may be assumed to derive from or (perhaps via paraphrase) be inspired by Linehan’s many academic and popular writings.
Acceptance
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.
Acceptance is the only way out of hell.
Assertiveness
Don’t apologize for making requests.
Asserting Yourself, with Kelly Egan (1987).
DBT
An important distinguishing factor of DBT is its emphasis on learning how to tolerate and accept distress.
Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (2020).
The goal of DBT is to help people find the path to getting out of hell.
Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (2020).
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.
Freedom
When we are free, we can look in the face of our cravings and desires and say “I don’t have to satisfy you.
DBT Skills Training Manual, second edition (2014).
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.
DBT Skills Training Manual, second edition (2014).
Linehan on 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.
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.
Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (2020).
“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.
Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (2020).
One night I was kneeling in [a small Catholic chapel], looking up at the cross, and the whole place became gold—and suddenly I felt something coming toward me. . . . It was this shimmering experience, and I just ran back to my room and said, “I love myself.” It was the first time I remembered talking to myself in the first person. I felt transformed.
“Expert on Mental Illness Reveals Her Own Fight,” New York Times, June 23, 2011.
Pain
Pain can’t be avoided; it is nature’s way of signaling that something is wrong.
DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, second edition (2014).
Passivity
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.
Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder (1993).
Perception
Sometimes we cannot change the environment significantly, but we can perhaps alter the way in which we perceive it.
Asserting Yourself, with Kelly Egan (1987).
Recovery
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.
DBT Skills Training Manual, second edition (2014).
Relationships
Realize that good relationships depend on what you do.
Asserting Yourself, with Kelly Egan (1987).
If you like someone, let them know.
Asserting Yourself, with Kelly Egan (1987).
Self-Harm
It took me a long time to realize the dialectic inherent in planning a suicide and engaging in self-harm. Both make your feel better, and both can make you feel worse. Both sides are true.
Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (2020).
Self-Help
Change your behavior and you will change your emotions.
Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (2020).
Respect your emotion.
DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, second edition (2014).
All people at any given point in time are doing the best they can.
DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, second edition (2014).
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.
DBT Skills Training Manual, second edition (2014).
You can’t think yourself into new ways of acting. You only can act yourself into new ways of thinking.
Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (2020).
Self-Respect
Accepting compliments graciously can help to build your self-respect.
Asserting Yourself, with Kelly Egan (1987).
Silence
Silence is the language of God. Listen.
Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir (2020).
Suicide
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.
Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder (1993).
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.
Treating DBP Patients
The great thing about treating borderline patients is that it is like having a supervisor always in the room.
Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder (1993).
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.
Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder (1993).
Values
Values are not static: they evolve, and they involve a great deal of choice.
Asserting Yourself, with Kelly Egan (1987).
Wise Mind
Ask Wise Mind: Which actions will make it better or worse?
DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets,” second edition (2014).
Willingness is listening very carefully to your Wise Mind, and then acting from your Wise Mind.
DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, second edition (2014).
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.
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