Use of Self to Help Others

Psychologist and psychotherapist Marsha Linehan, creator of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) for people with borderline personality disorder, comes out about her history of struggling with mental illness. She says, “So many people have begged me to come forward, and I just thought — well, I have to do this. I owe it to them. I cannot die a coward.”

On what inspired her to create DBT: “I decided to get supersuicidal people, the very worst cases, because I figured these are the most miserable people in the world — they think they’re evil, that they’re bad, bad, bad — and I understood that they weren’t,” she said. “I understood their suffering because I’d been there, in hell, with no idea how to get out.”

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