01/03/2026
Shared from LinkedIn post by Eric Arzubi, MD ():
It's 1961.
A 17-year-old girl is locked in a psychiatric ward.
The doctors don't expect her to survive.
She would go on to revolutionize how we treat the "untreatable."
She spent 26 months there.
Seclusion rooms. Electroshock.
Burning herself. Banging her head against walls.
But Marsha Linehan made herself a
VOW:
She would get out of hell.
And she would find a way to help others escape it too.
Decades later, she did exactly that.
She created Dialectical Behavior
Therapy (DBT).
A treatment that would save countless lives.
Here's what Marsha Linehan taught
US
that we desperately need today:
1/ Acceptance and Change Aren't
Opposites
L, Traditional therapy pushed only for change
- Linehan realized this felt invalidating
to people in extreme pain
- The breakthrough: Hold both.
Radical acceptance AND commitment to change.
2/ Validation Is a Clinical Intervention
-> Before you can help someone change,
they need to feel understood
-> Validation isn't agreeing.
It's acknowledging their pain makes sense.
-> People can't hear solutions until they feel heard.
3/ Skills Can Be Taught
→ Emotional regulation isn't a personality trait.
It's a skill set.
→ Distress tolerance can be learned.
Interpersonal effectiveness can be practiced.
→ What was once called "untreatable" became teachable.
4/ Meet People in Their Crises
→ DBT includes phone coaching between sessions
→ Skills aren't useful if they're only practiced
in the therapy room
→ Real change happens in real moments.
5/ Your Suffering Can Become Your Purpose
→ Linehan didn't hide from her past.
She used it.
- In 2011, she publicly revealed her own hospitalization
→ Lived experience isn't a liability.
It's credibility.
Linehan gave us one phrase that captures her life's work:
"The goal is to build a life worth living."
Not symptom-free. Not cured. Worth living.
She understood that healing isn't about erasing pain.
It's about creating meaning alongside it.
60+ years after that locked ward, are we helping people build lives worth living?
Or just managing their symptoms?
www.ElementalHealthBR.com
