They drive themselves to crazy tyring, I recognize that some people don’t have the skills to plant the garden they need. In the 1980s, she achieved a breakthrough when she developed dialectical behavioral therapy, a therapeutic approach that combines acceptance of the self and ways to change. It’s like looking at the night sky in the city, where you see points of light from planets and stars here and there, but mostly it is unbroken blackness.

This memoir will mostly appeal to clinicians and those interested in dialectical behavior therapy, as it's not just the story of Marsha Linehan but also the story of the therapy she created. Anger, hurt, grief, worry, and other intense feelings can be overwhelming, and how you react to these emotions can impact your ability to maintain relationships, succeed at work, or even think straight! Linehan was trained in spiritual directions under Gerald May and Tilden Edwards and is a Zen master (Roshi) in both the Sanbo-Kyodan-School under Willigis Jaeger Roshi (Germany) as well as in the Diamond Sangha (USA). In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them?She was a visionary and could prove her methods in trials and in face to face settings, having rapid fire and easy answers when questioned on the spot. I looked at the audience for a few seconds, casting my eyes here and there at the gathering of so many wonderful people in my life—­friends, colleagues, students and former students. I admire Marsha for daring to come up with a treatment that is unconventional and doesn't rely on dispensing medication.

Mother Teresa had a beautiful phrase that captures some of this: “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. You could say it is throwing yourself into the will of God, or into acceptance of the causal factors of the universe. I think at times she lost me when she switched from her narrative to explaining DBT and this crossed between memoir and self-help.

Marsha Linehan is a major figure in Psychiatry and an inspiration and this review is in no way a review of her life or her work, DBT. I abandoned the book fifty pages in, because already by then, it was repetitive, poorly written, not at all engaging nor gripping, and more or less an infomercial for Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, the quite wonderful therapy she created.