  urlLink The New York Times > Health > Mental Health & Behavior > With Toughness and Caring, a Novel Therapy Helps Tortured Souls : "Dr. Linehan first developed the therapy as a way to help people with borderline personality disorder, an enigmatic and notoriously difficult condition to treat. Borderline patients are often severely self-destructive, cutting or burning themselves and attempting suicide. In therapy, they are often manipulative, mercurial, at times chillingly mute. They wear out therapists and try the patience of friends and family members. (The needy, compulsive, violent character played by Glenn Close in the 1987 movie 'Fatal Attraction,' who seduces a married man and then stalks him when he rejects her, exhibits borderline behavior, some say.
) Some researchers believe that the disorder develops as a result of uncertain attachments to parents early in life. Others are searching for biological roots. One study, for example, found that borderline patients exhibited hyperactivity in the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in emotion regulation. Some patients, experts say, are helped by mood-stabilizing drugs. Yet dialectical therapy neither involves drugs nor concerns itself much with biology.
It begins with an idea called radical acceptance, the insistence that people in therapy accept who they are and that they are not who they want to be. They cannot go back and repair their childhood, as awful as it might have been. They have blown precious relationships for good. Most of all, they experience waves of rage, emptiness and despair far more intensely than other people do. " 
