Oh, and a word on shit: “Profanity is a source of comfort, clarity, and strength,” they write. “It helps to express anger without blame, to be tough in the face of pain.”

I recently spoke with the Bennetts by phone about what the f*cking deal is with their book. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Olga Khazan: Do you call this approach something? This idea that you’re going to not obsess about closure, or the roots of your problems, and focus more on solutions—is that a certain branch of psychology?

Michael Bennett: The important thing is not what therapy you follow but that you stay grounded in common sense, and whatever therapy or therapies you're pursuing, you ask yourself repeatedly, have I reached my limit? Has this taken me as far as I’m going to go? So that you don't get stuck in the “if I did it better” or “if I did it longer” or “if I found a better therapist.” And it’s more, “Has this taken me as far as I’m going to go, and what am I going to do now?” Once you've done that, there are some therapies and, maybe more appropriately some therapists, that are good at picking things up from that point and being good coaches. Sometimes the “feeling” part of it is sort of valuing who you are and what you’re trying to do with yourself. And some therapists are really good coaches and others aren’t.

We certainly share a lot with DBT, a kind of CBT for people who have intensely destructive feelings—dialectic behavioral therapy. Particularly because it started out with the idea that it was directly for people who were suffering terribly. This treatment won’t make you feel better, but it will prevent you from feeling worse by helping you control your behavior.

The idea that there's so much life you don't control, and to accept that and still be a person, is still very hard. I think there's a core of that in Judaism and Christ parables, and in Buddhism. So there's nothing new about this. Sometimes it sounds very 19th century when we’re saying [that] sometimes when you feel strongly and you need to communicate, you're still going to do better to shut the fuck up.

Khazan: How would you sum up your approach to life’s problems, whether it’s love or childhood issues, or work?

Sarah Bennett: The first step is accepting what you can't control. So many people who come to my father—they want something they can't have. They want a happy relationship that’s never going to be happy, or they want opportunities that are not easy to come by.

So it's going into accepting what you can't control, the factors that are out of your hands, and seeing what you can do with what you can control. And learning to be proud of yourself not just for accomplishing what you can, and not beating yourself up for what you can't. Not seeing yourself as a failure, when you haven’t really failed because it’s not something that you could have controlled in the first place. And admiring your ability to withstand a feeling of rejection, and the frustration and the pain, and keep going on towards a more reasonable goal while being a good person. That’s also what’s emphasized so heavily. Figuring out your own values and sticking to them.