Relationship Rescue: A Seven-Step Strategy for Reconnecting with Your Partner by Phillip C. McGraw

Description

With Life Strategies, Phil McGraw helped hundreds of thousands of people take responsibility for their own actions and break free from self-destructive habits and situations. Now he turns his honest, unflinching eye toward relationshipsdiagnosing them, repairing them, and maintaining them. This hands-on book is for people who realize their relationship is in trouble, but who dont want to give up on it. In addition, it includes questionnaires, profiles, and checklists that will keep readers focused and aware of their feelings. Phil McGraw has already established himself as someone whom readers can turn to for direct, tell-it-like-it-is help in their own lives. Now he offers readers the chance for further happiness through meaningful, fulfilling relationships that work. Dr. McGraw helps get relationships back on track with a controversial explosion of the myths of conventional relationship thinking and clear action-oriented steps for reconnecting partners.

Editorial Review

As a follow-up to his bestselling book Life Strategies, Oprah acolyte Phillip C. McGraw, Ph.D., moves from aiding the aimless individual to coaching the disconnected couple. McGraw has distilled his more than two decades of counseling experience into a seven-step strategy he calls “Relationship Rescue.”

“I'm prepared to kick a hole in the wall of the pain-ridden, unhappy maze you've gotten yourself into, and provide you clear access to action-oriented answers and instructions on what you must do to have what you want,” says Dr. Phil. His aim is to expose and eliminate the saboteurs that cause senseless damage to already-fragile marriages, and, like an emotional root canal, to replace them with values he says provide positive results. If you follow Dr. Phil's strategy, he will lead you on a precise journey to uncover your heart and then share it with your partner as part of taking the “risk of intimacy.”

Dr. Phil leads you to “reconnect with your core” in the first five steps of his seven-step strategy. By no means a quick fix, there are in-depth and rigorous questionnaires, surveys, tests, and profiles that require a “brutally candid” mindset, with such fill-in-the-blanks as “List five things that today would make you fall out of love with your partner.” With this internal work accomplished, you'll then move on to reconnecting with your partner during a two-week, half-hour-a-day short course. As a “dyad,” you and your loved one take turns giving monologues on topics such as “The most positive thing I took away from my mother and father's relationship was…”

Once the “reconnection” has been established, Dr. Phil says the work shifts to a management role, as relationships are always a work in progress. Dr. Phil humorously refers to his own marriage throughout the book, sharing his mishaps and victories in learning to accept and enjoy what he sees as fundamental but complementary differences between men and women. –John Youngs