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
