Relationship Rescue: Don't Make Excuses! Start Repairing Your Relationship Today [Paperback]

Phillip C. McGraw (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2002

"Life Strategies", published to coincide with the start of Phillip McGraw's role on Oprah's "Change Your Life TV", gave powerful, straightforward advice on shaping your life and then making dramatic changes. In "Relationship Rescue" McGraw applies this expertise to relationships, explaining how to repair and maintain them using his unique 7-step relationship rescue plan. He can help you to diagnose what is wrong in a relationship, take personal responsibility, escape wrong thinking, embrace relationship truths, learn the formula for success, renegotiate a relationship and learn to live with love and harmony.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Oprah's relationship expert and the author of the hugely popular Life Strategies, McGraw offers a challenge to readers in troubled marriages. (Though he refers to "relationships," his comments about the roles of men and women make it obvious that McGraw has mostly traditional marriages in mind.) With typical frankness, the Dallas psychologist declares that the underlying reason that "your relationship is in trouble [is] because you set it up that way." Traditional relationship counseling doesn't work, McGraw says, so he dares readers to follow his multistep plan for "reconnecting," which demands honest exploration, through exhaustive self-tests and questionnaires designed to define each partner's needs and expectations. The last step of McGraw's program is probably the most difficult and rewarding: 14 days of structured reconnection exercises in which the partners share their deepest feelings. By participating with the required level of commitment, candor and seriousness, couples would seem to guarantee enhancing their relationships. Despite the strengths of his program, McGraw's compelling television presence doesn't translate well to the page. He reminds readers so often that the "reconnecting" process will not be easy or fun that at times he seems more hectoring than persuasive--not that this is likely to matter to his viewers and fans. One-day laydown on February 8; television and radio satellite tours. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Vermilion (April 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0091884179
• ISBN-13: 978-0091884178
• Product Dimensions: 4.4 x 0.9 x 7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (122 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,565,059 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Phillip C. McGraw, Ph.D., has worked in the field of human functioning and strategic life planning for over twenty years. Dr. McGraw is co-founder and president of Courtroom Sciences, Inc., America's leading litigation consulting firm, and has been associated with some of the highest-profile cases in the country, including Oprah's highly publicized "Mad Cow" case. A professional psychologist, he appears regularly on Oprah as her resident expert on human functioning. He lives in Dallas.