Relationship Rescue: A Seven-step Strategy for Reconnecting With Your Partner

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

Dr. Phil McGraw is the author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers:Life Strategies: Doing What Works, Doing What Matters; Relationship Rescue: A Seven-Step Strategy for Reconnecting with Your Partner;Self Matters: Creating Your Life From the Inside Out; The Ultimate Weight Solution: The Seven Keys to Weight Loss Freedom, and his most recent book,Family First: Your Step-by-Step Plan for Creating a Phenomenal Family. He is also the author of theNew York Times bestseller The Ultimate Weight Solution Coookbook: Recipes for Weight Loss Freedom as well asThe Ultimate Weight Solution Food Guide. His books have been published in 37 languages with over 22 million copies in print. Dr. Phil has a B.S, M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from North Texas State University with a dual area of emphasis in clinical and behavioral medicine. He has been a board-certified and licensed clinical psychologist since 1978, and appears on his nationally syndicated daily one-hour series,Dr. Phil. He lives in Los Angeles with Robin, his wife of 28 years, and their two sons, Jay and Jordan.