Relationship Rescue: A Seven-Step Strategy for Reconnecting with Your Partner

Relationship Rescue is my pick as the top book of 2000.This book deserves many more than five stars. It is as close as you can get to having a hands-on guide to improving your relationships as you can get without having a trained counselor present. It's too bad that most people will take on this book because they have a bad or failing relationship. It would be much better to start with this approach in the beginning. I hope marriage advisors, parents, living together couples, and engaged people will become familiar with this book and recommend it to others. The book is extremely direct. The author makes it clear that you have to first change yourself before you can change you relationship.The book is extremely well structured for easy use both as a book and as a workbook. It is divided into seven steps (define and diagnose where the relationship is now; get rid of your wrong thinking about relationships; find out what you are doing to hurt the relationships; internalize the values needed to build and maintain strong relationships; the necessary format for a strong relationship; and how to reconnect and manage the relationship).Each section is filled with diagnostic questions for you and your partner to use, as well as directions for implementing what you learn. The process involved is a good one. It begins with identifying stalled thinking, works on stallbusting that thinking, and then builds new habits that will work better. The steps are extensive, but you can take them in bite-sized amounts. Before you are done, you will be sharing what you have done with your partner. I have to believe that anyone who was told that their partner had been working on these questions and exercises would be very impressed by the commitment to the relationship that this effort represented. It can help overcome a lot of thoughtlessness that may have preceded that sharing. If your relationship is on the rocks, that idea of reconnecting can be scary. I was impressed to see that the book provides a 14 day program to help you with exercises that help reconnect you emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. Most counselors would probably not give you this much guidance.You can improve the benefits you will find here by also using the excellent workbook that is sold separately. It contains many more questions and a convenient place to write them down. You can read my review of that as well, if you like.One of the finest things in life is to have a great relationship with other people. This book gives you the necessary background to move in that direction. The rest is up to you, as the author says. Give it a shot! You have a great quality of life to win!

As usual, Phil McGraw is steps ahead of the rest of us in sorting out what is *really* going on in relationships. Refreshingly, he begins the book by questioning the therapeutic standards too often given to the thousands of couples in trouble. "The divorce rate in America refuses to drop below fifty percent, and twenty percent of us will divorce not once but twice in our lifetime. Clearly, pleasant and generic instructions on how to communicate better or theoretical musings that give you great insights about relationships just weren't going to cut it fifteen years ago and won't cut it now. " Obviously (to paraphrase him), couples therapy as we have known it isn't working. You can watch him often on Oprah, but this book is the next best thing to either watching him there, or having him as your personal therapist. This book is primarily for relationships 'on the rocks' - the first steps are set up to evaluate and understand what your relationship is, how it got this way (no surprise, it didn't fall apart on its own, or because of your partner). The Seven Steps are not simple or simplistic, but provide structure for thought and more. This book is not about what's wrong with your partner and how to fix him or her. It is about the person reading the book -- you!This would be a great book for new couples to read together (and for this price, why not order one for you and one for your loved one, and read them first in private, then together), not just before they are in crisis, but before they decide to marry. When the relationship is still strong, new, fresh, it is more likely that both people will be willing to talk openly about what they expect and want, and to be able to use the truly helpful instructions on how to stay together. For those in a troubled relationship, you might want to read this yourself first, and work on your own issues. Dr. Phil has a directness that can be intimidating to some - but for some of us, we need that extra push. This book is on my must have list for newlyweds as well as those in trouble.Highly recommended for those who truly want that special relationship to work!

This book deserves many more than five stars. It is as close as you can get to having a hands-on guide to improving your relationships as you can get without having a trained counselor present. It's too bad that most people will take on this book because they have a bad or failing relationship. It would be much better to start with this approach in the beginning. I hope marriage advisors, parents, living together couples, and engaged people will become familiar with this book and recommend it to others. The book is extremely direct. The author makes it clear that you have to first change yourself before you can change you relationship.The book is extremely well structured for easy use both as a book and as a workbook. It is divided into seven steps (define and diagnose where the relationship is now; get rid of your wrong thinking about relationships; find out what you are doing to hurt the relationships; internalize the values needed to build and maintain strong relationships; the necessary format for a strong relationship; and how to reconnect and manage the relationship).Each section is filled with diagnostic questions for you and your partner to use, as well as directions for implementing what you learn. The process involved is a good one. It begins with identifying stalled thinking, works on stallbusting that thinking, and then builds new habits that will work better. The steps are extensive, but you can take them in bite-sized amounts. Before you are done, you will be sharing what you have done with your partner. I have to believe that anyone who was told that their partner had been working on these questions and exercises would be very impressed by the commitment to the relationship that this effort represented. It can help overcome a lot of thoughtlessness that may have preceded that sharing. If your relationship is on the rocks, that idea of reconnecting can be scary. I was impressed to see that the book provides a 14 day program to help you with exercises that help reconnect you emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. Most counselors would probably not give you this much guidance.One of the finest things in life is to have a great relationship with other people. This book gives you the necessary background to move in that direction. The rest is up to you, as the author says. Give it a shot! You have a lot to gain!

As a practicing psychologist, I have seen a number of self-help books that have "useless" written from the get-go. Phil MacGraw's "Relationship Rescue" is NOT one of those useless, quick fix manuals. People who are familiar with Neuro Linguistic Programming will see his models instantly. As other reviewers have mentioned, the emphasis here is that each partner sees how they individually are "at cause" for relationship problems through a series of short and direct questions (i.e. "What did you do today that contributed to or contaminated your relationship?"). This program is not a quick fix, though, and couples may even need to go through the questions more than once. Of most use are the dyads that MacGraw gives couples as "homework" to cover all aspects of what makes a relationship work. And, make no mistake, MacGraw is also quite blunt in his assessment of how men and women view relationships differently, and how often those views are just an excuse for not doing the work. Just as there are different people, there is probably no one book to help people recover from relationship shock, but this is an easy-to-use readable manual that will help the vast majority of people who are ready to end a relationship but do not want to do that until every stone has been turned. Guaranteed to help.

Relationship Rescue is an incredible opportunity for anyone who wants to have a healing in themselves and their relationship! The kicker is that you have to take ACTION to heal and not just sit there counting your woes. Phil takes you step by step through a series of tests and strategies to uncover and clarify your specific areas of difficulty so that you then can focus and address each. This book is not only for the lazy procrastinator nor just for the chronic complaining wimps...this book is for everyone who wants to be the best they can be for themselves and for their loved ones because all realtionships start with YOU first! Infact, you could spend 20 years in therapy costing you thousands of dollars or spend a lifetime masking your problems with anti-depressants and not even begin to scrape the surface of all the personal growth that you will get out of this one book. I wouldn't be surprised if all the medical insurance companies in this nation got wise and bought and sent a copy of this book to each and every policy holder they had because this book would save them millions in wasteful therapy and anti-depressants because it is just that good! Kudos to Phil for helping us without costing us our life savings over our whole lifetime! Also recommended: Life Strategies,The Seat of Our Soul, Dating for Dummies