Relationship Rescue
By Phillip C. McGraw, Ph.D.
 Bucking the Trend: You can Make Your Relationship Work
We will not proceed in a random fashion. The strategy for rescuing your relationship involves seven major steps. First, we will focus on defining and diagnosing where your relationship is now, because you will never be able to define specifically, precisely what is wrong with you – as well as what is wrong in your relationship – will you be able to set reasonable goals for change. I’m talking about taking your understanding about yourself and your relationship to a whole new level. It is one thing to say, “It hurts; I don’t like the way I feel; something is missing.” It’s another thing to get to what is structurally, behaviorally, philosophically, and emotionally not working. Only when you figure out what the problem is can you match a solution to it. You will be amazed at the power this knowledge gives you as you pursue the rescue of this relationship.
Second, we must rid you of wrong thinking. As I stated earlier, you haven’t suffered just an absence of information; you have suffered a poisoning of your thinking by an infusion of wrong information. This wrong information – the “myths” that abound about relationships – have sent you down the wrong road, pursuing the wrong alternatives to poorly defined problems. If you have misdiagnosed the problem as we just discussed, and then unknowingly embraced faulty thinking in these popularized myths, you're living a life where you are resorting to the wrong treatment for the wrong problems.
Third, it will be important to blow the whistle on your own negative attitudes and behaviors and the specific ways you do irreparable harm to your own relationship – in other words, how you interact in ways that are in direct opposition to the healthy self that is defined in your core of consciousness. You can’t get defensive here and start complaining about your partner, because I promise you that based on results, you are going to find plenty to fix in yourself before you ever get to focus on your partner. You either get it or you don’t, and it’s only when you start “getting” how and why your relationship is not what you want will you be able to start shaping it into what you want. The fact that you are the focus should be great news because you can control you!
Only then, after understanding the full extent of your wrong thinking and bad attitudes and actions and the powerful impact they have on your relationship, can you move to the fourth step, which is to internalize a set of what I call “Personal Relationship Values” that will become the new foundation for your relational life. It’s these Personal Relationship Values that lead you back to your core, emotionally tune you in to the best parts of yourself, and behaviorally set you up to give your partner positive things to respond to.
Then comes the fifth step, in which you will be taught one of the most basic and powerful formulas active at the core of human functioning: the specific formula for a successful relationship.
Copyright 2000 by Phillip C. McGraw, Ph.D.
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