Dr. Laura’s Life Lessons : Laura Schlessinger’s signature style is beyond no-nonsense. The radio shrink wants <i> everyone</i> to straighten up and fly right.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the radio scourge of the immature, has a lesson for you.

To illustrate it, she plucks one from a zillion stories of Angst and ennui crammed in her head, ready to roll in moments like this. The tale is about a short-lived early marriage, the unfurling of a union of hard-working New York professionals with a luminous future.

On a fateful stroll across the George Washington Bridge shortly after they met, the woman was wearing heels, and the walk cost her knee-cap cartilage and a couple of years of pain.

So the young man took care of her. He carried her on his shoulders. He came home at noon and put her on the potty. And then one night at dinner, he told her his fears.

“I’m afraid when you get better,” he said, “because I don’t think you’ll need me.”

She did get better and he did become more afraid, which translated into rudeness, and the woman left him.

“He created what he most feared,” says the popular KFI AM-640 talk-show shrink.

Dr. Laura Lesson No. 1: Do trust anyone under 30--just not enough to marry them.

Dr. Laura Lesson No. 2: When a guy tells you something, listen. “He was telegraphing that he needed me to be helpless.”

Me ?

Today’s lesson stems from Schlessinger’s first marriage to an orthodontic student at Columbia University, where she earned her doctorate in physiology ( ergo , the Dr. in Dr. Laura). When Dr. Laura talks and sometimes hectors her radio audience into shaping up and flying right, she may very well be drawing on her own life.

So the ultimate Dr. Laura lesson is this: There’s a lesson in everything.

“I always look for it,” she says, sitting back straight, hands folded, in a KFI office. “One of the ways I survive is, I look for what I can get out of this, how I can be a little stronger from this point on, what can I learn to be better.”

Schlessinger packed a course-worth of Dr. Laura life lessons into her new book, “Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives.” The in-your-face title is vintage Dr. Laura, whose signature style is beyond no-nonsense. Take her take on the word stupid .

“Not intelligent,” she says crisply. “Not using one’s brain. Using one’s immediate need. Emotion. Weaknesses. Genital titillation.”

Dr. Feelgood she’s not.

Schlessinger, 47, whose on-and-off radio career spans 18 years, long ago dispensed with such therapeutic niceties as being non-judgmental, the principle on which many counselors cut their teeth. Schlessinger’s orneriness wins her high ratings--she’s No. 2 in her noon-to-2 p.m. time slot after KLAX-FM, a Spanish-language music station, according to the fall ’93 Arbitron ratings. And she says her show will go national in late spring, but she declined to give details.

In a recent KFI promo, Schlessinger calls one woman lazy. During a show, she tells a caller that a boyfriend who believes in hitting an 18-month-old is insane: “Get rid of this guy or just date him, but keep him away from your kids.”

“I think you have to get people’s attention, and I call something what it is,” says Schlessinger, a petite woman in big red Sally Jessy Raphael glasses and a suit like blue stained glass. “People are very used to hearing New Age sweetie stuff and I wasn’t doing that at all. . . . You could say, ‘This is a choice determined by all the historical pain you’ve had.’ I don’t think these motivate people to face the truth and do anything constructive.”

Which summons up another Dr. Laura story. This one is about a lesson learned in therapy school, as she calls it. One of her supervisors, a refined woman of a certain age, invited her to imagine people who lived in houses with slats for floors.

“Now they don’t have a bathroom, so they do it in between the slats. People basically will not move until the poop gets too high.

“I had a shock of recognition of what a brilliant concept that was. And it’s true. So the bluntness brings the truth of the moment and I think the ultimate pain to the fore, and I think that makes people realize they have to move. Until that, there are rationalizations, denial all over the place. I only have a few minutes with people, so my style has evolved in that I’ve been taught by my callers what works.”

But her distinctive kick-butt style earns her mixed marks from other therapists.

Calling callers cowardly and lazy is “absolutely outrageous,” says a former Pepperdine student of Schlessinger. “Laura said one time in class that she always gets mad at a client if a client says, ‘I don’t know.’ She said, ‘I don’t believe a client doesn’t know. I hate that answer.’ My feeling is, what’s Laura’s need to be answered? She yells at people.”

But Schlessinger’s impassioned on-air sessions have also won her fans among colleagues. “She’s no-nonsense and yet she does it with compassion, which I admire,” says Santa Monica clinical psychologist Diane Medved, the author of “The Case Against Divorce” and, briefly, a talk-show counselor herself. “There is no such thing as a non-judgmental shrink, and those who claim to be objective are being less than honest.”

Schlessinger acknowledges that people have ended relationships after minutes’ worth of on-air talk, a fact borne out by letters. But she doesn’t pretend that what she does substitutes for professional counseling.

“I’m not doing therapy,” she says. “What I do has many therapeutic parts to it. I’m expressing my views, my attitudes, my experience, my education, my beliefs. I’m clarifying things for people based on all my training and experience as a therapist, but this is not a couch. This is not an hour with each person.”

In fact, the American Psychological Assn., concerned about the fallout from broadcast therapy bites, prohibited psychotherapy over the airwaves in its code of ethics in 1977. But pressured by the popularity of radio psychology talk shows, the APA relaxed the ban in 1981, allowing advice-giving, but nixing psychotherapy.

The problem, some therapists say, is that the distinction between advice and therapy can be blurry.

“If a radio psychologist says, ‘This isn’t therapy, this is advice,’ what’s the difference when push comes to shove?” asks David Levy, associate professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, who has published studies on radio psychology talk shows.

“If a mental health professional advises you to do something, that happens in therapy all the time. The problem as I see it is, given a two- or three-minute phone contact to make an accurate assessment, to offer advice that’s meaningful but appropriate to the caller, it can be at best misleading, and at the very worst, it may be harmful.”

In Dr. Laura’s view, her naysayers eventually come around. When she delivered her stingingly clear opinions on early childhood--she believes moms should stay at home for the first few years--to a group of working mothers last year, only half the women agreed with her message, she says.

“In fact, the room seethed with hostility as I endorsed the absolute necessity of babies being with mothers and/or fathers who attend to them,” she wrote in her book.

Sometime after her hostility bath, one of the mothers approached her at a mall.

“She said, ‘You know, I used to think you were mean,’ ” Schlessinger says. “ ‘Now I understand it’s depth.’ ”

For all her taking to task career moms with babies, Schlessinger considers herself “the ultimate feminist role model. . . . What better role model do you want than somebody who’s done it right?”

So she figures she’s qualified to tackle the National Organization for Women, which sent her a sniffy letter after she snapped at a caller who became pregnant with a noncommittal partner.

“I said, ‘It’s your fault. This is your body. You didn’t take care of it. You were too busy wanting to have a chuckle at the moment. This weak-kneed stuff got you to spread your knees and now you’re pregnant. He doesn’t care.’ Now that’s basically for the listener, because she’s already pregnant.

“I got this ferocious letter from one of the NOW organizations in Southern California, which said something that put me up the roof, and that was with all the trials and tribulations that women have, how can they possibly take control? I thought, ‘This is what the feminist movement is perpetrating, women are weak and have no control. They are helpless corks bobbling around on the ocean. A wave comes. They’re drowned.’ I can’t stand this. It enfeebles women and it treats them (as) second-class.”

Schlessinger boils at the thought of women who opt out of a first-class life, partly because she grew up with one who did. Her mother was an Italian beauty whom her Brooklyn-born father brought home after World War II, but family life became a caldron of tension and frustrated ambition. Her mother was a unhappy homemaker.

“She was frustrated and angry about it, but in my opinion, she complained about it but didn’t take any risks. And I don’t admire that. . . .

“Taking on the responsibility and the job of being a mother and a wife is something to enjoy, not to use as an excuse for one’s own weakness and fear of taking the risks for doing other things.”

And yes, that is the lesson she learned from her mother’s experience. And yes, even her mother got a dose of Dr. Laura’s no-nonsense life prescription 15 years or so ago.

“She didn’t take it well,” Schlessinger says with some understatement. “I think it was more of an angry confrontation. It was like I had a revelation. I didn’t believe all this whining and complaining and demanding of everybody else when you could have done it yourself.

“It’s not because you had a kid that you didn’t do it. You didn’t do it. Don’t blame me.”

After Schlessinger got her doctorate and got out of her first marriage, she moved to Southern California for a job as an assistant professor at USC. It was there that she first “locked eyeballs,” as she puts it, with her husband, Lewis Bishop, 60, a former USC biology professor who now manages her career. That was about 20 years ago, and they’ve been married for 10.

So when she tells callers to wait 1 1/2 years before marrying anyone, “I say, ‘Listen, I’m being nice to you. I really think it’s two.’ ”

Commitment “means that you pledge to work out the difficult parts, but when people jump into things quickly, it’s because they don’t want to deal with the difficult points,” she says. “They want to be happy now and that’s why they’re less likely to make it.”

Schlessinger’s experience as a new mother was characteristically intense. She had her son, Deryk, eight years ago.

“When I got pregnant with our son, I woke (Bishop) up at 3 in the morning and I said, ‘I want you real clear on one thing. If I even think you hurt him, I will take you down to the molecular level.’ And he said, ‘As well you should.’ ”

When Deryk popped out, he was given his mother’s last name.

“My husband had a prior family. And I figured I went through 12 hours of labor and a C-section. I figured, I’m going to name this thing anything I want, and I said, ‘Lew, do you have any problem with the last name Schlessinger?’ He said, ‘No.’ ”

Bishop says he’s mesmerized by his wife’s outspokenness.

“Laura has the ability--and I’ve always been fascinated by it--to take things from disparate corners and put them together. And that’s what she does on the air, and sometimes when I listen to her, I say, ‘How the hell did you get from here to there?’ It’s almost an altered state of concentration.”

Schlessinger did post-doctoral work in psychology at the USC Human Relations Center and earned her license as a marriage, family and child counselor in 1980. She spent most of the ‘80s as an adjunct professor in psychology at Pepperdine University.

None of which explains her leap into the radio psychology talk-show business.

“This is the silliest story,” she says of the time she called the Bill Ballance program on KABC, a talk show for women that tackled Schlessinger’s specialty--relationships. The question of the day was, “Would you rather be a widow or a divorcee?” Schlessinger got on the line, said that her name was Cathy and that she’d rather be a widow:

“Then you don’t have to second-guess yourself whether you made the right choice in leaving. You don’t feel guilt. Everybody feels sorry for you. They come over and cook for you.”

Ballance was so intrigued by her quick wit and common sense that he kept her on through two commercial breaks and took her phone number. He later visited her.

“He said, the first day of meeting me, ‘You are going to be a big star.’ ”

Schlessinger started as a human sexuality expert on his show, then got her own show, first with guests, eventually without. She started at KFI in 1990 on nights and moved to the noon-to-2 slot in 1992.

She also gave up her private practice, partly to spend more time with her family in Woodland Hills and partly to avoid the pitfalls of high-profile shrinkage.

“When you’re a celebrity and a therapist, either way, you’re dealing with people who have difficulties. . . . I got worried that somebody might hurt my reputation because they think I’m a deep pocket. That happened to a friend and I went, ‘Whoa.’ ”

So instead she ministers to her callers, many of whom are women with tired lives. Schlessinger’s audience is about evenly divided between men and women, KFI says. But according to Pepperdine professor Levy’s paper on the subject, nearly twice as many women as men call in to radio psychology shows, and those women are likely to be unmarried, unemployed and not highly educated.

Schlessinger wrote her book, “Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives,” primarily for those callers, the many who can’t find identity in their work, so they look for it in their men.

Dr. Laura Lesson No. 45: Big mistake.

“In a quality love relationship, the love between the two people is an even kind of give-and-take and has a priority in their lives,” she says. “What you see with the troubled situations is love doesn’t mean the same thing to the two of them, and I would say when women think of love, they think of it as the whole sentence. And when men think of love, they think of it as commas in their lives.

“I think a lot of women find the love instead of development. The love is the development.”

So the women hold onto their relationships for better or for worse, often worse, to avoid the void. And then they call Dr. Laura.

One woman said her boyfriend wasn’t crazy about her daughter, so she was trying to figure out how to unload the child.

“I landed all over her with both feet. Sometimes it’s amazing to me, but then I realize that they know what they’re doing is wrong. It’s like getting the Dr. Laura KFI Seal of Approval. ‘This is right that I’m doing wrong, isn’t it?’

“ ‘Yes, it’s right you’re wrong.’

“ ‘OK. I’ll take care of it.’

“People are hungry for some kind of moral and value system. It’s gone. See, I’m from the ‘60s and the ‘60s were, you do whatever you damn well feel like and if somebody is unhappy about it, it’s too bad, it’s their problem. And I remember that vividly, and I don’t think it’s gone away.”

*

There are days that are intense and intractable, filled with callers who refuse to be fixed, people who won’t learn the lessons. There are days that make Schlessinger cry, when she has turned off the microphone and let her head thud.

One caller wasn’t protecting her kids from their abusive father, and Schlessinger worked hard to reach her, but she knew as the minutes flicked by that she hadn’t. She was so upset that she threw down her headphones, hurled her pencil across the room and paced through an extra commercial until she could pull herself together.

And there’s a lesson in that.

“Ultimately, I do respect how hard I work and how sincere I am, and how hard I try and how I persevere and have never taken the easy way. I’ve never cut corners. I haven’t lied, cheated, stolen. I admire all that.

“So if somebody criticizes me, ‘Gee, you were too tough on that call,’ you know, maybe I was. But all in all, my heart’s in the right place. So I forgive myself that I can’t be right on in everybody’s estimation of what I should be all the time, even my own.”

Reality, According to Dr. Laura

Laura Schlessinger packed a course-worth of lessons into her new book, “Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives,” including:

* If you kiss a toad, you don’t get a prince--you get slime in your mouth and bad memories.

* Sex-too-soon is self-love-too-late.

* When you move in with a man without a commitment, he already knows one crucial thing: He doesn’t have to do much to get you.

* Look out for the word compromise if it ends up meaning you give up what is precious to you so that maybe you’ll get what you want later.

* Too often, hope is just postponed disappointment.

* Procreation has little to do with your needs; it has everything to do with the child’s needs.

* Is this the Catch-22 Syndrome of women? You’re miserable, so you make kids, now you have kids and you can’t get out for the sake of the kids--even though you are miserable with him?

* The ultimate sadness for me is to hear how people refuse to stop trying to get love and approval from bloodsucking, slime-producing, im- or a-moral, insensitive, unloving, uncaring, self-centered, disgusting sperm and egg donors (a.k.a. “lousy parents”).

* Water and self-esteem seek their own levels.

* There are no two ways around it: Women must have more dimension in their lives than “looove”!