The Doc Says, Analysis, Schmalysis

Phillip C. McGraw is a tall, balding, broad-shouldered former college middle linebacker who has never had a dialogue with his inner child, and doesn’t want to. In his 49 years, he has been a recreational pilot, accomplished amateur athlete and coach, expert witness, clinical psychologist, seminar leader, entrepreneur, author and, lately, television personality.

Now McGraw is doing very well at an endeavor that he doesn’t think much of and for many years didn’t like doing: therapy. Thanks to a chance meeting with the woman who has had more influence on book sales than anyone since the invention of movable type, he has become a guru to millions. Twice a month, he counsels troubled couples on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” and his book, “Relationship Rescue” (Hyperion, 2000), has sold nearly half a million copies and been at the top of the New York Times list of bestselling self-help books since its publication a month ago.

Better educated and with more practical experience in psychology than many mass media pundits, McGraw reserves his greatest contempt for the buzzwords and psychobabble that attach, like mold, to the crust of therapy. As Winfrey says when she introduces him to her rapt audience, “Dr. Phil is here to cut through all the phony baloney. Y’all know Tell-It-Like-It-Is Phil, right?”

Anyone who doesn’t might try to excuse their shortcomings by running some meaningless self-help jargon past McGraw. They’d risk hearing him drawl, “I tell you, my friend, around my house, that dog won’t hunt.” (That’s how people talk in Texas, where McGraw, an Oklahoma native, has lived most of his life.) Face to face, he’s likely to say, “I’m going to call bulls---- on that,” but he alters his vivid vocabulary for television.

Midway through the ‘90s, many daytime talk shows were wallowing in the gutter (and getting big ratings) by presenting real people who traded outrageously vulgar personal secrets for some time in the spotlight. Winfrey was so disgusted by the trend that she repudiated the galloping exhibitionism and exploitation of her competitors’ shows and adopted a different formula. Instead of being the most shocking, she wanted her program to be the most helpful and uplifting.

Having risen above childhood poverty and abuse, she is a believer, as well as an example of the credo that your life is what you make it. She strives to bring that message to her audience as often, and in as many ways, as she can.

Taste in Self-Help Has Been Varied

She’s been accused of being preachy but has the clout to ignore such gibes. Her taste in self-help literature is varied, ranging from Gary Zukav’s “The Seat of the Soul” (Simon & Schuster, 1999), an obtuse and repetitive tome representative of New Age gobbledygook, to McGraw’s plain-speaking, tough-love workbooks.

Since Winfrey began discussing novels on her show in September 1996, Oprah’s Book Club has earned publishers roughly $175 million in revenue, and she’s been responsible for 28 consecutive bestsellers. Her track record with nonfiction is not as strong, but sales of any book that’s mentioned on her show spike, at least for a while.

Engagement-ring purveyors couldn’t make a worse choice than to place ads on the Winfrey show every other Tuesday, when Dr. Phil shows up. With the exception of Winfrey’s comments about her steady, Steadman Graham, and McGraw’s unvarnished testimonials to his wife of 23 years, the picture of commitment presented is unremittingly grim. The couples who share the stage are engaged in cold, cold wars in which stonewalling, silence and physical withdrawal are one set of weapons, nagging, verbal abuse and marital rape, another. Even between young men and women married only a few years, affection is a distant memory and sexual desire a forgotten one.

In more than 30 appearances on the Winfrey show, McGraw has dealt with adult children who mooch off parents, mother-daughter betrayals, sexless marriages, chronic anger. In the name of results, he isn’t afraid to take sides, coddles no one and abandons a number of traditional counseling techniques, such as making each person feel his position deserves to be heard.

Andrew Christensen, director of the Couples Therapy Project at UCLA and co-author of “Reconcilable Differences” (Guilford Press, 2000), said, “Phil takes a very accusatory, challenging, at times ridiculing, stance that I don’t think is very helpful. He’s sometimes dismissive, like when a man complained about carrying a disproportionate share of parenting and housework duties, and Phil called him ‘Mother Teresa in a turtleneck.’ His style is sometimes patently disrespectful, and I don’t think that’s effective, because it makes people defensive.”

Such is the aura of the “Oprah” show that it often succeeds in turning what could be displays of tawdry behavior into lessons in transformation. The same people who would come across as repulsive and trashy on Maury or Sally or Ricki Lake’s stage, seem only pitiable and maybe a bit courageous with Winfrey and McGraw. The focus is not on the sordid details of their stories, but on what they’re going to do--starting right now--to get their lives on track.

“I think they are courageous people,” McGraw said. “It’s like the rape victim who doesn’t want to come forward because it’s too embarrassing. You find those who have the courage to do so really accomplish something. Oh, some of them are exhibitionistic, and some are there because of the fun factor--they get to meet Oprah and be on television. But a lot of people are just desperate. They believe so much in Oprah, and now in me, that they’re saying to themselves, ‘If that’s where I can get help and attention, then I’ll go do it.’

“When people hurt badly enough, then they’ll finally do something. It’s got to be the best offer they’ve ever had.”

In “Relationship Rescue,” McGraw’s guiding principles are deceptively simple. Personal responsibility comes first.

“I strongly believe that we have gotten so far away from accountability that it’s just ridiculous,” he said. The ascendance of victimhood so incenses him that he crash lands in a heap of metaphors. “We are a victim-packed society circling the drain. And if somebody doesn’t break that pattern, we’re headed for a train wreck.”

McGraw blasts martyrdom in a single statement that Oprah admits inspired a “lightbulb moment” for her: “You have the relationship you have because you set it up that way,” he said.

Placing Blame on Hollywood

If blame for the mess that miserable married couples find themselves in can be placed anywhere, he believes it might be on Hollywood, for contributing to an unrealistically dreamy portrait of romance.

“Falling in love is not the same as being in love,” McGraw cautioned. “Relationships are negotiated, and the negotiation doesn’t ever end. The contract is that you’re going to stay together, not that you’re going to stay together exactly the way that you started.”

In his book, McGraw explodes a number of myths that confuse and sabotage couples, then distills a formula for a good marriage into one sentence: “The quality of a relationship is a function of the extent to which it is built on a solid underlying friendship and meets the needs of the two people involved.” He explains and expands that thesis but sees no point in making things much more complicated than that.

The shift in marriage counseling has been toward more emphasis on immediate problems, with less attention to people’s pasts. McGraw is all for that. A recent thought for the day on his Web site, Philmcgraw.com, repeated one of the McGrawisms he has lived by: “When you encounter a problem in your life or your relationship, don’t waste your time and energy analyzing the problem; rather, spend your time finding a solution to the problem. Analysis is paralysis.”

Instead of dissecting why he was frustrated with his conventional psychology practice, he took action and in 1985 began leading “life skills seminars” for couples and individuals. As popular as the seminars were, they were never a full-time job for McGraw. He spent much of his time testifying as an expert witness in medical malpractice cases, drawing upon his knowledge of brain and central nervous system injuries.

Before earning his doctorate, McGraw had written a master’s thesis on jury conduct.

“After a while, the lawyers were asking me to help them prepare their cross examinations for the expert witness on the opposing side. And they’d ask me to advise them about the juries. Then, they said, ‘Why don’t you have one of your colleagues testify, and you just come around here and help us?’ ”

The justice system was more compelling than the seminar business, especially after his father, a psychologist who helped run the workshops, died at 74. In 1989, McGraw formed a legal consulting business with a partner and two years later sold the seminars to a company called Pathways that still follows the protocol he developed.

Courtroom Sciences Inc. is among the leading firms in a field that brings the techniques of market research to the courtroom. Based in Dallas, the company has a staff of 90, divisions that produce graphics, videos and animation, and full-size courtrooms where mock trials are staged.

McGraw said, “I feel about litigation the way Patton said he felt about war, ‘God help me, I do love it so.’ It’s a terrible thing to love, but it’s a high-stakes poker game that is so exciting because there’s a winner and a loser and no fuzziness about it. Somebody gets a billion dollars and somebody doesn’t.”

Clients have included Exxon, which had a whopper of a legal problem in the wake of the Exxon-Valdez disaster, the New York Times, ABC, major airlines and technology giants. The legal advisory business has afforded McGraw a luxurious home on the golf course of the Four Seasons Hotel in the Dallas suburb of Las Colinas, which he shares with his wife and sons, 13 and 20. When Oprah came calling, he was earning a handsome living and enjoyed his day job, so making his name or fortune writing advice manuals wasn’t a high priority.

In 1996, McGraw was hired to help battle charges of fraud, slander, defamation and negligence brought by a group of Texas cattlemen who had taken exception to remarks Winfrey made on her show about the so-called mad cow disease threatening America’s food supply. Courtroom Sciences had just helped Diane Sawyer and ABC fight Food Lion supermarket’s accusation of fraud.

“The year leading up to the trial and the trial were very difficult for Oprah because she felt she had done absolutely nothing even remotely wrong or even controversial,” McGraw said. “It really got to her. One of the things about preparing a witness is, if they lose themselves, they come across badly on the stand. She said, ‘I’m reeling here.’ We spent a lot of time talking about that, not about trial strategy.”

The six-week trial ended in a smashing victory in February 1998, when a federal jury in Amarillo, Texas, ruled that Winfrey bore no liability. By then, McGraw and Winfrey had forged a close friendship. He’d helped her so much that she encouraged him to put his philosophy in a book and offered to throw her considerable power behind it.

McGraw felt better about the trial’s outcome than Oprah’s invitation. For one thing, he wasn’t sure she meant it. But when she called several months later to ask how the book was going, he examined the situation again, thinking, let’s see, the woman who’s been the publishing industry’s heaven-sent marketing phenomenon wants to support your book, and since you have an independent income, you can be honest and write what you really believe, not what people might want to hear. Is there a problem here?

“One of the life laws I talk about in the book is, you either get it or you don’t,” McGraw said. “Oprah’s deal was I’d get to do it my way. So I figured this was a great opportunity, and I’d better get it.”

“Life Strategies” (Hyperion, 1999) sold more than 600,000 copies in hardcover. It’s out in paperback and still a bestseller. Although he sees no couples in private practice, the success of the books and his TV appearances have renewed McGraw’s passion for counseling, he said, “because I’m doing it the way I want to and I’m seeing the effect. Before, I was talking to one couple, or 100 couples, and now I’m talking to millions at one time. So by simply doing the math, I feel better about having an impact. Maybe this is grandiose, but I, honest to God, believe that we’re making a difference.”

In McGraw’s competitive, results-oriented worldview, making a difference constitutes winning. That will to win, which he brings to the courtroom, the tennis court, golf course and television studio, even made him want to be a better husband. He admitted that the fantasy that his wife could be in a room of 1,000 women, and say that no one there was treated better than she behind closed doors, motivated him to become a better husband.

Mimi Avins can be reached at mimi.avins@latimes.com.