Frank Lawlis - Mending the Broken Bond: The 90-Day Answer to Repairing Your Relationship with Your Child

In all creative projects there are many people who contribute to the final result, but this book is special to me because it came from a relationship I discovered as love. Granted, I have gone through life as an academic, thinking I knew what love was all about, but it took me more than sixty years to see the true wonder of it. The person who took me by the hand and became my soul mate in this world of paradise is my wife, Susan Faye Franks.

Susan was my student more than twenty years ago, and I was intrigued with her intelligence and clever disposition, and probably a little distracted by her beauty as well, if truth be told. As the years rolled past we were in contact with each other for research design consultation as well as for discussions with our mutual friend Dr. Joel Butler. Fast forward to the Katrina disaster and her activities in that ordeal as well as further meetings on new approaches to mental problems. The spark that must have been there for years caught the wind of passion. We fell in love.

My life has been filled with this healing power of love, and within that mission this book was created. I am constantly amazed at how my life has been transformed with her support and creative intelligence. I can only hope that the reader will be able to feel the energy of this love in relation to the ultimate hopefor the world to experience what love is.

I could not write a book without acknowledging one of my best friends, Dr. Phil McGraw, who continues to support my work on his television show and in our lives. We have built a trusting bond over thirty years of mutual respect that is rare on this earth. We have walked many miles together in a mission of making things happen that have never happened before. And it is very likely that he is the smartest man I know.

My colleagues and best cheering section are Jan Miller and Shannon Miser-Marven. Besides being the best literary agents in the world, they have become friends whose purpose, they allege, is to enable me to publish my books worldwide. They have been led to believe that I am smart and truly believe I have the answers to the mysteries of the universe. Even though this belief is misguided, my relationship with them is extremely important to me.

Wes Smith has been my writing consultant for years and he brings life into my words. I believe that the man can make a phone book read like A Tale of Two Cities. His amazing talent has certainly been critical to whatever success I have had writing my truth and having someone actually understand me.

Several readers have helped form the result from their perspectives. All of them are geniuses in my view and have graciously added to my knowledge and supported some conclusions that might be on the edge with tremendous insight. They are Dr. John Chirman, professor at Harvard University, and Dr. Ann Miller, director of pastoral services at Cook Childrens Medical Center.

I have seen thousands of children for one reason or another in forty years of working with kids. Regardless of how much professional training I have had in recognizing psychopathology and adjustment issues, I have discovered that most problems rest with inadequate skills to develop a loving relationship with someone else. I might add that this disturbance in developing loving bonds also explains most problems with adults as well.

I entered the field of psychology to help people, as most individuals clearly communicate with the application; however, when I entered the classrooms, that help word was quickly translated into diagnosis and therapy. Psychology does not pretend to deal with the indefinable and unreliable features of the human psyche or else it becomes an art and not a science. Those in the profession of psychology prefer the discipline to be considered alongside medicine as a healing science, and discourage anyone from even discussing the soft fringes of human experience. Each dynamic or behavior has to be reduced to measurable and researchable units. For example, there was huge relief when even the personal experience of pain could be calculated in subjective units of discomfort (SUDs) and could be brought to a linear measurement.

You could probably understand my dismay and frustration when I was given a textbook on human development on the first day of graduate school that consisted of childrens responses to environmental stimuli as its entire content, as if the childs behavior had been reduced to that of a rat. This level of understanding children continued throughout my training and still exists today.

Theres clearly a disinterest in teaching a child to love and to be loved although this primary issue is at the heart of the problem for nearly every child I have ever seen. For the great majority of referrals, the performances or intelligences required in school or as part of their participation in family or social life bring them to my door.

Where have we gone in our society or even in our world that we downgrade this critical concern that lays the grid for all of human conditions? We worry about competition from other countries in terms of knowledge and numbers of PhDs. Yet what makes a country successful and builds its resistance to invasion but love and loyalty toward it? The mark of a great nation is its success in providing its citizens with an abundance of happiness and success. How can we achieve this without the basic elements of bonding in relationships? Our religions speak to this priority.