There is a serious and outcome-determinative precondition that you have to meet if you expect to successfully rescue your relationship and reconnect with your partner. YOU have to get real about YOU. No defensiveness, no denial - total honesty. While we focus on rescuing your relationship and reconnecting with your partner, the vehicle to achieving that is YOU. Reconnecting with your partner cannot and will not happen if you do not reconnect with YOURSELF first.

You can change your partner from daylight to dark, but it won't make a bit of difference unless and until you decide to clean house inside YOURSELF first. This journey does not begin with you and your partner, it begins with YOU. You have to take your power back and become the kind of person who demands quality, inspires respect and settles for nothing less than an active and abiding love. That change begins from the inside out as you get back in touch with who you are and as you decide what to do with your love, your life, and your vision. Your clairty and your purpose must become crystal clear. The fix, the rescue, depends on YOU. To proceed with any other mind-set is to guarantee failure, miserable failure. That's why I have to begin by getting your right with YOU. I know you aren't being true and right with yourself.

If you are in a relationship that has gone awry, a relationship that is laced with pain, confusion or emptiness, then by definition I know you have lost touch with your own personal power, your own dignity, your own standards and your own self-esteem. You've allowed yourself to accommodate pain and disappointment and self-destructive attitudes. You have rationalized away many of your hopes and dreams, you've settled for so many things you did not want, you've allowed apathy to set in, and along the way you've probably let your partner mistreat you over the years. But most important, you've mistreated yourself. You've blamed your partner or other circumstances for your place in life rather than making the effort to find the true answers within you. You've lost touch with that part of you that I call your core of consciousness. You were centered on this God-given core that uniquely defined you. And you can be centered on this core again.

People who do well in their lives, are so in touch with their individual core of consciousness, so aware of their self-worth and their sense of personal value, that they not only treat themselves with enormous self-respect but they inspire others to treat them with equal respect.

The truth is not always easy to hear, but it always remains the truth and you can't hide from it, and in so doing, cheat yourself. If you don't scrape away all of life's layers of distortion, negative input, and doubt-inducing messages, and get back in touch with your own core of consciousness, then no matter what else you learn, you will have such low standards that you will continue sabotaging your relationship. You will remain mired in pain, guilt, anger and confusion.

You must reclaim your own power and strength so that you can build something extraordinary for yourself. This power is not the kind of power that will make you more domineering over your partner. It's about the power to give and to lift up those around you. It's the power that comes from depth and conviction - the power to inspire, the power to create, the power to experience your life and relationship at a totally different level. It is the quiet, calm power of dignity and worth.

As Emmerson once wrote: "what lies behind us and what lies in front of us pales in comparison to what lies within us". Get back in touch with YOURSELF.