Scanning Amazon using ‘divorce’ yields dozens of titles – the market is well stocked. However, the author of Breaking up Blues is a British psychoanalyst whose monograph claims to be a ‘practical self-help book’. Divorce, especially splintering of families, is not only a growing social and economic concern. It increases the risk of adult psychopathology and long-term vulnerability in children of divorcing adults. There is death (e.g. attacks by men with morbid jealousy on former partners) and illness (e.g. self-harm in adolescent children). What outcomes does the author mean by ‘growth’ after a life event like divorce?
Cullington uses ‘her own experience of break-up’, but research evidence cited is limited and rather old. One section (‘Emergency toolkit’) might provide short-term ‘survival’ tips, around the time of a break-up. However, the intellectual framework for survival and growth is one-size-fits-all (men, women, heterosexuals and homosexuals) using preverbal infant models, personal ‘experience’ and Janet-and-John-style superficial vignettes. As a life event, divorce is equated with trauma or occasionally bereavement, including offensive analogies with the history of Israel or suicide bombers. The few black-and-white illustrations are poorly reproduced. Gaps include ‘practical’ financial, housing and legal matters, responding to threats of violence, relationships with older dependents or step-children, and desertion linked to pregnancy or postnatal depression. Religion is never considered in relation to the many descriptions of guilt, shame and grief. I never grasped what was meant by ‘growth’ – certainly not, say, flourishing, participation or the search for meaning. By the end, readers may feel like audiences at recent Woody Allen films: where did the humour go?
Overall, this book is boring and repetitive. A revealing interview with Cullington is podcast on the publisher's website (www.routledgementalhealth.com/breaking-up-blues/interview.asp).
If patients read this bleak book, they might augment their learning with ‘practical’ examples of ways to rehearse their options, along successful lines used for children in The Divorced and Separated Game (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1996). Cullington frequently quotes ‘no future without forgiveness’ and some families may benefit from practical ‘rite de passage’ approaches to bury old resentments (L. Gulliford, ‘The healing of relationships’, Forgiveness in Context, T. & T. Clark, 2004).
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