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Breaking Up Blues: A Guide to Survival and Growth is a self-help book about mourning the end of a marriage or long-term partnership. The author
describes the breakups of heterosexual couples; and while she says that gay couples will find the book helpful as well, her chapter on childhood development describes primarily heterosexual development. The book is useful for couples with or without children and includes a substantial number of pages on the impact of divorce on children. But this is a self-help book with a difference. A quick perusal of other self-help books on divorce reveals this one to be unique in its comprehensiveness. It is well-written, thoughtful, and both psychoanalytically and personally informed. Its author, Denise Cullington, a British psychologist and psychoanalyst, creates a map through the difficult emotional territory of breaking up. She has a clear-eyed vision of the enormous challenges and painful feelings that breaking up engenders but also offers perspective as she reminds readers that while they are navigating very difficult territory, divorce is not Rwanda or the Holocaust. Early on she reveals that her own marriage broke up. So this book may well be the one she would have wanted to read during her own marital crisis. In her acknowledgments she writes, “Finally, this book would not have been written without the many good years with Tom, the ending of which left me with the curious problem of how to grapple with, and move on from them” (p. x).
Part 1, Prelude to Break-up, has three chapters after an introduction: “Should You Leave?” “Should You Stay?” and “Being Left.” Part 2, The Trauma of Break-up, has chapters titled “Loss,” “Rage,” “Legal Battles,” “Refusing to Mind,” and “Depression.” Her focus is the internal work required through and out of a divorce. She emphasizes that breaking up is a slow process. The structure of the book is relevant to the process she describes. In the first two parts, Cullington describes how a couple feel