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During a recent transmission of a television health programme concerned with the perils of smoking, a sixty-a-day smoker was asked what steps she had taken to give up her habit. She listed all the usual ones she had tried and specifically mentioned that she knew that her local health centre offered a quit smoking group run by one of the nurses but added that she would never go near it. When it was suggested she might not have done so out of embarrassment, her riposte was to make clear that she knew the nurse concerned was ‘a picture of health and had never had a fag in her life and how could someone like that ever know the misery of addiction and the struggle to overcome it’.
This is not a charge that can be levelled against Denise Cullington whose very refreshing book Breaking Up Blues draws thoughtfully but appropriately upon the painful, yet ultimately illuminating experience of her own divorce and manages to do so in a way that avoids the wearisome pitfalls of an account full of wounded invective and poorly disguised narcissistic narrative. Instead she brings to her writing a winning amalgam of personal reflection, high-calibre expertise and plain English, jargon-free elaboration of her book's central purpose - the promotion and achievement of survival and growth out of one of life's most challenging and frequently miserable experiences. Within its pages we see the fruits of her training as a clinical psychologist and the development of her skills and personal learning at the Tavistock Clinic and her current work as a psychoanalyst in Oxford.
Her plea for a measure of psychological-mindedness at a time when thinking is usually the first casualty of a messy relationship breakdown is underpinned throughout this impressive book by an understanding that draws upon her personal experience as a wife and mother, together with her years of experience as a gifted clinician working with individuals and couples as they struggle to face and work through the cruelty, injustice