Imparting sensible and healthy ways of parting
Breaking Upwards By Charlotte Friedman Short Books, £8.99 Reviewed by Anne Garvey
ARE YOU getting divorced? Do you know anyone who is? If either is the case, dash off and buy this remarkable guide — and save yourself shedloads of legal and therapy fees. Its sub-title — How to manage the emotional impact of separation — is modestly misleading. Feelings in most divorces impact directly on the legal process, and turn what should be a relatively simple division of spoils into a soul rending battle to the bitter end. This book will soothe a wounded heart and could keep you out of the courts.
Former lawyer and now psychotherapist, Charlotte Friedman takes a cool, long view. She bases her advice on selfpreservation rather than vicious vin- dication. Among the recriminations, the casualties are most obviously the children of the shattered marriage. But less apparent is the damage to the divorcing individuals, to their confidence, outlook and potential to love — and trust — again.
Though, in any life aside from unforeseen accidents or major health issues, divorce stands out as the most traumatic of events, we seem strangely illequipped to deal with it.
Americans, who have lived cheerfully alongside divorce as a fact of life for decades, seem collectively more sanguine about it. Here in Britain, divorce is not simply a private pain but a kind of public humiliation. The tendency is towards blame, intensified by the shock of its happening at all.
Charlotte Friedman collects all the fury of betrayal and the despair of loneliness into one simple but lucidly readable book. She steers a path between brisk and sympathetic. A divorce barrister for 25 years, she must have seen every possible incarnation of the desperate divorce story. And she has distilled what she has learned into this invaluable slim volume. By page 11, she has swept up all the feelings of disillusion and despair and hands out her first piece of demanding advice. “How hard then, against this cacophony of emotions, to have to be at your most efficient, your most organised, your most civil and your most motivated.”
This book exists to help, not to indulge its readers. It’s a tall order. Most divorcing parties resemble the Ancient Mariner telling the tale of misery again and again. Friedman will have none of it. Her advice is sometimes revolutionary: Get a friend to listen to an account of yourself rather than yet another re-run of your ex’s failings.
Despite such strictures, she still recognises what divorcing partners suffer: “You will cry yourself a river until there are no more tears left and one day you will wake up and not want to cry any more”. Her signal message is: “it will get better”.
Between helpful chapters like “How to tell your family”, are thoughtful quotations that dovetail with the author’s own approach: “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” These words of Albert Camus’s are welcome when the divorce winter seems to stretch out endlessly .
Friedman brings an understanding of the human heart to a potentially destructive part of life, combining a lawyer’s clear-eyed pragmatism with her psychotherapeutic understanding — and a natural compassion.
Introducing a profound but practical chapter on loneliness, is a quotation from Anna Freud: “I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.” A powerful sentiment with which to counter the dislocating trauma of divorce.