January 12 is D-Day — so called because it is the day when lawyers expect the highest number of calls from couples wanting to divorce. They typically stick together for one last Christmas as a family, but then split up the Monday after their children go back to school.

The divorce rate is likely to be higher than ever this year, according to academics from Essex University. They calculate that a 10 per cent drop in house prices leads to five per cent more couples splitting up, which could mean thousands more family breakdowns across Britain as the economy heads into recession.

This comes as no surprise to Oxford psychoanalyst Denise Cullington, whose book, Breaking Up Blues, aims to help people contemplating, or recovering from, break-up.

“Perhaps in the Christmas holidays, and in the summer holidays, the expectation is that you should be having this happy family or ‘couple time’. Your expectations won’t get fulfilled.”

However, she warns people to think very carefully before taking any irretrievable steps. She said: “Divorce may offer hope and the possibility of leaving a disappointing relationship behind – but it takes time and there are many pitfalls.

“Research evidence shows that many adults do less well than they expected and only the minority are able to use break-up as a ‘window of opportunity’.”

She first had the idea for the book eight years ago. “I had been thinking about it for some time, and when my marriage broke up, I looked at lots of self-help books and there wasn’t anything that addressed the issues I wanted to address.

“I found it astonishingly difficult and distressing; much more traumatic than I thought it would be. When you grumble about your partner, you might think that you could break up and find someone better easily, but it is extremely difficult.

“I had to draw on all my resources and experience of analysis to figure my way through, and I thought it would be helpful for other people.”

“Research follow-up studies of couples after divorce show that a surprising number had a lot of difficulties, not only in the immediate aftermath — 18 months or so — but in the long term as well.

“When you look at people ten years on, 30 per cent were still fighting bitterly with their ex-partner over money or access to the children; difficulties that took up all their energy.

“Another way of managing it was to rush into a new relationship or series of relationships, and then if the new relationship didn’t work out they could get depressed. Men were particularly at risk of doing that.

“The third reaction was to feel like a victim and get caught in depression, and wanting to stay depressed as a way of getting back at the person who left.”

Adults who turn away from emotional pain are less able to help their children with their distress – and there is consistent evidence of risk to children of divorce of emotional, behavioural and educational difficulty, she says.

“It was a minority of people who were able to grow as a result of the experience, perhaps take more risks, get more confident, and if they settled down in a new relationship were in one that was better than the previous one.” She believes strongly that it’s not enough to just “be positive” and move on quickly. “It’s what everyone wants to do, but one needs to be able to find a way of getting rid of the hatred of the other person and looking at the good things that happened in the relationship.”

She has deliberately aimed the book at both men and women, leavers and left, and believes that it is pretty fair and balanced. “One of the difficulties was that I wanted to be encouraging to the reader, but also challenge them to move out of whatever entrenched position they were in, including facing up to their own part in what went wrong in the relationship, which can be a hard thing to do if your self-esteem is battered. If you can’t look at your own part in the difficulties, you can’t learn for the future, you have to keep blaming the other one, and believing that it was completely their fault.”

She says people often want to sweep separation under the carpet and pretend they’re fine. But it’s not a long-term solution, she says, and people need to face up to their guilt and/or grief.

“It’s worrying on two levels, because it means we’re under-estimating the effects of divorce on adults and children and we’re fooling ourselves into thinking that divorce is some kind of safety net when things start going wrong in the marriage.”

Breaking Up Blues: A Guide to Survival and Growth is published by Routledge at £9.99. See www.routledgementalhealth.com/ breaking-up-blues.