Where and when do you offer sessions?

All sessions are either online using Microsoft Teams or in person. I am based in Bayswater, London, Monday to Friday, and at Chancery Lane (Gray's Inn) on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. My availability is 8.00 am to 6.00 pm. Appointments can be scheduled as needed at a frequency that best meets your goals.

What type of intervention do you offer?

I am trained to provide a range of different psychological approaches. This enables me to develop a bespoke intervention plan based on your particular needs and preferences. The models I use most often are Schema Therapy (ST), Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and Person-Centred Therapy.

How many sessions will I need?

This is different for everyone, depending on your situation and what your goals are. Some people find that a handful of sessions is all they need, while others find it helpful to have ongoing support over a number of months.

Do you accept insurance clients?

Yes. I accept clients from Aviva, BUPA, Vitality, and WPA primarily but also some lesser known ones, so please ask. I can also provide invoices for clients to seek reimbursement from their insurer after paying me.

What's the next step?

I offer a free initial 10 minute consultation which enables us to think together about what you need, and whether I am the right practitioner for you. Research shows that the most significant factor in the success of psychological intervention is the rapport we have with our practitioner.

Why leaving a relationship feels like withdrawal: the evidence, and how long it really takes

Please read this first

This article is general information about how human beings respond to the end of a relationship. It is not a diagnosis or a substitute for individual support. One safety point matters too much to leave for the end: if the relationship you are leaving, or thinking of leaving, has been abusive or controlling, the period around separation is the time to be most careful about your safety. Please do not rely on an article. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline (0808 2000 247, free, 24 hours) can help you think through leaving safely, and my

support and resources page

lists further specialist services.

In a hurry? The short version

The withdrawal comparison is scientifically respectable. Brain imaging of recently rejected people shows activity in the same reward and craving circuitry that lights up in substance addiction, and researchers in this field describe romantic love using the language of craving, tolerance, withdrawal and relapse.
But "oxytocin withdrawal lasts nine weeks" is not a research finding. There is no primary study behind that figure. Oxytocin itself clears from the blood in minutes; what takes time is the recalibration of a whole attachment system, which also involves dopamine, the brain's own opioids, and the stress system.
The often-quoted 11 weeks is a misreading too. It comes from a study of students who were, on average, about 11 weeks past a breakup, most of whom reported growth. It was never a measured recovery deadline.
What the better studies show: distress is worst early, eases unevenly over weeks to a few months for most people, and is slowed by continued contact with the ex, which works rather like a relapse.
Leaving a bad relationship does not exempt you. The attachment system does not audit whether a partner deserved your bond. Intermittent mistreatment can actually strengthen attachment, so grieving someone who hurt you is common, and it is not evidence you should go back.
If months have passed and it is deepening rather than easing, or you are struggling to keep yourself safe, that is the point to involve your GP or a therapist rather than waiting it out.

A claim has been doing the rounds on social media for a while now: that after a breakup the body goes through "oxytocin withdrawal", and that it lasts nine weeks. Clients mention it to me, sometimes with relief, because it puts a medical-sounding shape and an end date on something that feels shapeless and endless. I understand the appeal. But when I went looking for the study behind it, there isn't one. No published research measures a nine-week oxytocin withdrawal after relationship loss, and, as I will explain, oxytocin is the wrong molecule to hang the story on anyway.

Here is the thing, though. The instinct underneath the claim is sound. People reaching for the language of withdrawal are noticing something real, and the research genuinely backs them: the end of a bonded relationship recruits the same brain systems as coming off an addictive drug, complete with craving, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, and the overwhelming urge for "one more" text, call, or drive past the house. So this article tries to do two honest jobs at once: to give the withdrawal comparison the scientific credit it deserves, and to untangle the parts of the viral version that are simply made up.

Heartbreak in the scanner: why "withdrawal" is the right word

The most direct evidence comes from a small but influential brain-imaging study by Helen Fisher and colleagues. They scanned fifteen people who had recently been rejected by a partner and were still intensely in love, while they looked at a photograph of the person who had left them. The image of the ex activated the ventral tegmental area and other parts of the brain's dopamine reward system: the circuitry of wanting, motivation and craving, the same regions engaged by cocaine craving.1 The researchers' conclusion was not that heartbroken people are being dramatic. It was close to the opposite: that romantic rejection is processed, at the level of brain systems, like craving for a drug you can no longer have.

A second study makes the "it physically hurts" part respectable too. Ethan Kross and colleagues scanned forty people who had been through an unwanted breakup in the previous six months, again while viewing a photo of the ex and thinking about the rejection. This activated not only the emotional regions you would expect but the somatosensory brain areas that register the sensory component of physical pain, an overlap that ordinary sad memories do not produce.2 When someone says the loss feels like being winded, the scanner is on their side.

Fisher's group went on to argue, in a later review, that intense romantic love is best understood as a natural addiction: in the early and the thwarted stages it shows euphoria, craving, tolerance, emotional and physical dependence, withdrawal, and relapse.3 That last pair matters most for our purposes. If love runs on addiction circuitry, then losing the person is not just sadness. It is abstinence, imposed overnight, from something your reward system had come to treat as essential. The 3am urge to text them is, in this frame, exactly what a craving is. Seeing them "just once, for closure" and finding yourself back at square one is what a relapse is.

I should be honest about the limits, because that is the point of these articles. These are small studies, of self-selected people, and showing that two experiences share brain regions is not the same as showing they are identical. Nobody is claiming a breakup is pharmacologically equivalent to opioid dependence, and the physical dangers of genuine opioid withdrawal have no parallel here. The claim the evidence does support is more modest and, I think, more useful: the craving-and-protest phase after losing a partner runs on the same motivational machinery as substance withdrawal, which is why it behaves so similarly, and why addiction concepts like cues, cravings and relapse turn out to be genuinely practical tools for getting through it.

The oxytocin story: mostly right, wrongly told

So where does oxytocin fit? It is real and it matters: oxytocin, along with vasopressin, is central to how mammals form pair bonds, and touch, sex, and everyday closeness all engage it. Losing a partner really does mean losing a reliable source of oxytocin-mediated soothing. But the viral version, in which oxytocin drains out of you over nine weeks like a drug leaving your system, cannot be right, for a simple reason: oxytocin is cleared from the bloodstream in a matter of minutes.4 There is nothing to "withdraw" from on a timescale of weeks. What changes over weeks is not the level of a single hormone but the settings of a whole attachment system that had organised itself around one particular person.

The clearest evidence for what partner loss actually does to that system comes from prairie voles, one of the few mammals that pair-bond the way we do. Male voles separated from their partner show something that looks strikingly like grief: they become passive and despairing in standard stress tests, driven by an overactive stress system (corticotropin-releasing factor, the brain's alarm chemistry).5 Follow-up work found that partner loss also suppresses oxytocin signalling in the reward system, and that restoring oxytocin there reverses the despair-like behaviour.6 The researchers made a poignant suggestion: this miserable state may be a feature, not a bug. It evolved to make separation feel bad enough that the animal goes and finds its partner again. The system that makes long-term love possible is the same system that punishes its loss.

Voles are not people, and I want to flag that clearly rather than smuggle the finding across species. But the vole work is the best mechanistic window we have, and it reframes the pop-science story in a helpful way. After a breakup you are not "low on oxytocin" the way a phone is low on battery. Your attachment system is doing what it was built to do: raising the alarm, suppressing reward, and pushing you towards reunion with a person who is no longer an option. The distress is not a malfunction, and it is not evidence that leaving was wrong. It is the cost of having bonded at all.

Where opioids genuinely come in

Interestingly, the strongest neurochemical link to the drug-withdrawal comparison is not oxytocin at all. A long-standing body of work argues that the day-to-day maintenance of close bonds runs substantially on the brain's own opioid system: the endorphins released by touch, laughter, and comfortable companionship, acting on the same receptors as morphine and heroin.7 The theory holds that the warm, settled feeling of being with your person is, quite literally, a mild endogenous opioid state.

Human experiments back this up in an elegant way. When healthy volunteers are given naltrexone, a drug that blocks opioid receptors and is used in treating opioid and alcohol dependence, their feelings of social connection measurably drop, both in the lab while reading loving messages from their closest people and across ordinary daily life.8 Block the opioid system and closeness loses some of its glow; which implies that when you lose the person who reliably produced that glow, you lose a genuine, physiological source of opioid-mediated comfort. On this account, the restlessness, ache and bleakness after a separation are not "like" opioid withdrawal by loose analogy. They are the attachment system's own, much milder version of the same event: a receptor system adapted to regular input, suddenly getting none.

This is also, I suspect, why the losses compound. The same opioid-attachment machinery responds to all our close bonds, which is why spending real time with friends and family in the weeks after a breakup is not just a distraction. It is a partial, legitimate replacement supply, from safer sources.

So how long does it take? On nine weeks, eleven weeks, and honest answers

The nine-week figure, as far as I can establish, has no research behind it at all. The eleven-week figure you may also have seen has a source, but it does not say what the headlines claimed. It comes from a 2007 study by Gary Lewandowski and Nicole Bizzoco, who surveyed 155 students who had been through a breakup in the previous six months; on average, participants were around eleven weeks out, and a large majority, about 71 per cent, endorsed statements of growth and positive emotion about the ending.9 That is genuinely encouraging, and I will come back to why. But it was a snapshot of people who happened to average eleven weeks post-breakup, not a measured recovery deadline, and the study focused on relationships that had been low in quality to begin with. "Science says you'll be over it in 11 weeks" was never what it found.

The research that actually tracked people through time paints a messier, more truthful picture. David Sbarra and Robert Emery followed young adults with daily emotion diaries for a month after a breakup and found that sadness and anger were highest early and eased over the weeks, love faded more slowly and more steadily, and relief was there too, right alongside the grief. Strikingly, contact with the ex-partner slowed the fading of both love and sadness.10 Recovery was also nothing like a straight line: good days and terrible days alternated, especially early on, which is worth knowing in advance so the bad days do not read as evidence you are going backwards.

So the honest answer to "how long?" is this. For most people the acute, withdrawal-like phase, the craving, the intrusive thoughts, the physical ache, is at its worst in the first few weeks and substantially eased somewhere in the range of two to four months. But the variance around that is enormous, and it is not random. Recovery tends to take longer when the breakup was unwanted, when the relationship was long or deeply woven into your identity, when your attachment style runs anxious, when rumination has somewhere to feed, and, above all, when contact continues. And there is no fixed neurochemical clock underneath any of it. The popular "half the length of the relationship" rule has no evidence behind it whatsoever. If you are past the average and still hurting, you have not failed a deadline. There was never a deadline.

Good relationship or bad: why the withdrawal feels much the same

Here is the part I most want people to take away, because it carries so much unnecessary shame. Clients who have left genuinely harmful relationships often expect to feel only relief, and are blindsided to find themselves grieving, craving, and missing the very person they fought so hard to leave. They conclude something must be wrong with them, or worse, that the missing is a sign the relationship was better than they thought and they should go back.

Neither is true. The attachment system does not audit whether a person deserved your bond; it simply bonds, and then it protests the loss. In fact, the research suggests something harder still: intermittent mistreatment can strengthen attachment rather than weaken it. Donald Dutton and Susan Painter studied 75 women in the months after leaving abusive relationships and found that the strength of their continuing emotional attachment to the ex-partner was predicted by exactly the features that make abusive relationships so disorienting, the alternation of cruelty and warmth and the imbalance of power, and that this attachment was still measurable six months after separation.11 Anyone who knows the addiction literature will recognise the mechanism: intermittent, unpredictable reward is precisely the reinforcement schedule that produces the most persistent craving, in relationships as at slot machines. If you are grieving someone who hurt you, your brain is not malfunctioning and your judgement is not broken. You are experiencing the predictable after-effect of a bond formed under exactly the conditions that make bonds hardest to dissolve. Missing them is withdrawal, not a verdict.

And if you left a relationship that was merely wrong rather than abusive, or were left by someone you still love, the same logic applies with the signs changed. Relief and grief are not opposites; the diary studies found them running concurrently.10 Feeling moments of lightness does not mean you did not love them. Feeling waves of longing does not mean leaving was a mistake. Lewandowski and Bizzoco's finding is the hopeful half of this: when people leave relationships that were not helping them grow, the aftermath, for a majority, includes not just pain but measurable growth, rediscovery of self, and positive emotion, often sooner than they expected.9 Both things are true at once. That is not a contradiction to be solved. It is what recovering from a bond is like.

What actually helps, through a withdrawal lens

If the craving-and-protest phase runs on addiction machinery, then the things that help people through withdrawal translate surprisingly well, and they give the standard breakup advice a rationale beyond folk wisdom.

Treat contact as the relapse it is. This is the single most evidence-backed item on the list: continued contact with an ex slows the decline of both love and sadness.10 Every "harmless" check of their social media is a cue exposure that re-triggers the craving system and restarts the clock. Where children or work make contact unavoidable, make it as structured, scheduled and businesslike as you can, and mute everything in between. Blocking is not petty. It is cue management.
Expect cravings, and ride them rather than obey them. Urges to text, to explain one more time, to drive past: these arrive in waves, peak, and pass, usually inside half an hour, whether or not you act on them. Name it as a craving ("this is withdrawal, not information"), put a delay between urge and action, and let the wave break. Each one you ride out genuinely weakens the next.
Look after the body that is doing the withdrawing. Broken sleep, no appetite, agitation: the physical symptoms are real, so respond as you would in any convalescence. Regular meals whether or not you are hungry, movement most days (exercise is one of the more reliable ways to nudge your own endorphin and dopamine systems), daylight, and a fixed getting-up time even after a terrible night.
Use your other bonds deliberately. Given that closeness itself is partly an endogenous opioid event,7,8 time with people who love you is not a distraction from the problem but a partial replacement for what was lost, from safer sources. Physical presence beats messaging; a walk with a friend beats both of your phones.
Give the ruminating mind a container. Some structured reflection helps people make sense of an ending, and expressive writing has reasonable support after relationship dissolution, but there is a dose at which reflection becomes rumination. Twenty minutes of writing, then deliberately closing the notebook, tends to serve people better than an evening of mental litigation.
Rebuild the self the relationship absorbed. The growth that Lewandowski and Bizzoco measured clustered around rediscovery of self.9 The friendships, interests and versions of you that the relationship crowded out are not just consolation activities; reclaiming them is, as far as we can tell, one of the mechanisms of recovery.

When it is more than heartbreak

Most people, most of the time, come through this with the ordinary supports: time, friends, sleep, and the slow recalibration described above. But not always, and part of writing honestly about a withdrawal-like process is saying clearly when to stop white-knuckling it. I would encourage you to talk to your GP or a therapist if, after two or three months, things are deepening rather than easing; if you have stopped functioning at work or as a parent; if you are using alcohol or anything else to get through the evenings; if the loss has pulled older losses or traumas in behind it; or if you keep returning to a relationship you know is harming you and cannot understand why (that last one is precisely what therapy is for, and the traumatic-bonding research above is why willpower alone so often is not enough).

And if it is darker than that: if you are having thoughts of not wanting to be here, or of harming yourself, please treat that with the seriousness you would give it in someone you love. Call your GP, or NHS 111 (option 2 for mental health), or the Samaritans on 116 123, free, at any hour, or use their online chat at samaritans.org. In an emergency, call 999. If you are leaving an abusive relationship, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247, free and 24 hours, and my

support and resources page

lists specialist services for economic abuse, legal advice, and more.

A closing word

The viral posts get the shape of the truth right and the details wrong. There is no nine-week oxytocin clock, and nobody can tell you the date your grief expires. But the deeper claim, that losing a bonded partner puts you through something genuinely akin to withdrawal, is one of the better-supported ideas in the science of love, and I find most people are helped rather than alarmed by knowing it. It means the craving is not a character flaw, the ache is not imaginary, missing someone who hurt you is not a verdict on your judgement, and the days when it suddenly ambushes you again are not evidence that you are broken. A system that bonded is doing its slow, uncomfortable work of unbonding, and it does finish.

If you are in the middle of it and would like company for the work, whether the relationship you left was precious, or harmful, or confusingly both, my

free 10-minute consultation

is an easy, no-obligation place to start.

References and further reading

This is a plain-language research summary, not clinical advice. Several of the imaging studies are small, the vole findings are animal research, and conclusions in this field may change.

Fisher HE, Brown LL, Aron A, Strong G, Mashek D. Reward, addiction, and emotion regulation systems associated with rejection in love. Journal of Neurophysiology. 2010;104(1):51–60.

doi:10.1152/jn.00784.2009. The rejection-in-the-scanner study.

Kross E, Berman MG, Mischel W, Smith EE, Wager TD. Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2011;108(15):6270–6275.

doi:10.1073/pnas.1102693108. Why heartbreak registers partly as physical pain.

Fisher HE, Xu X, Aron A, Brown LL. Intense, passionate, romantic love: a natural addiction? How the fields that investigate romance and substance abuse can inform each other. Frontiers in Psychology. 2016;7:687.

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00687. The case for love as a natural addiction, withdrawal included.

Gimpl G, Fahrenholz F. The oxytocin receptor system: structure, function, and regulation. Physiological Reviews. 2001;81(2):629–683.

doi:10.1152/physrev.2001.81.2.629. The standard review of oxytocin physiology, including its clearance from plasma within minutes.

Bosch OJ, Nair HP, Ahern TH, Neumann ID, Young LJ. The CRF system mediates increased passive stress-coping behavior following the loss of a bonded partner in a monogamous rodent. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2009;34(6):1406–1415.

doi:10.1038/npp.2008.154. Grief-like behaviour after partner loss in pair-bonded voles.

Bosch OJ, Dabrowska J, Modi ME, et al. Oxytocin in the nucleus accumbens shell reverses CRFR2-evoked passive stress-coping after partner loss in monogamous male prairie voles. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2016;64:66–78.

doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2015.11.011. Partner loss suppresses oxytocin signalling in the reward system; restoring it reverses the despair-like state.

Machin AJ, Dunbar RIM. The brain opioid theory of social attachment: a review of the evidence. Behaviour. 2011;148(9–10):985–1025.

doi:10.1163/000579511X596624. The case that long-term bonds are maintained by the brain's own opioids.

Inagaki TK, Ray LA, Irwin MR, Way BM, Eisenberger NI. Opioids and social bonding: naltrexone reduces feelings of social connection. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. 2016;11(5):728–735.

doi:10.1093/scan/nsw006. Blocking opioid receptors dampens feelings of closeness in daily life.

Lewandowski GW Jr, Bizzoco NM. Addition through subtraction: growth following the dissolution of a low quality relationship. The Journal of Positive Psychology. 2007;2(1):40–54.

doi:10.1080/17439760601069234. The source of the misquoted "11 weeks" figure, and the evidence for growth after leaving low-quality relationships.

Sbarra DA, Emery RE. The emotional sequelae of nonmarital relationship dissolution: analysis of change and intraindividual variability over time. Personal Relationships. 2005;12(2):213–232.

doi:10.1111/j.1350-4126.2005.00112.x. The daily-diary study: recovery curves, relief alongside grief, and contact with the ex slowing both.

Dutton DG, Painter S. Emotional attachments in abusive relationships: a test of traumatic bonding theory. Violence and Victims. 1993;8(2):105–120.

doi:10.1891/0886-6708.8.2.105. Why intermittent mistreatment strengthens attachment, and why it persists after leaving.