Welcome back to Friendship Therapy and our first bitesize episode, where Emma shares her therapeutic takeaways from her conversation with this week's guests, Janine and Julia. In this bitesize episode, Emma dives into the concept of yin and yang, a term that Janine and Julia use to describe themselves and their friendship. Emma explains how the contrasting dots of colour in the yin and yang symbol represent the need for chaos and control to exist harmoniously, and how this concept can help...

Welcome to the first ever episode of Friendship Therapy, a brand new podcast where psychotherapist, author and podcaster Emma Reed Turrell looks at your friendship experiences through a therapy lens.   This week, Emma speaks to best friends for 25 years, Janine and Julia.   Describing their personalities as ‘yin and yang’, these two women were thrown together in the school playground, becoming friends by default rather than design. In the years that followed, they worked to grow and nurture a...

Friendship Therapy is a brand new podcast coming soon, in which psychotherapist and author Emma Reed Turrell talks to real people about real friendships and looks at these pivotal relationships through a therapy lens.  Subscribe now and don't miss the first episode when it drops on Monday 3rd June.

Well, here we are. Emma is firmly in denial and Elizabeth is busy looking for silver linings because this week's episode of Best Friend Therapy is our LAST ONE EVER. Probably.  We have loved every minute of these last two years, as we've curated this collection of conversations to share with you, our wonderful listeners. Thank you so much for having us and we hope you'll join us for one last look back, at the journey we've been on together...  We talk about our favourite episodes and look...

We begin this episode with the announcement that this... sniff... will be... sniff... our last season of Best Friend Therapy but DON'T PANIC because there are good reasons which we'll go into and plenty of exciting new projects in the pipeline! Which also means there's no time to lose and so this week we take a deep dive into the work Emma has been developing around her unique model of "blind spot therapy", and which she's sharing with us all in her upcoming book, What Am I Missing? If you...

Welcome back to Best Friend Therapy and this season’s opportunity for Emma to therapise our beloved guinea pig, Elizabeth Day, whilst offering some psycho-education for us all about the Transactional Analysis concept of the “Drama Triangle” - why and how we end up repeating conflict in relationships (be they personal or professional) and what we can do to change it. The Drama Triangle was developed by Stephen Karpman in the 1960’s and tells us about three unhealthy roles we take on in drama...

What is introversion and extroversion anyway? This week we’re drawing on the ideas of Carl Jung, and the Big Five personality traits, to help us understand why some people get their energy from being around other people, and others prefer to recharge their batteries on their own. Emma challenges the idea that it’s simply a matter of personality, and wonders whether we develop these behaviours as an adaptation to societal pressures, and Elizabeth explains why, as an introvert, she prefers a...

This week on Best Friend Therapy, we tackle the thorny issue of comparison - how it gets in our way, what its true function is and how it can actually direct us to feel happier and more fulfilled. From Reese Witherspoon to Richard II, we cover themes of unconditional acceptance and safety, via the rise of social media and the Peasants Revolt (bear with us, ED is ever the historian). Emma teaches us the difference between jealousy and envy and Elizabeth tells us how gratitude is her...

Welcome to this week's episode of Best Friend Therapy - the one where we ask the tough questions... * What's the difference between emotional detachment and emotional unavailability? * Why can needs get confused with neediness? * How do sympathy and empathy serve different purposes? We explore how emotional detachment can actually help us to develop greater empathy and deepen authentic relationships, with others and ourselves. And we explain what happens when we don’t detach - how we can...

🚨 BIG NEWS 🚨 Not only are we back for a brand new season, but Elizabeth and Emma will be hosting a LIVE SHOW for the very first time! Book your tickets and join us live at the Bloomsbury Theatre on Thursday 4th April. We can’t wait to see your gorgeous faces IRL! 🎟️ fane.co.uk/best-friend-therapy --- TW: Miscarriage Welcome back to our seventh season of Best Friend Therapy and we begin with a update, for all those of you who have listened to or read Elizabeth's experiences on her...

TW: Discussion on miscarriage. Welcome to this week's episode of Best Friend Therapy - the fourth instalment of our miniseries on break-ups and the final episode of Season 6! As we have been exploring different break-ups, whether it be a romantic relationship, the ending of a friendship, family estrangement or career change, we realised there is one feeling that connects them all - the feeling of rejection. So we are dedicating this final episode to unpacking this feeling - to better...

Welcome to this week's episode of Best Friend Therapy, and the penultimate instalment of our miniseries on break-ups. So far we have been focusing on personal relationships but today it’s time to take a look at professional break-ups - from being fired or made redundant, to feeling left behind or breaking up with a previous profession. We talk about why people-pleasing and work don’t mix, and why healthy work contracts have to be reciprocal (just like those family contracts that we...

Welcome back to our break-ups miniseries, and this week we're looking at the thorny issue of how to end, change or evolve a relationship with friends and family. We talk about why remaining friends is not always as kind as we might think and why being authentic and accountable might actually be more generous. Emma talks about non-verbal boundaries and how to reset realities for everyone's benefit, and Elizabeth describes what it feels like to be ghosted by a friend and what it looks like...

In a first for Best Friend Therapy, we bring you a four-part MINISERIES, all about break-ups. We'd be lying if we said it was intentional but we quickly realised there was far too much to say about romatic break-ups, let along friendship break-ups, family break-ups and work break-ups, to get through in a single episode. So this week's episode is dedicated to heartbreak of the romantic variety... When we break-up with a partner, we often feel a form of grief - not only for the relationship,...

This week, we’re talking about burnout and that particular kind of emotional exhaustion that can knock us off our feet and leave us feeling utterly depleted. Emma and Elizabeth both share their own personal stories of burnout and explore what they learned from their experiences. Emma talks about the work she does with organisations to prevent burnout in the first place and how to balance individual responsibility with a workplace culture that rewards healthy behaviour. And Elizabeth...

This week, Elizabeth shares a challenging work scenario, in which she found herself at the pointy end of someone else's ego. We go back and look at the original meaning of ego through the eyes of Freud, with an overview of his theory of three-part personality, to build an understanding of how egotistical behaviour, narcissism and power-play intersect, and what we can do when we come up against “big egos” in our daily lives. We wrestle with a tug of war between our instincts and morality and...

This week we’re looking at the theme of Responsibility, how we feel about it, and how its meaning might change for us over time. Whether it begins with a badge on our blazers or a ticket to teenage independence, being given responsibility might not always be such a gift, when it later brings with it the added pressures of work, or the task of emotionally regulating the people we live alongside. We suggest that it might be wiser to take responsibility in our lives, rather than be given it,...

We’re back with Season 6 of Best Friend Therapy and we are overjoyed to be in your ears again! In fact we're feeling so damn positive about life right now, we thought we'd kick off with a conversation about whether positivity can ever be negative... or even toxic? There’s nothing wrong with looking on the bright side of life, or tackling challenges with optimism and a positive mental attitude. But we wonder whether there is a role for taking our time to get there in certain situations, to...

It's that time again, it's our season finale! And this week on Best Friend Therapy, we thought it fitting to send you into the break with an episode all about uncertain times. We explore how cultural events such as the pandemic, the cost of living crisis and economic uncertainty can manifest in anxiety, and we also examine the potential for growth and change therein. We suggest that certainty might not be the only antidote to uncertainty, if we can find other ways to settle and soothe our...

Join us for this season's live therapy experience, with our glamorous assistant/guinea pig, Elizabeth Day! This week, Emma blends techniques from Neuro Linguistic Programming and timeline therapy to guide Elizabeth back through some significant experiences, in order to identify an unmet need or missing piece that might still hold her back today. You'll hear a guided visualisation that reframes past experiences in a way that can heal past hurt, and shows you what to look for in...

This week we are talking about how we can tune in to our 'inner child'. Or, at least, we're attempting to because Elizabeth has so far found her inner child to be quite elusive and the prospect of dancing on the beach to be a bit cringe. We come to the conclusion that inner child work might actually be about learning to trust our intuition and accept our wants and needs exactly as they are, with no judgment, and to give ourselves permission to play in whichever way we find comfortable - even...

TW; discussions around suicide. This week we are talking about gaslighting, where the term originates from and how it has helped us name a particular type of coercive control. We also talk about how it has been more recently adopted in casual conversation and how therapy talk doesn't always serve us when it’s overused or taken out of context. As always, our insights are informed by popular culture - namely the Archers, Jury Duty and Married at First Sight Australia (we’re talking to you,...

This week on Best Friend Therapy, we are reflecting on regret. As usual, we strive to keep our conversation authentic, which is why you’ll hear us singing along with Edith Piaf, receiving deliveries from the postman, battling with flies and playing a quick round of Just a Minute… NONE of which we regret because we come to the conclusion that regret really means mourning a life un-lived and, well, we’ll all have plenty of those. We also have the life we are living right now and we reckon...

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This week we're talking all things menopause. Emma and Elizabeth share their journeys so far, through the wild ride that is peri-menopause, and look at the good (no longer doing things you don't want to do), the bad (next-level anxiety) and the ugly (who knew anyone could sweat this much?). Menopause has gone from being the taboo of previous generations, to a subject discussed openly in mainstream media and we wanted to celebrate this transition into a new stage of womanhood - one that is...