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 lose objectivity and fall foul of merging with others, enmeshing our experiences, projecting our beliefs and outsourcing our authentic needs... Emma explains why she used to work for brownie points and Elizabeth gets interested in the inner psyche of the teenage girl. --- Not for the first time we reference the Love Languages work of Gary Chapman: https://amzn.eu/d/68aAaOc --- 🚨 BIG NEWS 🚨 Not only are we back for a seventh 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! 🎟️ http://fane.co.uk/best-friend-therapy --- Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. --- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy Email: contact@bestfriendtherapy.co.uk

🚨 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! 🎟️ http://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 fertility journey and who have reached out with care and concern. Elizabeth generously shares with us where she's been, where she is now, and what life looks like when you are childfree, not by choice. She shares her frustrations with the language and reactions of some, celebrates the kindness of many and describes the grief she has lived through, to reach a place of peace and renewed purpose. Emma explains why grief can be like a game of Snakes & Ladders and reminds us that, in a world where we are encouraged to hold on, it's often the letting go that will require most courage. --- Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. --- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy Email: contact@bestfriendtherapy.co.uk

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 understand why it hurts and what we can do to help ourselves. It may be the season finale but it's most definitely not a rejection, merely a time for reflection, and we look to the work of Alain de Botton to teach us about constructive pessimism and remind ourselves of Eckhart Tolle's wise words in "The Power of Now." We also look to the great philosopher, Elizabeth Day, and hear what the glockenspiel had to teach her about rejection and why she took up the trumpet instead. Emma introduces the Transactional Anaylysis theory of the "hot potato" and walks Elizabeth down her Staircase of Beliefs, to find the fear behind the rejection, and explains why the antidote to rejection is self-acceptance and a Joy List. See you very soon for Season 7 and thanks, as always, for listening xx --- Alain de Botton talks about "constructive pessimism": https://youtu.be/Aw1oLtuJOXQ?si=6BswjGNwxPWlxc6G Eckhart Tolle, "The Power of Now": https://amzn.eu/d/g0Oh6mo On the Hot Potato Theory and Episcript, p.124: https://www.fanita-english.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/Berne,%20phobia,%20episcripts%20and%20racketeering.pdf --- Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. --- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy Email: contact@bestfriendtherapy.co.uk

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 discussed last week). Emma offers some advice on how to improve work dynamics when it's not practical to break up, and Elizabeth explains why the language of redundancy is so unhelpful. --- Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. --- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

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 to grow apart. We chat about the reciprocity of family relationships, how they need to work for everyone, why we need to challenge the taboo of family being fixed, the danger of toxic gratitude and how it can be healthier to recategorise certain family relationships. We'll be back next week to look at break-ups of the professional variety! --- Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. --- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

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, but also the future we may have planned, and for a past version of ourself. It's a triple whammy. We talk about the difference between being dumped and doing the dumping, how to break up well (if there is such a thing) and why break-up through divorce is hard, but break-up after divorce can be even harder. Emma explains why romantic break-ups can reinforce core beliefs and re-enact past attachment trauma and Elizabeth directs us to the ever-guiding light that is Taylor Swift. Join us again next week when we'll be turning our attention to friendship break-ups. --- If you want to hear us talk more about grief, you can tune into our previous episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/best-friend-therapy/id1614793299?i=1000601683198 Emma talks about the grief cycle, developed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and made famous in her book, "On Death and Dying", in 1969. --- Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. --- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

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 brings in the work of psychiatrist and author, Gabor Maté, who believes the physical symptoms of burnout to be manifestations of psychological stress. We talk about how to recognise symptoms of burnout, how to treat it and, most importantly, how to understand what it was trying to tell you in the first place. --- Listen to Elizabeth’s conversation with Gabor Maté on How to Fail: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/how-to-fail-with-elizabeth-day/id1407451189?i=1000624455746 --- Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. --- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

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 find our balance on a seesaw, which concludes that it’s good to talk and, if talking about feelings makes us less acceptable to some, we’re here for it. --- For more on Freud’s three-part psyche: https://www.simplypsychology.org/psyche.html Emma references the work of Dr Christine Dunkley and her work on Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT): https://amzn.eu/d/9yLqPUU Elizabeth talks about Jung’s Collective Unconsciousness and Emma expands with group imago theory which you can read more about here: https://amzn.eu/d/eLujeLP and https://www.awesomebooks.com/book/9780285647763/transactional-analysis-in-psychotherapy --- Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. --- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

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, and for our sense of duty to deliver on the values that lie within ourselves, rather than be employed to meet the needs of others. We talk about the dangers of outsourcing responsibility to others and how gaslighting and toxic relationships can get set up, and we discuss the impact of an outdated and patriarchal sense of responsibility for others, when all we can ever usefully offer is a sense of responsibility to the people we care about. --- Elizabeth references the Changes podcast, hosted by Annie Macmanus, in which she interviews Zadie Smith: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/zadie-smith/id1465937091?i=1000626637952 And she generously crowbars in a reference to Emma’s new book, called “What Am I Missing: The Four Blind Spots that are Holding You Back, and How to Overcome Them” - out in April 2024 and available to pre-order now: https://amzn.eu/d/6yuHeXV Oh, and she also takes us back to Aristotle, because she’s a historian at heart. Emma shares her most wholesome of weekends and, should you find yourself in Hampshire and keen to become more “manipulate”, you too can check out the wonderful workshops hosted by @alicecrowe_ceramics, @nicepearceramics and @rushmerefarm. --- Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. --- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

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 feel heard first (by ourselves and others) and to feel validated in the truth of what is, even when it’s not as we would wish. And whether we can trip ourselves up with the pressures to be positive and feel like we’re failing, when really what we’re acknowledging is the complicated, nuanced, conflicted reality of life. To quote our very own Elizabeth Day, “life is texture” and striving to be overly positive, at the cost of authenticity, can make us more fearful of the darker feelings that are an inevitable part of the human condition. Elizabeth introduces us to the view of Zadie Smith that tells us our pain can run in parallel to others’ experiences and Emma questions whether this season of Married at First Sight sees its participants setting themselves up to fail with their "good vibes only". Never let it be said that we don’t draw on a diverse range of sources in our research for BFT. We hope our conversation puts a smile on your face but, if it doesn't, cheer up, it might never happen! --- Elizabeth quotes Zadie Smith's "Intimations": https://www.waterstones.com/book/intimations/zadie-smith/9780241492383 --- Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. --- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy