Welcome to Best Friend Therapy, where we chat about what's on our minds, to get deeper in our minds, and we've come to end of Season Two already!

So we're throwing in the towel, we're giving up, we're admitting defeat - oh no, wait a minute, we're not actually quitting, we're just *talking* about quitting this week. Phew!

We would never abandon our lovely listeners because quitting is a bad thing... it's an admission of failure... it's a sign of weakness. Right?

Well, it turns out we're not so sure and this week we'll be exploring whether quitting gets a bad press it doesn't deserve. Whether quitting can also be an active way to end something with agency. Whether fear of the unknown keeps us doing what we know, even when that unknown could be a better job, a happier relationship or an outcome that feels right.

We explore how to quit aspects of a situation if you aren’t ready or able to quit altogether, and we ponder whether, if something quits you, was it even right for you in the first place?

Elizabeth wrestles with how to quit therapy and Emma quits trying to save everybody else.

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Elizabeth references 'Adapted Child' from Eric Berne's P-A-C model which is brilliantly explained in this text: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Today-New-Introduction-Transactional-Analysis/dp/1870244028/ref=sr_1_2?adgrpid=52680008869&gclid=Cj0KCQjw9ZGYBhCEARIsAEUXITUSzQNTHrxFAt0SFN2S32O6YIlGcfQ533iG6z_dqO5i5w2s9oBuMdYaAmnUEALw_wcB&hvadid=259035468682&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9045783&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=9682401238517000128&hvtargid=kwd-298703266987&hydadcr=3222_1824632&keywords=ta+today&qid=1661272526&sr=8-2

You can listen to Eckhart Tolle on Super Soul Sundays with Oprah Winfrey here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/eckhart-tolle-session-the-awakening-of-consciousness/id1264843400?i=1000443295402

Elizabeth Kubler Ross on the Grief Cycle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Grief-Grieving-Finding-Meaning-Through/dp/0743263448

Emma uses the Gestalt terms, 'figure' and 'field' and a great introduction to Gestalt psychotherapy can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gestalt-Counselling-Helping-People-Change/dp/0863881335

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Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [email protected]

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Social Media:

Elizabeth Day @elizabday

Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

Welcome to Best Friend Therapy, where we chat about what's on our minds, to get deeper in our minds, and this week we're doing something a little bit different.

We're going down the rabbit hole and we're taking you with us, as Emma therapises the hell out of Elizabeth.

Using Transactional Analysis techniques, Emma takes Elizabeth on a journey of self-discovery and hopefully sets you up to do the same. Bring a question or a situation of your own and follow along, as you discover your internal voices and find your way to an Adult way of seeing things.

Find out why Emma loves a game of hopscotch, and why you wouldn't want to meet Silvana down a dark alley.

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This episode is based on the work of Eric Berne, who you can find out about here: https://ericberne.com

And you can learn more about Transactional Analysis in a brilliantly accessible text here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Today-New-Introduction-Transactional-Analysis/dp/1870244028/ref=sr_1_2?adgrpid=52680008869&gclid=Cj0KCQjw9ZGYBhCEARIsAEUXITXUrgNprG_RpeBC-2woMc3QgCJdfhqCTO2i_dkAsPSPWv-_e4s0EBYaAi9OEALw_wcB&hvadid=259035468682&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9045783&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=3426000332817789466&hvtargid=kwd-298703266987&hydadcr=3222_1824632&keywords=ta+today&qid=1661272287&sr=8-2

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Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [email protected]

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Social Media:

Elizabeth Day @elizabday

Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

Welcome to Best Friend Therapy, where we chat about what's on our minds, to get deeper in our minds, and this week we're turning up the volume on some Tammy Wynette (not Dolly Parton, Emma) to talk about D.I.V.O.R.C.E.

Stigmatised by society as a shameful failure, or presented as an opportunity to grow and evolve, divorce (as the name suggests) can be divisive.

We challenge the notion that a long-lasting marriage is a successful one, draw a distinction between "fair" and "equal" when it comes to co-parenting, and discuss the friendship and family fall-out that can come as a by-product of divorce.

Elizabeth shares her personal experience of divorce and takes Emma on a magical mystery tour through Elizabeth's experiences of dating in the aftermath. Roar.

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"Conscious Uncoupling: The 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After" by Katherine Woodward Thomas is available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Conscious-Uncoupling-Steps-Living-Happily/dp/1473619327/ref=asc_df_1473619327/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=310973726618&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=14366100668256074437&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1007093&hvtargid=pla-453601331467&psc=1&th=1&psc=1

"For One More Day" by Mitch Albom is available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/One-More-Day-Mitch-Albom/dp/0751537500/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3R5XSEXF4TC61&keywords=for+one+more+day&qid=1660723850&s=books&sprefix=for+one+more+day%2Cstripbooks%2C111&sr=1-1

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Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [email protected]

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Social Media:

Elizabeth Day @elizabday

Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

Welcome to Best Friend Therapy, where we chat about what's on our minds, to get deeper in our minds, and this week we're bringing you a Feelings 101 - everything you ever needed to know about what we feel, why we feel, and how feelings can be our best guides when it comes to meeting our needs.

Sadness, anger, fear, joy, jealousy, envy, guilt or shame. Pick your poison. There's a feeling for every situation and an action required for every feeling. This week we join the dots to help you know what action you need to take, to feel more authentic and empowered in life.

Emma explains the 'core feelings' and the needs they signal, and Elizabeth tries to disarm her with the cuteness of a baby deer.

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This week we reference some previous episodes of Best Friend Therapy: Games, Competition, Imposter Syndrome from Season 1, and Jealousy from Season 2.

"Good Reasons for Bad Feelings" is by Randolph M. Nesse: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Reasons-Bad-Feelings-Evolutionary/dp/0241291089

Accessible and informative summaries of Richard Erskine's work on 'Racket Feelings', Jackie Schiff's work on 'Reparenting' and Eric Berne's 'Parent-Adult-Child' model can all be found in a fantastic book called "TA Today" by Ian Stewart and Vann Joines: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Today-New-Introduction-Transactional-Analysis/dp/1870244028

And thank you Merriam-Webster for confirming the true etymology of the 'fawn' response: Middle English speakers adapted an Old English word meaning "to rejoice" to create the verb faunen, which shifted in spelling over time to become fawn. That Old English word, in turn, derives from fagan, meaning "glad." Fagan is also an ancestor of the English adjective fain, whose earliest (now obsolete) meaning is "happy" or "pleased." This fawn is not, however, related to the noun fawn, referring to a young deer. For that we can thank the Latin noun fetus, meaning "offspring." Sorry Liz.

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Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [email protected]

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Social Media:

Elizabeth Day @elizabday

Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

Welcome to Best Friend Therapy, where we chat about what's on our minds, to get deeper in our minds, and this week we're talking about a hotly requested topic - toxic friendships.

We talk about how the pandemic reset friendship protocol for many of us, how introverts and extroverts get along, different definitions of friendship and what a co-dependent friendship feels like.

We practice using conflict constructively to negotiate healthy friendship boundaries and we tackle that dreaded question, how do you break up with a friend?

Elizabeth gets her head around the concept of friendship dating and Emma introduces the idea of a friendship Venn diagram. She loves a diagram.

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Elizabeth refers to our first episode of Season 2 about People-Pleasing, which you can listen to here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/s2-ep1-best-friend-therapy-people-pleasing-why-do-we/id1614793299?i=1000570241594

Glennon Doyle's podcast "We Can Do Hard Things" can be heard here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/we-can-do-hard-things-with-glennon-doyle/id1564530722

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Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [email protected]

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Social Media:

Elizabeth Day @elizabday

Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

Welcome to Best Friend Therapy, where we chat about what's on our minds, to get deeper in our minds, and this week we're talking about jealousy.

Do you have a touch of the green-eyed monster?

Well, that might not be a bad thing. Because jealousy can show up to tell us when a relationship we value requires some maintenance - we jealously guard something because it matters to us.

Sometimes that relationship will be with a friend or loved one, but sometimes the relationship that needs our attention is the one we have with ourselves.

In this episode, Elizabeth and Emma share with brutal honesty the times in their lives they have felt jealous, and Emma challenges the dangerous idea that we should feel flattered or gracious when someone else is jealous of us.

Emma reveals her avoidant side and why she'd rather just play in a different sandpit, and Elizabeth reveals that she can get you whatever you need from the Dark Web. JK.

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Elizabeth's How to Fail episode with Alain de Botton can be heard here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/how-to-fail-with-elizabeth-day/id1407451189?i=1000452022015

Emma talks about the work of Freud and Bowlby in terms of attachment and object relations, you can read more about it here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/best-friend-therapy/id1614793299?i=1000556922612

You can listen to the BFT episodes of Shoulds and Oughts and Special Occasions here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/best-friend-therapy/id1614793299?i=1000556922612
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/best-friend-therapy/id1614793299?i=1000556922612

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Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [email protected]

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Social Media:

Elizabeth Day @elizabday

Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

TW: Miscarriage

This week's episode is on a subject that's incredibly close to our hearts - fertility.

We wanted to do it justice by sharing some very personal stories and so it feels important to say that, if you are going through a fertility journey right now and don't feel this is the episode for you, we see you and we will be here for you if you want to come back to it another time.

If you do want to listen, we see you too, and you'll hear us talk openly about miscarriage, IVF and the realities of parenthood. You'll hear Elizabeth coin a phrase that everyone has to hear - "fertility privilege" - and you'll hear first hand how to support someone else who is going through their own journey to parenthood.

If this episode resonates with you, we hope you feel less alone after listening.

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Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [email protected]

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Social Media:

Elizabeth Day @elizabday

Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

We're back!

We're so happy to be coming to you with Season Two of Best Friend Therapy, where we chat about what's on our minds, to get deeper in our minds.

And we have felt SO bad about having left you for so long. We've been worried that we'd let you down, or you wouldn't like us anymore. So we stayed up all night thinking about how to make it up to you, how to please you... hmmn. Hang on a minute, I see what we're doing here.

So this one's for the people-pleasers, the people-pleasers in recovery, and the people who'll avoid the pressures to please at any cost.

We talk about why outsourcing our sense of self to others is a risky business, the four (yes, four!) different types of people-pleasing, how to raise your stock at work and renegotiate your friendships, and why straight talking in romantic relationships is the new pillow talk.

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Correction: When we're talking about 'heeding the seed', we're referring back to Season One, Episode Three on 'Shoulds & Oughts', not Episode 7 on 'Competition' as Emma thought. So it's 1-0 to Elizabeth. That'll please her.

Emma is so passionate about how to stop people-pleasing that she's written a book about it, and you can buy it from all good book stores, but here's a link to make it easy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Please-Yourself-Stop-People-Pleasing-Transform/dp/0008409374

The episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, featuring Emma, was Episode Seven from Season Ten and you can listen to it here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/how-to-fail-with-elizabeth-day/id1407451189?i=1000513387472

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Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [email protected]

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Social Media:

Elizabeth Day @elizabday

Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

Welcome to this episode of Best Friend Therapy, where we chat about what's on our minds, to get deeper in our minds.

Well, we've reached the final episode of season one (sob!) so it seemed only fitting to make this a conversation all about endings. But don't panic, because we also look at the beginnings that follow endings - including the beginning of season two of Best Friend Therapy, which will be here before you know it!

We talk about the endings that arose through the pandemic, how friendships and relationships evolve, and what quitting really means. Elizabeth shares a personal experience of bereavement and Emma shares her perspective of grief through a therapy lens. It's not an easy listen at times, but one we hope will help anyone who has experienced loss themselves.

We hope that you've enjoyed this first season of Best Friend Therapy as much as we have and would love to hear from you! So why not email us or slide into our DMs and let us know what you'd like us to talk about next time.

We'll be back soon with another conversation for the soul but, in the meantime, if you could rate, review and subscribe, we'd be so grateful.

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Elizabeth references "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle.

Emma talks about the grief cycle, developed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and made famous in her book, "On Death and Dying", in 1969.

Both are available from all good book stores.

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Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [email protected]

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Social Media:

Elizabeth Day @elizabday

Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy

Welcome to this episode of Best Friend Therapy, where we chat about what's on our minds, to get deeper in our minds.

This episode is all about competition - how it can become a problem when it comes from a place of scarcity and how we can learn to develop an abundance mindset that allows us to reach our goals more securely and meaningfully. We look at competition through the lens of attachment theory and explore the difference between belonging and fitting in.

Elizabeth takes a break from training for Paris 2024 to unpack her relationship with jealousy, and Emma tucks into some cheese that she made on her own sustainable dairy farm.

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You can listen to Elizabeth's conversation with Brené Brown in Season 13, Episode 1 of How to Fail here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/how-to-fail-with-elizabeth-day/id1407451189?i=1000547612407

Emma references various psychological concepts in this episode, including:
Drivers: Kahler, T. (1975). Drivers—The Key to the Process Script. Transactional Analysis Journal, 5:3 http://changingminds.org/explanations/motivation/kahler_drivers/kahlers_drivers.htm#nav

Process Scripts: Kahler, T. (2008). The Process Therapy Model: The Six Personality Types with Adaptations, Taibi Kahler Associates, Inc. http://changingminds.org/explanations/models/kahler_scripts.htm

Reparenting and Redecision therapy: these and many other concepts are covered in this brilliant introduction to Transactional Analysis https://www.amazon.co.uk/Today-New-Introduction-Transactional-Analysis/dp/1870244028

There is a wealth of information available about attachment theory but one of Emma's favourite books is: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Attachment-Psychotherapy-David-J-Wallin/dp/1593854560

Edit: thank you so much to Gemma who emailed us with a reference for the mice! From the Prologue of: Pearce, C (2016). A Short Introduction to Attachment and Attachment Disorder (Second Edition). London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers

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Best Friend Therapy is hosted by Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [email protected]

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Social Media:

Elizabeth Day @elizabday

Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Best Friend Therapy @best.friend.therapy