Hello and welcome back to Dial Emma! Today I want you to think about the last time you felt guilty. Maybe you actually did something you regretted. But I wonder how many other things make you feel guilty too - saying no, cancelling plans when you're exhausted, buying something for yourself, resting on a Sunday, or even feeling happy when someone you love is struggling.

We use the same word for all of these very different experiences. And once we've called it guilt, we tend to assume it's telling us something true. If I feel guilty, I must be guilty. But feelings aren't verdicts. So perhaps the more useful question isn't why do I feel guilty, it's what is this particular guilt actually trying to tell me?

Today's dilemma comes from a listener I'm calling Rachel. She feels guilty about almost everything - saying no, not seeing her parents enough, working instead of being with her children, being with her children instead of working, resting, spending money on herself. She doesn't think she's a selfish person, and she knows rationally she can't keep everybody happy. But knowing that doesn't make the feeling go away. She wants to know how to tell when she should actually listen to her guilt.

I don't think the goal is to become someone who never feels guilty. I think it's to become someone who knows what to do when guilt arrives. Sometimes you listen and repair, and sometimes you recognise an old rule knocking at the door and decide it doesn't get to run the house.

Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.

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This week on Dial Emma, I'm tackling a question I suspect most of us have asked ourselves: why do I care so much what other people think?

We're often told we shouldn't. "Stop caring," "you do you," "other people's opinions are none of your business." But I'm not convinced that's actually the goal. I care what my children think of me, what my friends think, whether the people I love feel respected in their relationships with me. Other people matter to us, so their experience of us matters too. The more interesting question is why, for some of us, other people's opinions become so powerful that they start to override our own.

Today's dilemma comes from a listener I'm calling Sophie. She's 38, confident by most measures, with a good job and a lovely group of friends - but she constantly monitors how people respond to her. If someone's quiet, she wonders if she's annoyed them. She struggles to say no without a lengthy explanation attached. She asks everyone's opinion on everything, and once someone questions her choice, she loses her own sense of it. She thinks she should be past this by now. She wants to know how to stop.

Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.

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Email: contact@dial-emma.uk

This week on Dial Emma, we're stepping slightly outside of relationships - although, as you'll hear, they find their way back in anyway. I'm tackling one of the internet's most Googled questions, and one I suspect a lot of you already know in your bones: why do I overthink everything?

Maybe you send a message and read it back six times. Maybe you get home from a meeting and start conducting a full forensic investigation into a two-second pause that nobody else even noticed. If any of that sounds familiar, you're not alone - and I don't think you're overthinking because your brain is faulty. I think your brain has taken on an impossible job.

Today's dilemma comes from a listener I'm calling Lucy. She's exhausted by her own mind. She analyses conversations, messages, what she said and didn't say at work, and even after she finally makes a decision, she starts worrying she's made the wrong one. She wants to know why she does this, and how to make it stop.

I don't think Lucy is really asking why she thinks so much. I think she's asking why she can't ever feel certain enough to stop. And that's a much more interesting question.

Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.

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Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Email: contact@dial-emma.uk

This week on Dial Emma, I'm delving into a relationship question people often feel ashamed to even ask out loud - because surely loneliness is something we feel when we're single, not when we're sharing a bed with someone who loves us? And yet, some of the loneliest people I've ever met are in long-term relationships.

Our listener writes: "I've been married for nine years, and my husband is a genuinely good man. We don't fight very often and we parent well together, but somewhere along the way, I started feeling invisible. We spend every evening in the same room, usually both looking at our phones or watching television, and weeks go by without us really talking. It's not that we're unhappy, it's that I feel deeply alone. How can I feel lonely when I'm lying next to the person I love?"

In this episode, I explore why loneliness isn't the absence of people, but the absence of feeling known. Relationships don't protect us from loneliness - connection does, and connection needs tending.

I also introduce my Four C's model, built on the transactional analysis framework of parent–adult–child ego states, to map where connection can live, and where it can quietly go missing, in a relationship.

Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.

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Book my 2027 women's retreat at Bliss House in Crete: https://bliss-house-experience.replit.app

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Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Email: contact@dial-emma.uk

This week on Dial Emma: What am I Missing?, I'm exploring a relationship question that sounds simple but carries real weight - one that's less about disagreement and more about the loneliness of feeling unseen inside a relationship.

Why doesn't my partner understand me?

Our listener says: "My partner and I have been together for four years. We rarely argue, but there's a recurring disconnect. When I've had a hard day, he jumps straight to solutions - but I just want to feel understood. He gets frustrated when I reject his help and we both end up feeling unheard and unappreciated."

In this episode, I unpack three blind spots behind the feeling of being misunderstood:

1. Confusing being understood with being agreed with. I introduce the concept of self-differentiation - the ability to stay standing in your own experience while remaining open and connected to someone else's.

2. Giving the help we'd like to receive. One partner offers solutions because that's how they show care; the other needs empathy first. Neither is uncaring, they're just speaking different emotional languages. I revisit Gary Chapman's five love languages (acts of service, physical touch, words of affirmation, gift giving, quality time) not as boxes to pick from, but as a starting point for becoming "bilingual" in how we give and receive love.

3. Certainty quietly replacing curiosity. Early in relationships we ask endless questions; years in, we assume we already know the answers. It's important to return to curiosity in relationships - to ask about who your partner is now, not just who they've been.

Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.

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Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Email: contact@dial-emma.uk

Hello lovely listeners and welcome to Dial Emma: What am I Missing?

There are some relationship questions that get typed into Google more than almost any other - often late at night, often after a hard conversation or moment of disappointment.

Why do we keep having the same argument?

I've asked it myself. Most of us have. And after years of sitting across from couples and individuals in the therapy room, I've noticed something: people often walk in asking one question, and walk out realising they needed to ask a different one entirely.

That's the idea behind this new season of Dial Emma, named after my second book, What Am I Missing? The book grew out of watching clients circle the same obstacles, the same patterns, the same kinds of people, again and again, until they'd finally say: I don't get it. There must be something here I'm not seeing. This season asks that same question of the internet's biggest relationship dilemmas, one a week, each one run through a therapeutic lens.

This week's dilemma: Our listener has been with her partner for eleven years. Two young kids, no huge rows - but the same disagreement every week. She carries the mental load, and he's stopped offering to help because he "can't win." Suddenly, they're no longer arguing about housework, but questioning whether the other person cares.

Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.

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Book my 2027 women's retreat at Bliss House in Crete: https://bliss-house-experience.replit.app

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Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Email: contact@dial-emma.uk

Hello lovely listeners and welcome to a brand new series of Dial Emma!

There's a question that gets typed into phones more than almost any other relationship question - often late at night, often after a hard conversation.

How do I know if this relationship is right?

I've asked it myself. Most of us have. And after years of sitting across from couples and individuals in the therapy room, I've noticed something: people often walk in asking one question, and walk out realising they needed to ask a different one entirely.

That's the idea behind this new season of Dial Emma, named after my second book, What Am I Missing? The book grew out of watching clients circle the same obstacles, the same patterns, the same kinds of people, again and again, until they'd finally say: I don't get it. There must be something here I'm not seeing. This season asks that same question of the internet's biggest relationship dilemmas, one a week, each one run through a therapeutic lens.

This week's dilemma: A listener has been with her partner for six years. He's kind, dependable, trustworthy - everyone tells her she's lucky. But the butterflies are gone, she sometimes imagines other lives, and she can't shake the question: is nothing wrong the same as this is right? Is she settling?

Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.

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Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Email: contact@dial-emma.uk

Hi! It's me. This is the last bonus Voicenote Therapy episode of Dial Emma, combining my love of long voicenotes with therapeutic insights to create something new and, hopefully, helpful.

This week, I'm sitting with something I thought was about rest, but turns out to be about permission. That moment at the end of a long day when you finally sit down, and instead of resting, you think: what have I forgotten? What else should I do?

Why do we so often push rest to the bottom of the list, after everything and everyone else? How can we begin to recognise the subtle but important differences between 'stopping' and 'resting'? And why are so many of us keeping an invisible scoreboard, knowing that the game will never end?

A thought to sit with: "You are not a machine that occasionally deserves maintenance. Your wellbeing is part of the work, not something you squeeze in afterwards."

This week's practice: Rest without earning it first. Finish one thing less. Go to bed with a job still undone.

Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.

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Book my 2027 women's retreat at Bliss House in Crete: https://bliss-house-experience.replit.app

Social media:

Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Email: contact@dial-emma.uk