Have you ever taken a piece of advice? I’m not asking a rhetorical question. Have you ever once in your life been given a piece of advice that you’ve then acted on? I ask this question a lot at parties, and generally find the answer is: ‘No, not that I can think of.’ It may be that when we take good advice, we begin to imagine we came up with the idea in the first place. It may be that we always just do whatever it is we were always going to do. All I can say for sure is that if you ask: ‘What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever given someone else?’, people will keep you there all night.
Best Friend Therapy bills itself as a chat between two best friends that will impart the blessings and insight of therapy. The hosts are, per the name, best friends: Elizabeth Day, a broadcaster and author, and Emma Reed Turrell, a therapist of an unusually private and introverted persuasion. The idea is that Day has been benefitting from Reed Turrell’s expertise for years, and now we all get a chance to experience the same.
A key tenet of the theory is that a game is only a game if you don’t know you’re playing it
The slight problem is that the show often boils down to advice, which comes for free and no one values, rather than insight, which is hard earned and tightly guarded. The first episode takes up the problem of boundaries: personal, private, professional. How to set them and insist on them when we would rather please people. ‘We think of boundaries as dividing lines rather than points of contact,’ says Reed Turrell, who suggests we conceive of them as a ‘mutually respectful point of contact’.
It’s a nice idea, but it feels more like a metaphorical work-around than a breakthrough.
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