Dear Therapists with Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch

Lori Gottlieb wrote Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and Guy Winch wrote Emotional First Aid. Together they run what amounts to a public consulting room. In each episode a listener writes in with a real problem (a stalled marriage, a rift with an adult child, a job that has become unbearable, a grief that will not lift) and Lori and Guy spend the first half of the show actually talking with that person on air. They give feedback, suggest small experiments to try during the week, and then check back in the following episode to hear what happened. It is one of the few advice shows that shows its work and updates its conclusions. The hosts disagree in public, correct themselves when a listener reports back, and are honest about the limits of what any conversation can accomplish. Lori brings the narrative instincts of a memoirist and Guy brings the focused, skills-based approach of a short-term therapist, and the combination is a good model of how two clinicians can hold the same situation in very different frames. Listeners often say they learn as much from the questions the hosts ask as from the answers they offer. Episodes run about 40 minutes and are surprisingly cathartic even when the problem on screen is nothing like yours.