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Therapy-room clarity for real-life emotional knots.
Dear Therapists follows Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch as they work through intimate problems with everyday people. The sessions move from raw stories toward concrete emotional guidance, then often return to hear what changed afterward.
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Dear Therapists is an advice-and-session series shaped around real emotional problems rather than abstract self-help themes. Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch guide people through conflicts that are familiar, messy, and usually bigger than the presenting issue. A mother brings cookies and toys, and the conversation opens into a daughter’s old fear of not being seen. A woman describes the turbulence of her parents’ divorce, and the focus shifts from the facts of the conflict to the feelings she rarely names. The show listens for repetition. Childhood coping strategies reappear in adult relationships, adult children struggle with what they owe parents who caused harm, and family holidays carry old custody battles into the present. Some episodes work through romantic trust and Instagram flirtations. Others sit with infertility, chronic illness, stepfamily strain, alcoholism, depression, abuse, and the exhaustion of trying to repair a relationship alone. The pacing is patient. The language is plain. The emotional work is often sharp. Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch are direct when someone is avoiding the real subject, but the tone stays humane and careful. The format also gives the series a rare sense of consequence. Advice is not treated as a closing speech; the show often circles back to hear how a person used it, resisted it, or changed after the session. That follow-through makes the episodes feel less like performance and more like supervised practice. The show suits listeners who are interested in therapy’s mechanics: how questions are framed, how defenses soften, how people learn to say what hurts without drowning in the whole history. It is especially strong on family systems, emotional inheritance, and the difficult difference between explaining someone’s behavior and excusing it. The result is intimate, useful audio that turns other people’s sessions into mirrors without pretending that one answer fixes every life.
Made for: For listeners drawn to therapy, advice columns, family dynamics, and emotionally specific storytelling. It suits people who prefer careful questions and practical reflection over quick inspiration.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its session-and-follow-up structure: problems are explored in real time, then revisited after the advice has been tried. Its best moments come from tracing how old family patterns quietly shape present relationships.
I’m Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk To Someone. And I’m Guy Winch, author of Emotional First Aid. We’re both advice columnists, TED speakers, and of course therapists in clinical practice who want to bring the lessons of the therapy room outside the therapy room… to all of you. Each week on DEAR THERAPISTS, we invite you to be a fly-on-the-wall in these personal, raw, transformative sessions with everyday people and then hear what happens when we give concrete, actionable advice and have them report back to let us know how things went after the session...
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch make family conflict legible by tracing present reactions back to the emotional patterns that keep them alive.
Dear Therapists with Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch lets difficult relationships reveal themselves in real time, then slows the conversation where a familiar complaint starts hiding a deeper pattern.
Cookies arrive, old loneliness flares; Lori and Guy help you hear the argument underneath.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A careful mother-daughter conversation that treats old hurt as something to understand, not score.
Carol and Michelle's conversation stays with how Carol's depression shaped Michelle's loneliness and alarm, and the hosts give that space without rushing past it.
A measured episode that finds its force in careful listening and plainspoken feeling.
Nicole's story keeps returning to the same gap: what happened, and what it felt like to live through it. Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch stay on that seam with care, and the episode works best when it moves from plain reporting into the harder work of saying stress, anger, and…
An encore that revisits a difficult family dynamic with practical, humane attention.
This encore returns to a relationship still working out how to live with a partner's child in the middle of it. Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch treat Priscilla's story less as a settled success and more as an ongoing case of repair, where the signs of progress are tentative plans…
A holiday story about family logistics, loyalty, and the strain of being split in two.
Holiday dread here comes less from the calendar than from the custody schedule. The guest talks through shuttling between parents, fitting in Thanksgiving twice, and moving through Hanukkah and Christmas while trying to give both households equal time.
A plainspoken marriage story about being unheard, the fallout for children, and the hard work of facing what is true.
Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch keep the focus on a marriage that breaks down around being unheard. The piece stays with the damage that follows when adult conflict spills onto children and an affair is brought into the open.
Two classical-education teachers slow-read novels like Jane Eyre, chapter by chapter.
Book talk with room to wander.
Dear Therapists hosts Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch examine Doug's difficulty moving forward after a five-and-a-half-year engagement to Max, whose clinical OCD dominated their relationship.
This encore episode of Dear Therapists revisits a popular session where therapists Lori and Guy help Carol and Michelle navigate their mother-daughter conflict, offering listeners another chance to gain therapeutic insights.
Nicole brings Dear Therapists a letter about her parents separating after 39 years of marriage, and Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch quickly identify her as the youngest child who has long been the family mediator.
Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch present follow-ups from four past therapy clients one year after their sessions.
This encore episode of Dear Therapists revisits a popular session about Diane's infertility struggle, offering listeners a chance to gain new insights through repeated listening.
A therapy session where a man discusses his guilt over caring for his aging, abusive alcoholic father who called him names and physically abused him growing up.
This encore episode of Dear Therapists revisits a popular session where Jennifer seeks advice about her fiance's Instagram flirtations, offering listeners a chance to gain new insights through repeated listening.
This is an encore episode of Dear Therapists featuring a session about Savannah's chronically-ill husband, offering therapeutic insights on navigating such relationships.
"I would probably spend it with my best friend" becomes a concrete plan, not just a wish.
"You were the one that was trying to convince her to stay, to repair, to work."
This bonus episode features a conversation with Stacey Abrams and Lori Gottlieb about romance writing and the creative process.
This episode features promotional trailers for iHeart podcasts including Math & Magic with marketing insights from industry leaders and Mind Over Mountain with Cheryl Strayed interviewing adventurers.
This transcript features promotional trailers for multiple iHeart podcasts covering topics like marketing insights, financial education, and interviews with athletes and adventurers.
This episode features promotional trailers for multiple iHeart podcasts, including Math & Magic on marketing, Earn Your Leisure on financial literacy, and Mind Over Mountain on athlete interviews.
This transcript features promotional trailers for multiple iHeart podcasts covering topics like marketing insights, financial education, and personal growth through interviews with athletes and adventurers.