Self-Loathing: Feeling like an imposter in your own life
Friendship Therapy
Emma Reed Turrell
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 June 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome back to Dial Emma! Each week, I'll be answering your dilemmas with honesty, empathy, and a few therapeutic truth bombs to help you make sense of life's stickiest moments. If you've ever wished you had a therapist in your back pocket, Dial Emma is here to help.
This week, we hear a deeply personal and vulnerable dilemma from a listener who feels like an imposter in her own life. She struggles to feel like she 'belongs' in her friendship groups and her family unit, and often leans into self-sabotage and feelings of jealousy to cope with an overwhelming fear of ending up alone.
During the episode, we unpack where these painful beliefs often come from—early life experiences where a child might learn to take the blame in order to feel safe. Through therapeutic insight and compassion, we explore how harsh self-judgment, fear of rejection, and unmet needs can shape adult relationships and our inner narrative.
This episode offers a gentle, validating invitation to reconsider: Is it really you that’s not okay—or is there something about this that’s not okay?
If you have a dilemma for Emma, please fill out this form.
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Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.
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Social media:
Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell
Dial Emma @dialemmapodcast
Email: [email protected]
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On Morrison's Market Street, for this week's fresh weekly specials, save a third on our British King's scallops in shells, now 99p each. |
| 0:09.1 | So let's do the dive in and bring the taste of the sea to you with some delicious scallops that are pure coastal luxury on a plate. |
| 0:17.1 | Pan-fried in butter, splash a lemon, and that is dinner sorted. |
| 0:20.8 | Fresh from Market Street. Pan fried in butter, splash a lemon, and that is dinner sorted. |
| 0:22.9 | Fresh from Market Street. |
| 0:29.9 | Majority of stores, subject to availability excludes online and Morrison's Daily Wals 1 pound 50 each ends 29th of June. |
| 0:37.1 | Hello and welcome to Dial Emma, the podcast where your Dialmmas meet my therapeutic insights. |
| 0:41.9 | I'm Emma Reed-Torrell, psychotherapist, author, and well-recovering people-pleaser. |
| 0:46.4 | Each week, I'll be unpacking real-life questions from listeners just like you. |
| 0:50.1 | The big ones, the small ones, the ones that keep you up at night, |
| 0:54.7 | offering practical tools and gentle truths to help you find your way through. |
| 0:58.3 | So if you've got a question, you don't know how to ask out loud. |
| 1:00.1 | You've come to the right place. |
| 1:11.2 | And now a dilemma about being an imposter. |
| 1:16.5 | Why do I feel like an imposter in friendship groups? |
| 1:21.7 | I always feel like I'm tolerated rather than genuinely liked. |
| 1:23.9 | I never feel good enough. |
| 1:30.7 | I always feel I don't belong or that my friendships are only surface deep. They serve a purpose at that time, but I'll be dropped as soon as I've served that purpose. Why can't I keep |
| 1:36.9 | long-standing friendships with people I get on really well with at the beginning? But then I say |
| 1:42.1 | something that sabotages that relationship for good |
| 1:45.2 | and then I've lost a good friend. Or we drift apart because life takes a change and I mourn that loss |
| 1:53.0 | and I hate change. Why can't I keep my mouth shut even if something has upset me. All because I'm jealous of other friendships |
... |
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