GeniesLoki

TBF, if your partner treats you like a sex worker you absolutely should object to that. But that's not the same as having sex with your partner, and I'm not sure that people are making that fine grained distinction on the "free therapist" front.

I should perhaps point out that I am typically the "free therapist" in my friendships and relationships to a really disproportionate degree. I'm not saying that people don't have valid problems they are describing by this term, I'm saying that I think the labelling is badly off.

I've seen this go very well and I've seen this go very badly. When it goes very well, it looks nothing like therapy because it is about mutuality and deepening the relationship. When it goes very badly it looks nothing like therapy because you cannot be sufficiently objective.

Is there any space in the middle for this kind of phenomenon? If so, what would it be like? How to stay above it?

I'm not sure, but I don't think so! I think healthy emotional support with your partner intrinsically deepens the relationship in a way that it doesn't with a therapist, and a relationship intrinsically lacks the objectivity required to play therapist accurately.

I think there's a very wide range of variation of healthy modes of this - some of them will look more therapy-like in terms of the methods deployed, some of them will look less therapy-like, but they are always fundamentally not therapy in really crucial ways.

Please define therapy

Therapy is what therapists do. I'm afraid you can't define it more precisely than that. I can tell you some typical things therapists do? But generally it's about helping people deal with their emotions and live their lives better using a number of different related techniques.