telling-off

The matchmakers have been known to give participants a telling-off for certain behaviours or comments that they deem unacceptable.

Lou Campbell, a relationship counsellor, explains that the telling-off "is entirely made for TV" as qualified therapists "challenge behaviours" but don't scold their clients.

On one occasion, when he almost destroyed it, Bob recalled getting a severe telling-off from his mum, who "stood it up again, bandaged it up and it took off again."

The telling-off I got in an undergraduate seminar still stings: If I could get over my “junior Marxist training,” the teacher said, I might actually come to know Blake’s poems.

The more outwardly broken figures are Joe, a quiet-voiced counselor with nightmares who allows some of the guys to help him find the lakehouse where his abuse took place, and Mike, all roiling anger, whose scene is a rageful telling-off of the Church review board that denied him justice.