This struck a chord with me. I work as a coach to parents who have special needs, and my role feels a lot like that of a therapist. Our team sees a very strong correlation between the quality of our relationship with our clients and how well they implement our program. It’s funny (maybe not) that we spend so much time preaching to our clients the importance of loving their children, or rather, making their children feel loved “no matter what” but it’s not until I read your newsletter that I realized something: the more we make our clients (the parents) feel loved unconditionally by us, the more likely they will know how to make their children feel that way too.
Thanks for the clinical studies as well. It will help me as I prepare a memo for the team.
I see your dreamwork circle and guides on your website. I would love our audience to learn more about you. Do you have a lead magnet like a resource guide or a how-to guide that I could share with them?
Thanks so much for your reflections, Kim! It means a lot to hear that this theme has resonated so deeply with you and the work you do (which sounds so needed and impactful). And indeed, I imagine a coaching relationship can be a lot like a therapeutic one and many principles still apply. I love your approach of demonstrating that love to your clients and giving them an embodied sense of it–I imagine they would benefit greatly from that. Good luck implementing that, I wish you all the best!
I'm currently working on finalising a free dreamwork resource to publish on Substack for my paid subscribers, but I'm happy to share that with you over email when it's done!
Sounds good. I also saw you responded to my email. Lots of free stuff. Let me have a look at which one would make the most sense, or maybe send it all. Why not? Maybe we can do a resource swap? At the moment I have one to prime the brain for a good night's sleep, one for an intense day (calm and clarity and focus... Oh I should lean into the alliteration and change the name to calm, clarity and concentration...) and we are working on one with protocols to help with cognitive decline (lots of requests for that one).
If your clients are paying you for services, it’s not unconditional love by definition. That’s an illusion as you are engaging in an unequal power relationship. It’s a slippery slope.
I am very cautious when people appear to be very certain of their opinions. I think many things can be true at once. It's true that the relationship is unequal and that's why therapists really have to do their inner work to not cause harm. A lot of that money goes into maintaining the safety and sacredness of that "love": supervision, personal therapy, ongoing training (these are all mandatory and cost a shit-ton of money). Just because there are therapists who misuse love doesn't mean love is the issue. There have always been and always will be therapists who abuse this work–love is not the problem here, it's the fact that we don't talk about it and we keep it all unconscious.
From my perspective, this unconditional kind of love does have some necessary conditions (read: boundaries) that keep it safe: not engaging in a friendship/sexual relationship outside of the therapeutic one, meeting only for the allocated time, confidentiality etc etc. But healthy love is boundaried love! And the love can be unconditional in terms of the client themselves and their material: that the therapist doesn't respond like all the people who presumably love the client in real life around their difficult material, but that they actually stay and help the client deal with it non-judgementally. It really takes love to do that, at least in the approaches I'm trained in.
Have you ever heard of JD Gill’s book “Seeing: In Intimacy and Psychotherapy”? I just heard about it on a Joseph Campbell podcast yesterday, and then stumbled upon this article today. Total synchronicity I believe. Curious if you’re familiar…
I prefer the term, positive regard, as a psychotherapist ‘loving’ their client is a problem for so many reasons. Clients pay a mental health professional for professional services. They’re not paying for a relationship and it would be unethical for a psychotherapist to present their services in such a manner. Relational repair, attachment work and transference/countertransfence work might be involved, but it’s never love in the true sense of the word. Too many unhealthy psychotherapists derive too much ego gratification in unhealthy encounters with their clients.
I appreciate your perspective and it's one shared by many (probably most) therapists, especially in the behavioural side of approaches. Positive regard is a way of saying love, indeed, in a less threatening way, as are attunement or empathy. And I agree that it would be unethical for therapists to present their services as such, it would ring a few alarm bells for me if I read that on their website.
At the same time, I also believe love is a significant part of therapeutic work. Like I said in the article, this doesn't need to be expressed in any overt way and it shouldn't be advertised as such. However, it's undeniable and well documented (interestingly, particularly in psychoanalytic literature on narcissism, as well as in clinical writings on transpersonal psychotherapy) that therapists do end up loving their clients–but in a particular way.
What I was trying to challenge in the essay is most of our perception of what love means (and that it's unhealthy or attached to sexuality) and why we might resist it. It's so interesting we get so tense around this topic! It says a lot about how love has been for us. But there's a distinction: therapeutic love is not attachment, romantic, or sexual, and it's not transference/countertransference. It's completely something else and it's an important factor in healing. From my perspective, it's a healing experience for the therapist to access this kind of love in themselves. If I didn't want to use love, perhaps I would use the Buddhist word "lovingkindness", or an unattached but deep compassion and sympathetic joy.
I don't think anyone can understand it unless they've trained as a therapist and found themselves having this odd experience. So I completely understand the resistance and challenge. And I'm not saying it's a universal experience: for example, I doubt that a CBT therapist who sees a client for 12 sessions will feel it. I'm more convinced that a transpersonal or Jungian therapist is more likely to feel that for a client they work with for over a year and got to know on a really deep level. It's a different framework when you approach therapy through a soul perspective than a pathological one (but again, not all therapists...). I really think that when you get to know people that deeply, as us therapists get to do, it's really hard not to love them. You see their struggles to be good, to make sense of their hurts, to find out who they are. It's really moving.
It's also interesting to see the resistance arising to this, especially when it comes to money. When I was only a client, I would've most likely agreed that my therapist didn't really love me, but was in it for the cash (and maybe they kind of liked me). I have an entirely different perspective now about all my former therapists. It also makes me think of the devaluation of the feminine in society and how we're uncomfortable to pay for "mothering" or nurturing/caring roles. Can a therapist love you and also care about making a good living? I think they can both be true at the same time–and that this represents healthy therapy (rather than a therapist sacrificing their wellbeing to care for clients because they think of themselves as a saviour; or one who only does it for the money and power–both signs of narcissism).
It's a very rich theme so thank you for your contribution!
Reading this essay the first thing i asked myself was 'why would i want my therapist to love me?'. I can understand i want them to like me or respect me but why love?
That being said i did feel that i was liked, respected, honoured in the process i was going through, understood which in turn taught me what holding space for someone feels like, the one where there's no judgement just validation for the experience in itself while at the same time there are solid boundaries and firmness in confrontation and accountability aka it wasn't just pats on the back and there, there, there. I felt guided with care and gentleness but also made to see what i wasn't able to on my own or didn't want to which is what i had signed up for and also empowered to feel accountable for what i lived in my experiences (maybe it sounds harsh but it helped me understand that i am not a passive participant in my own life and that i have the power to say no or leave or ask for what i need or want).
One thing that i did reflect on or some sort of conclusion i drew from reading this was that this feeling of being loved is probably very aligned with the patient's own experience of being loved as a friend of mine and myself shared the same therapist for a short time and we were discussing progress and framing of experiences and hers was very different than mine but also very in line with what i know of how she was made to feel love at home vs my own experience. And to go a bit more into this - for someone that maybe comes from a more critical environment or a colder one this type of approach would be met with suspicion or plain rejection because the parallel or ability to understand the emotion behind it is not there (yet) and has to be built in time but with the tools that the patient has in the now. And i've seen this again in my own process once I've started feeling my feelings instead of thinking them or going about them like i would check something off a list, similar to what Mihai was describing below.
I really love the example you shared with you and a friend seeing the same therapist and having very different experiences. It's exactly that, we all have our expectations of what being love means based on our experiences (which is often not great: rejection, criticism, boundary issues etc). Love is culturally expressed differently as well.
Most of us are very defended against love and feel very suspicious of it, which makes sense given our history of it. I wrote the title that way because I know it will provoke a reaction: I invite everyone to ponder why wouldn't they want their therapist to love them? And what they imagine that love might mean? (I think the key is here)
I also believe that most of us were never truly loved as we needed. Then, when we receive that love from we don't recognise it, it's unfamiliar, therefore unsafe and we reject it. Most of us are more comfortable staying in familiar patterns of love that include distance or coldness or rejection, rather than learning to feel safe around being genuinely loved. It's a huge, longterm transformation that I would've never understood until I went through it experientially.
Personally, it took me about 6 years of therapy with 3 therapists to finally be able to (allow myself to) feel loved by my therapist now. I remember the anxiety I felt around the time and various thoughts of unsafety, parts that worried about unwanted sexual feelings, boundary issues etc. A lot of other painful experiences came up around it. We worked through all of that together and it was worth it.
What's most magical to me (and still is, as a therapist) is that none of this love is declared or expressed out loud. It's like a quiet undercurrent or an invisible presence in the therapy room. It informs everything the therapist does. Most clients will never know about it and that's okay (but I do think they will feel it on some level). But I truly believe that it's a more powerful healing agent than any of the clever interventions, interpretations, or discussions in the room.
I loved this essay, María, thanks! As a "becoming therapist" I really appreciate this insights to understand further my place with clients. In my particular analysis this is something that I use to think. The willingness to understand me from my therapist and my (sometimes) attachment to her validation and love usually shows me the bigger picture I am internally working on. This essay helped me to understand it better 💙
Hi Marina, thank you for the comment! I realise that this experience is probably unique to therapists (depends on how you practice) and makes very little sense to others. It's such a strange job to be a therapist and to end up caring so deeply about people. Good luck with your training!
I think women and men might approach therapy from very different POVs. Men (or at least myself) more likely want to solve the thing, achieve a thing, find a solution or an answer. So i couldn't care less if my therapist loves me lol. I care that she guides me or leads me or provides the solution I'm seeking.
Hence, probably quite a different approach with men and women clients might be needed. Probably men aren't very well served by the current approach in therapy.
Thanks for the comments, Mihai, I appreciate you sharing your experience.
As a therapist who's worked with quite a few men and women by now, I'm not sure I would generalise that statement (although it sounds like that's true for you now). There's a lot of nuance in therapy and I think we all need different kinds of support at different times in our lives. Some people prefer coaching, some are more suited for therapy. There's no one size fits all. Plus, sometimes only searching for answers/solutions can be a way to bypass emotions and dealing with unprocessed things from the past. It's different for everyone but I don't think it's a gender thing at all. Men are very well served by therapy in my experience, I wish more of them explored their inner worlds!
Dealing with unprocessed things from the past is very important and I've actually done that (by myself) actively in the last 5 years. Emotions, etc. as well. Therapy is great for everybody, including for men.
I myself have been able or would be able to shape it to suit myself. Most might not be.
However there are (big) differences and they are not explored enough.
The very short answer here would be - Focus on a solution, and that will also solve the emotions, in mens' case.
Of course, not always, not all the time, don't do JUST that. This is just the main idea, or the difference.
I understand the underlying idea of the concept. But really, to think of it as love and frame it this way is extremely icky and triggery and offputting so myself, a victim of incest.
Not to mention I have never needed a therapist coz I need a friend or a partner or a father who didn't rape me. I need a professional mental health worker to guide me to figure out how to have a good life regardless of, and in the face of the horrors I experienced as a child.
In answer to your original question, if I were asked that, my response would be to go "YUK! what a creep!" and walk out. End.
In fact, I'm feeling weirded out by you as a person. I'm only really writing this in case it makes you consider the impacts such language or approach might have on child incest survivors. And since so many never disclose to anyone, not even a therapist, and if they ever do disclose for so many it's only after a lot of trust has been built up over a long time, you can't know you are working with someone who is a survivor or not. Not sure it's gonna be too helpful for them to be confronted with this attitude.
Hi Anne, I appreciate your comment and I'm so sorry for what you've been through. I understand why you would feel that way and your reaction makes total sense.
I agree with you that it would be wildly inappropriate and unethical to even bring such a conversation to a client, especially if there's a history of abuse. I never suggested that a therapist should ever tell a client they love them or act out this love in any way–that should simply never happen, with any kind of client. I'm working on a whole piece about therapy abuse that will discuss this dynamic in particular too.
But that doesn't mean that a therapist can't love their client, while also being professional and boundaried. Therapists undergo very intense therapy themselves for many years in order to work through their own trauma and learn to be with others in a safe way. This kind of love is really hard to describe because it's not romantic or familial: it's a form of deep care and empathy, a "feeling-with", companionship, compassion, boundaries... You can see the specific "ingredients" in the Guidelines section I wrote and you'll see it has nothing to do with "regular" love. Mostly because, as I write in the article, regular love in our society is often problematic.
You're welcome to feel weirded out by this article and even by me, although you're making assumptions about me as a person from a particular way you're choosing to understand this essay, which may or may not be reflective of who I am as a person or a therapist.
I'm relieved to hear you would never suggest or tell a client you love them.
I do feel you missed my point about clients with history of abuse - you, nor anyone ever, can actually know if you are interacting with someone who has been abused unless they disclose to you.
The important point is MOST PEOPLE DO NOT DISCLOSE. And if and when they do it is after a lengthy time while they gain trust in the person.
So it makes obvious sense to just assume that anyone might have a history of abuse.
Regarding 'love' for a client, the feelings and position in regard to the other person I do understand, as I am a teacher, and to teach someone well, you need to approach them in the same way. But I wouldn't term it love. I would term it just being a good teacher.
I think your comment about regular love being problematic in our society hits at the heart of my issue with this post. You are using a word that already comes very heavily loaded with the ideas of what it means. And those interpretations of love ARE hugely problematic in the therapeutic space.
I have heard far too many very terrible abuses committed upon already abused and troubled people, by therapists, the very people they need to trust absolutely, in the name of "love".
And that, in a nutshell, is why have a big problem with this post.
My assumptions may or may not be accurate about you, but I'll add another assummption. You read as wonderfully idealistically naive.
I’m surprised that’s your take from this post, which makes me wonder if you read the actual essay before jumping to conclusions?
I wrote it specifically to highlight (briefly) how our cultural expectations of love are constructed and how they contrast with cultures that have more than one word for it. I specifically addressed how this sets up so much confusion and potential for abuse in our world. I then broke down with clarity what this therapeutic love consists of, in different frameworks, emphasising its fundamentals in *skilled*, ethical interventions. You may have noticed that this essay is cited from academic books, one paradoxically on narcissistic abuse (including therapy abuse), it’s not my own wild theory I randomly came up with.
Then I specifically used the generic word “love” and framed my essay as a question because I was curious about people’s experiences and opinions. I’m not writing a manifesto or a law here. I’m sharing wider ideas and inviting discussion about them. You can disagree with the ideas, you can even dislike my writing, but you’re making this a personal judgement, which is unnecessary and honestly kinda mean. And you’re assuming I’m “dangerously naive” just because I wrote a short article about an idea, without having any clue about my education or how I actually work (or who I am).
Just because an idea is dangerous *to you* doesn’t automatically make the person discussing it dangerous (or the idea itself).
I don’t see any point to engage further. Even though it appears to me we agree on the important principles here, you’ve shown no curiosity in understanding where I was coming from, what the books I cited are about etc but you seem more interested in labelling me personally in a certain way. If you find that helpful, go ahead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This struck a chord with me. I work as a coach to parents who have special needs, and my role feels a lot like that of a therapist. Our team sees a very strong correlation between the quality of our relationship with our clients and how well they implement our program. It’s funny (maybe not) that we spend so much time preaching to our clients the importance of loving their children, or rather, making their children feel loved “no matter what” but it’s not until I read your newsletter that I realized something: the more we make our clients (the parents) feel loved unconditionally by us, the more likely they will know how to make their children feel that way too.
Thanks for the clinical studies as well. It will help me as I prepare a memo for the team.
I see your dreamwork circle and guides on your website. I would love our audience to learn more about you. Do you have a lead magnet like a resource guide or a how-to guide that I could share with them?
Thanks so much for your reflections, Kim! It means a lot to hear that this theme has resonated so deeply with you and the work you do (which sounds so needed and impactful). And indeed, I imagine a coaching relationship can be a lot like a therapeutic one and many principles still apply. I love your approach of demonstrating that love to your clients and giving them an embodied sense of it–I imagine they would benefit greatly from that. Good luck implementing that, I wish you all the best!
I'm currently working on finalising a free dreamwork resource to publish on Substack for my paid subscribers, but I'm happy to share that with you over email when it's done!
Sounds good. I also saw you responded to my email. Lots of free stuff. Let me have a look at which one would make the most sense, or maybe send it all. Why not? Maybe we can do a resource swap? At the moment I have one to prime the brain for a good night's sleep, one for an intense day (calm and clarity and focus... Oh I should lean into the alliteration and change the name to calm, clarity and concentration...) and we are working on one with protocols to help with cognitive decline (lots of requests for that one).
If your clients are paying you for services, it’s not unconditional love by definition. That’s an illusion as you are engaging in an unequal power relationship. It’s a slippery slope.
I am very cautious when people appear to be very certain of their opinions. I think many things can be true at once. It's true that the relationship is unequal and that's why therapists really have to do their inner work to not cause harm. A lot of that money goes into maintaining the safety and sacredness of that "love": supervision, personal therapy, ongoing training (these are all mandatory and cost a shit-ton of money). Just because there are therapists who misuse love doesn't mean love is the issue. There have always been and always will be therapists who abuse this work–love is not the problem here, it's the fact that we don't talk about it and we keep it all unconscious.
From my perspective, this unconditional kind of love does have some necessary conditions (read: boundaries) that keep it safe: not engaging in a friendship/sexual relationship outside of the therapeutic one, meeting only for the allocated time, confidentiality etc etc. But healthy love is boundaried love! And the love can be unconditional in terms of the client themselves and their material: that the therapist doesn't respond like all the people who presumably love the client in real life around their difficult material, but that they actually stay and help the client deal with it non-judgementally. It really takes love to do that, at least in the approaches I'm trained in.
Yeah, I think what I meant by unconditional was non-judgmental.
Have you ever heard of JD Gill’s book “Seeing: In Intimacy and Psychotherapy”? I just heard about it on a Joseph Campbell podcast yesterday, and then stumbled upon this article today. Total synchronicity I believe. Curious if you’re familiar…
No I haven't, but it sounds excellent and very in line with what I was exploring here. Thank you for letting me know about it!
I prefer the term, positive regard, as a psychotherapist ‘loving’ their client is a problem for so many reasons. Clients pay a mental health professional for professional services. They’re not paying for a relationship and it would be unethical for a psychotherapist to present their services in such a manner. Relational repair, attachment work and transference/countertransfence work might be involved, but it’s never love in the true sense of the word. Too many unhealthy psychotherapists derive too much ego gratification in unhealthy encounters with their clients.
I appreciate your perspective and it's one shared by many (probably most) therapists, especially in the behavioural side of approaches. Positive regard is a way of saying love, indeed, in a less threatening way, as are attunement or empathy. And I agree that it would be unethical for therapists to present their services as such, it would ring a few alarm bells for me if I read that on their website.
At the same time, I also believe love is a significant part of therapeutic work. Like I said in the article, this doesn't need to be expressed in any overt way and it shouldn't be advertised as such. However, it's undeniable and well documented (interestingly, particularly in psychoanalytic literature on narcissism, as well as in clinical writings on transpersonal psychotherapy) that therapists do end up loving their clients–but in a particular way.
What I was trying to challenge in the essay is most of our perception of what love means (and that it's unhealthy or attached to sexuality) and why we might resist it. It's so interesting we get so tense around this topic! It says a lot about how love has been for us. But there's a distinction: therapeutic love is not attachment, romantic, or sexual, and it's not transference/countertransference. It's completely something else and it's an important factor in healing. From my perspective, it's a healing experience for the therapist to access this kind of love in themselves. If I didn't want to use love, perhaps I would use the Buddhist word "lovingkindness", or an unattached but deep compassion and sympathetic joy.
I don't think anyone can understand it unless they've trained as a therapist and found themselves having this odd experience. So I completely understand the resistance and challenge. And I'm not saying it's a universal experience: for example, I doubt that a CBT therapist who sees a client for 12 sessions will feel it. I'm more convinced that a transpersonal or Jungian therapist is more likely to feel that for a client they work with for over a year and got to know on a really deep level. It's a different framework when you approach therapy through a soul perspective than a pathological one (but again, not all therapists...). I really think that when you get to know people that deeply, as us therapists get to do, it's really hard not to love them. You see their struggles to be good, to make sense of their hurts, to find out who they are. It's really moving.
It's also interesting to see the resistance arising to this, especially when it comes to money. When I was only a client, I would've most likely agreed that my therapist didn't really love me, but was in it for the cash (and maybe they kind of liked me). I have an entirely different perspective now about all my former therapists. It also makes me think of the devaluation of the feminine in society and how we're uncomfortable to pay for "mothering" or nurturing/caring roles. Can a therapist love you and also care about making a good living? I think they can both be true at the same time–and that this represents healthy therapy (rather than a therapist sacrificing their wellbeing to care for clients because they think of themselves as a saviour; or one who only does it for the money and power–both signs of narcissism).
It's a very rich theme so thank you for your contribution!
Reading this essay the first thing i asked myself was 'why would i want my therapist to love me?'. I can understand i want them to like me or respect me but why love?
That being said i did feel that i was liked, respected, honoured in the process i was going through, understood which in turn taught me what holding space for someone feels like, the one where there's no judgement just validation for the experience in itself while at the same time there are solid boundaries and firmness in confrontation and accountability aka it wasn't just pats on the back and there, there, there. I felt guided with care and gentleness but also made to see what i wasn't able to on my own or didn't want to which is what i had signed up for and also empowered to feel accountable for what i lived in my experiences (maybe it sounds harsh but it helped me understand that i am not a passive participant in my own life and that i have the power to say no or leave or ask for what i need or want).
One thing that i did reflect on or some sort of conclusion i drew from reading this was that this feeling of being loved is probably very aligned with the patient's own experience of being loved as a friend of mine and myself shared the same therapist for a short time and we were discussing progress and framing of experiences and hers was very different than mine but also very in line with what i know of how she was made to feel love at home vs my own experience. And to go a bit more into this - for someone that maybe comes from a more critical environment or a colder one this type of approach would be met with suspicion or plain rejection because the parallel or ability to understand the emotion behind it is not there (yet) and has to be built in time but with the tools that the patient has in the now. And i've seen this again in my own process once I've started feeling my feelings instead of thinking them or going about them like i would check something off a list, similar to what Mihai was describing below.
I really love the example you shared with you and a friend seeing the same therapist and having very different experiences. It's exactly that, we all have our expectations of what being love means based on our experiences (which is often not great: rejection, criticism, boundary issues etc). Love is culturally expressed differently as well.
Most of us are very defended against love and feel very suspicious of it, which makes sense given our history of it. I wrote the title that way because I know it will provoke a reaction: I invite everyone to ponder why wouldn't they want their therapist to love them? And what they imagine that love might mean? (I think the key is here)
I also believe that most of us were never truly loved as we needed. Then, when we receive that love from we don't recognise it, it's unfamiliar, therefore unsafe and we reject it. Most of us are more comfortable staying in familiar patterns of love that include distance or coldness or rejection, rather than learning to feel safe around being genuinely loved. It's a huge, longterm transformation that I would've never understood until I went through it experientially.
Personally, it took me about 6 years of therapy with 3 therapists to finally be able to (allow myself to) feel loved by my therapist now. I remember the anxiety I felt around the time and various thoughts of unsafety, parts that worried about unwanted sexual feelings, boundary issues etc. A lot of other painful experiences came up around it. We worked through all of that together and it was worth it.
What's most magical to me (and still is, as a therapist) is that none of this love is declared or expressed out loud. It's like a quiet undercurrent or an invisible presence in the therapy room. It informs everything the therapist does. Most clients will never know about it and that's okay (but I do think they will feel it on some level). But I truly believe that it's a more powerful healing agent than any of the clever interventions, interpretations, or discussions in the room.
I loved this essay, María, thanks! As a "becoming therapist" I really appreciate this insights to understand further my place with clients. In my particular analysis this is something that I use to think. The willingness to understand me from my therapist and my (sometimes) attachment to her validation and love usually shows me the bigger picture I am internally working on. This essay helped me to understand it better 💙
Hi Marina, thank you for the comment! I realise that this experience is probably unique to therapists (depends on how you practice) and makes very little sense to others. It's such a strange job to be a therapist and to end up caring so deeply about people. Good luck with your training!
Thanks! I really appreciate talking about this 💙
She loves my money Lol.
I think women and men might approach therapy from very different POVs. Men (or at least myself) more likely want to solve the thing, achieve a thing, find a solution or an answer. So i couldn't care less if my therapist loves me lol. I care that she guides me or leads me or provides the solution I'm seeking.
For women, let them speak :-).
Hence, probably quite a different approach with men and women clients might be needed. Probably men aren't very well served by the current approach in therapy.
Thanks for the comments, Mihai, I appreciate you sharing your experience.
As a therapist who's worked with quite a few men and women by now, I'm not sure I would generalise that statement (although it sounds like that's true for you now). There's a lot of nuance in therapy and I think we all need different kinds of support at different times in our lives. Some people prefer coaching, some are more suited for therapy. There's no one size fits all. Plus, sometimes only searching for answers/solutions can be a way to bypass emotions and dealing with unprocessed things from the past. It's different for everyone but I don't think it's a gender thing at all. Men are very well served by therapy in my experience, I wish more of them explored their inner worlds!
Dealing with unprocessed things from the past is very important and I've actually done that (by myself) actively in the last 5 years. Emotions, etc. as well. Therapy is great for everybody, including for men.
I myself have been able or would be able to shape it to suit myself. Most might not be.
However there are (big) differences and they are not explored enough.
The very short answer here would be - Focus on a solution, and that will also solve the emotions, in mens' case.
Of course, not always, not all the time, don't do JUST that. This is just the main idea, or the difference.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12136448/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3330641/
https://discoveringdestinies.com/gender-differences-similarities/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJWT5TT0cEk
Don't dismiss it and see things from your own POV. Be curious to understand the average man. ( Even if you might not like him :-)). )
And yes, that might mean, heading in a direction you might not like.
Cheers,
I understand the underlying idea of the concept. But really, to think of it as love and frame it this way is extremely icky and triggery and offputting so myself, a victim of incest.
Not to mention I have never needed a therapist coz I need a friend or a partner or a father who didn't rape me. I need a professional mental health worker to guide me to figure out how to have a good life regardless of, and in the face of the horrors I experienced as a child.
In answer to your original question, if I were asked that, my response would be to go "YUK! what a creep!" and walk out. End.
In fact, I'm feeling weirded out by you as a person. I'm only really writing this in case it makes you consider the impacts such language or approach might have on child incest survivors. And since so many never disclose to anyone, not even a therapist, and if they ever do disclose for so many it's only after a lot of trust has been built up over a long time, you can't know you are working with someone who is a survivor or not. Not sure it's gonna be too helpful for them to be confronted with this attitude.
Hi Anne, I appreciate your comment and I'm so sorry for what you've been through. I understand why you would feel that way and your reaction makes total sense.
I agree with you that it would be wildly inappropriate and unethical to even bring such a conversation to a client, especially if there's a history of abuse. I never suggested that a therapist should ever tell a client they love them or act out this love in any way–that should simply never happen, with any kind of client. I'm working on a whole piece about therapy abuse that will discuss this dynamic in particular too.
But that doesn't mean that a therapist can't love their client, while also being professional and boundaried. Therapists undergo very intense therapy themselves for many years in order to work through their own trauma and learn to be with others in a safe way. This kind of love is really hard to describe because it's not romantic or familial: it's a form of deep care and empathy, a "feeling-with", companionship, compassion, boundaries... You can see the specific "ingredients" in the Guidelines section I wrote and you'll see it has nothing to do with "regular" love. Mostly because, as I write in the article, regular love in our society is often problematic.
You're welcome to feel weirded out by this article and even by me, although you're making assumptions about me as a person from a particular way you're choosing to understand this essay, which may or may not be reflective of who I am as a person or a therapist.
I'm relieved to hear you would never suggest or tell a client you love them.
I do feel you missed my point about clients with history of abuse - you, nor anyone ever, can actually know if you are interacting with someone who has been abused unless they disclose to you.
The important point is MOST PEOPLE DO NOT DISCLOSE. And if and when they do it is after a lengthy time while they gain trust in the person.
So it makes obvious sense to just assume that anyone might have a history of abuse.
Regarding 'love' for a client, the feelings and position in regard to the other person I do understand, as I am a teacher, and to teach someone well, you need to approach them in the same way. But I wouldn't term it love. I would term it just being a good teacher.
I think your comment about regular love being problematic in our society hits at the heart of my issue with this post. You are using a word that already comes very heavily loaded with the ideas of what it means. And those interpretations of love ARE hugely problematic in the therapeutic space.
I have heard far too many very terrible abuses committed upon already abused and troubled people, by therapists, the very people they need to trust absolutely, in the name of "love".
And that, in a nutshell, is why have a big problem with this post.
My assumptions may or may not be accurate about you, but I'll add another assummption. You read as wonderfully idealistically naive.
But also dangerously naive.
I’m surprised that’s your take from this post, which makes me wonder if you read the actual essay before jumping to conclusions?
I wrote it specifically to highlight (briefly) how our cultural expectations of love are constructed and how they contrast with cultures that have more than one word for it. I specifically addressed how this sets up so much confusion and potential for abuse in our world. I then broke down with clarity what this therapeutic love consists of, in different frameworks, emphasising its fundamentals in *skilled*, ethical interventions. You may have noticed that this essay is cited from academic books, one paradoxically on narcissistic abuse (including therapy abuse), it’s not my own wild theory I randomly came up with.
Then I specifically used the generic word “love” and framed my essay as a question because I was curious about people’s experiences and opinions. I’m not writing a manifesto or a law here. I’m sharing wider ideas and inviting discussion about them. You can disagree with the ideas, you can even dislike my writing, but you’re making this a personal judgement, which is unnecessary and honestly kinda mean. And you’re assuming I’m “dangerously naive” just because I wrote a short article about an idea, without having any clue about my education or how I actually work (or who I am).
Just because an idea is dangerous *to you* doesn’t automatically make the person discussing it dangerous (or the idea itself).
I don’t see any point to engage further. Even though it appears to me we agree on the important principles here, you’ve shown no curiosity in understanding where I was coming from, what the books I cited are about etc but you seem more interested in labelling me personally in a certain way. If you find that helpful, go ahead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯