I'm a Therapist and I Tell My Clients I Love Them

I’m a Therapist and I Tell My Clients I Love Them

I saw a TikTok recently about therapists and the word love. The creator made some fair points about the importance of processing what that word means before you say it, and about what love in therapy is not. It is not sexual. It is not romantic. It is not possessive. Obviously. But then the comments devolved into exactly what I expected: a pile-on about how therapists should never, under any circumstances, tell a client they love them. Full stop. End of discussion.

I disagree. And I want to talk about why.

I tell my clients I love them. When it is true, when it is appropriate, when it serves the client and the work, I say it. Because it is true. And because the pretense that it is not true is one of the more damaging legacies of how we have been trained to do this work.

What we are actually talking about when we talk about love in therapy

The ancient Greeks had multiple words for love because they understood that love is not a single thing. Eros is romantic and passionate. Philia is friendship. Storge is familial. And then there is agape. Agape is unconditional, non-possessive, spiritually inflected love. It is love as an orientation toward another person’s full humanity. It does not waver based on whether the client is likable that day, whether they are making progress, whether they are bringing their worst self into the room. It holds. It stays.

Carl Rogers essentially described agape when he coined the term “unconditional positive regard.” He used clinical language because the field was suspicious of the word love. But he was pointing at the same thing. Diana Fosha, who developed AEDP, built an entire healing model around the premise that what transforms people is being met in a deep relational encounter, and she trains therapists to use their own felt experience of the client as a clinical tool. Dr. Divine Charura, who wrote the book literally titled Love and Therapy, argues that love is not something that exists alongside the therapeutic frame. It is the frame.

These are not fringe thinkers. These are serious, rigorous clinicians who are naming what many of us already know to be true in the room.

We have been colonized into clinical distance

There is a version of therapy that lives on television and in the cultural imagination where the therapist sits behind a neutral mask, reflects everything back, never discloses, never reveals, is essentially a very expensive mirror. And then there is the other version, the one that has become almost a cultural joke, where the TV therapist is sleeping with their clients, blurring every line, making the therapeutic relationship about their own needs and hungers. We are so saturated by both of these images that the actual thing, a boundaried, loving, real human encounter, barely registers as possible.

Clinical distance has been mistaken for professionalism. So often it is just disconnection dressed up in the language of ethics. We have been medicalized into treating the therapeutic relationship like a diagnostic tool rather than what it actually is: a human encounter. And something about that, that colonized version of what “good therapy” looks like, has made the word love feel dangerous. Unprofessional. Boundary-violating. As if the deepest, most healing thing a human being can experience is somehow a liability.

Therapy is not a personal relationship. And it is one of the most personal relationships a person can have. Both of these things are true at the same time. The structure, the container, the boundaries, the one-directional focus on the client’s wellbeing, the clinical frame, all of that is what makes it safe enough for love to be healing rather than dangerous. The love is not despite the container. It moves through the container.

What this has actually looked like in my life

I had a long-term depth therapy relationship that changed me. My therapist worked through a transpersonal and psychodynamic framework. She was deeply relational. She told me she loved me.

There is a place in me that had not been held that way. A place that needed to know that it was possible to be seen this fully and still be loved. That is reparative. That is what inner child healing and reparenting actually means in practice. That is the work. Love is healing.

I strive to practice in a shamanic, matriarchal sense. Loving my clients is part of that. It is woven into how I understand what it means to hold someone in the work, to witness them, to accompany them into the places they have not been able to go alone. That kind of accompaniment is not neutral. It is not detached. It is loving. And that love is part of what makes the healing possible.

What I am not saying

I am not talking about bad actors. They exist. There are dangerous therapists who exploit the intimacy of this work, who manipulate, who use the vulnerability of the therapeutic relationship to harm people. That is real. That is a serious problem in our field. It is not what I am talking about. At all.

I am also not saying every therapist should say this to every client. Not every therapeutic relationship has this quality. Not every client needs or wants it. Not every therapist works in a modality where it is congruent or clinically appropriate. Depth work, relational work, transpersonal work, psychodynamic work, these are containers where love in this sense lives naturally.

What I am saying is that for some clients, in some therapeutic relationships, in some moments, love is not a boundary violation. It is the medicine. And pretending otherwise, in the name of a professionalism that was never really about protecting clients in the first place, does real harm to real people who come to us with real wounds.

We love our clients so they can love themselves

That is the whole thing. That is the center of it. When a client internalizes the therapist’s love, they are not becoming dependent on the therapist. They are learning, often for the first time, that they are someone who can be loved. That they are worth loving. That love is something that exists in the world and is available to them. It comes through relationship. Through genuine human contact. Through the sacred, boundaried, fiercely intentional space of therapy done with love at its center.

I am saying it plainly. I love my clients. And that love is part of how they heal.