How Should a Therapist Respond When a Client Says ‘I Love You’?

When a client says “I love you” in session, how can therapists respond—so as to avoid damaging the therapeutic relationship? Read on for insights and guidance on how therapists can best respond when a client says “I love you.”

What happened when I told my therapist I loved her

The first time I said “I love you” to a therapist I was a college student expressing it by way of thanks for her recovering my lost jump drive in her waiting room and returning it to me. 

In my overjoyed state, I didn’t think about the implications of my statement.

I certainly didn’t imagine that I would ever have any kind of romantic or sexual interaction with my middle-aged-and-married therapist, and I didn’t want one. 

But it’s hard not to feel some sort of affection for a person who gives you their undivided attention and regards you with a quiet, indulgent smile for hour upon hour.

I probably said it to reflect not only my excitement to get my jump drive back but also my gratitude for the hours she had spent with me.

“You can love me,” she responded, smiling in a way that I perceived as patronizing—though I’m sure that wasn’t her intention. 
“Oh,” my brain registered. “I wasn’t supposed to say that.”

For the next decade, which culminated in me becoming a therapist myself, I never forgot how awkward her response felt to me.

Many of us have seen a sitcom in which one character responds to another’s profession of romantic love with something like “thank you.”

Your heart hurts for the character in love.

But “thank you” is the first response I came up with when considering how to respond if one of my own therapy clients says those three little words to me. 

Do therapists become attached to their clients?

My clinical supervisor counseled me to respond to a profession of love by encouraging my client to identify what exactly they really love about me or the time they spend with me.

With my supervisor, I conceded that my client probably loves how I make them feel, and not me as a person, because they can’t know the real me.

Yet, when reflecting on our conversation later, I started to question this notion that our clients don’t know who we really are. 

With my own therapist, I know her compassion when I confess having intrusive thoughts of violence, a product of my obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’ve heard the edge of passion in her voice when describing how she would respond to someone contemplating suicide in the wake of a progressive, incurable disease.

I feel her warmth, even through the screen during a telehealth session. I know her better than I know most of my coworkers, and perhaps better than much of my extended family.

Our actions make up who we are.

I don’t just love the way my therapist makes me feel—I love her. 

But, can a therapist love their client?

Regardless of whether my clients truly love me, do I love them back?

If we conceptualize love as an action, then of course I love them.

I even love the clients I don’t particularly like.

In fact, those are usually the ones I love most. Their intense needs—material, social, and emotional—can cause them to bring a host of unpleasant emotions into a conversation. 
For these clients, I complete applications for additional services, call doctors and school counselors and lawyers and case managers and probation officers, and talk for hours about how I can possibly help them in my supervision sessions.

Love as action. 

Can clients love their therapists?

Carl Rogers, recognized as the originator of client-centered therapy, puts it eloquently when he suggests that in the therapeutic relationship, “the client moves from the experiencing of himself as an unworthy, unacceptable, and unlovable person to the realization that he is accepted, respected, and loved, in this limited relationship with the therapist. ‘Loved’ here has perhaps its deepest and most general meaning—that of being deeply understood and deeply accepted.”

If we assume that some form of non-romantic love is implicit in the therapy relationship, does that mean we should say so?

When I surveyed my colleagues, I was hard pressed to find a therapist who is willing to say “I love you” back to a client, with one notable exception: my friend the hospice social worker.  

“It’s never been ambiguous what it meant,” he explained, referring to when a dying patient tells him that they love him. “I made their life demonstrably more comfortable, and they appreciated that. Their hospice team felt like family to them.”

He admitted that in other settings, when a client expresses love towards a helping professional, the meaning may be ambiguous, and worth exploring with the client.

“Hospice is an exception to many of the social work rules around boundaries,” he said.

On just one occasion, he made the choice in the moment to say “I love you” back to a client: “I told her what I thought she needed to hear.” 

How should we respond if a client says ‘I love you’?

Another therapist-friend pointed out that the word “love” may have been misused in a client’s past, for example in abusive situations.

It may be safer, and more meaningful, for the therapist to respond concretely and specifically, as in naming the client’s qualities that are valuable and beautiful to the therapist. 

I want to buy into this view, but I struggle.

In Lois Lowry’s utopian novel The Giver, the young protagonist Jonas asks his parents whether they love him and is told that he has “used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it’s become almost obsolete.”

Even when we read this as sixth graders in school, we knew unquestionably that Jonas’s parents were painfully misguided. 

Yet is this the same conclusion that we have drawn in the mental health profession? That the word “love” has no meaning unless it’s made concrete with specific observations?

If I deflect a client’s proclamation of love, and instead refocus the conversation on what we mutually enjoy about one other’s company, some clients will likely respond positively.

But others may feel hurt, and too embarrassed to tell me so.

As therapists, we may need to experiment with different responses before landing on the one most authentic for our practice and for the relationship we have with an individual client. 

Perhaps it’s a warm smile and an organic “Aww!”
Or,  you may feel more comfortable inserting a subtle boundary that still reflects their authentic feelings, as in “I love working with you, too.” 

All this said, the question still sticks for me: What would be the harm in saying it back?

If you can say to your client, as my supervisor has in the past, “I feel tenderness for you,” how much of a leap is it to say “I love you too”?

For now, less than five years into my career, I err on the side of conformity.

I try not to say it. But maybe if it slips out, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

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