I do believe that therapists can love their clients, particularly those doing deep therapy whereby they get intimately acquainted with the child inside and raw emotions and childlike innocence. I have exchanged "I love yous" with my therapists (seen 3 different ones in the last 5 years) and they often sign emails or letters with "love."

However, just like different people in this thread have mentioned that they are uncomfortable with this word and with touch, therapists are the same - people like me and you! I'm not sure that being able to express and have love for us has everything to do with working through their own issues. One therapist I had, the most effusive with her "I love yous" and hugs, definitely has lots of work to do on herself (part of why we no longer work together).

My current therapist said it beautifully (and she said that she tells this to her students--she's also a professor in a counseling psych PhD program): "After some time, I fall in love with my clients." I think this is amazing. I don't want a therapist to love me because she's a therapist and I'm her client, I want her to get to know me and love me for who I am inside.

I'm a teacher and I do indeed love some of my students; I feel so privileged to get to know them and find that they are amazing people with lots of potential. I do not know them as intimately as my therapists know me, but I think of it in the same way. I love knowing that my therapists love me. Love is very important to me and I respect and recognize that love isn't as important for many others. I think that therapists have a sense of how each of us feels about love, touch, etc., and within boundaries that they feel comfortable with, they reciprocate this.

About the question "what good does being loved by a therapist do?", for me it showed me that I am loveable to other human beings, particularly to those whom I share myself with. I struggled A LOT with this, believing that I could possibly be loveable to someone (didn't feel this way from my parents). This has been an amazing gift to me from my therapists and has helped me enormously in other relationships to see that I am "worth it" and loveable.

I do think that this love extends after the therapy relationship ends. Though contact is infrequent or non-existent, we and our life stories have impacted our therapists and it's hard to just forget about us or turn off the love once we're gone physically from their lives. I do exchange emails a few times a year with a therapist I ended with 3 years ago. We've "talked" about this, and she said that of course she still loves me and she feels honored that I chose to share myself and my love with her; her love for me isn't a faucet that can just be turned off.