I think therapists can feel love towards their clients. Otherwise, my therapist lied to me before he died. I don't think he did because that would have been a weird and unnecessary thing to do.

For a long time, I felt a lot of shame for having feelings of love towards my therapist. I don't know where that shame came from, but based on a lot of things I read, I know shame about love and attachment towards one's therapist is quite common. One theory is that if someone learns in childhood that loving and being attached to another results in something bad, such as rejection, neglect, being hurt, or even being shamed by the attachment figure, then that negative experience is programmed into the child, and, as an adult, the person feels shame whenever they feel love and attachment. The shame is like a warning signal: don't have those feelings; they will result in something bad. Don't know if this is true. It's just a theory I read. Psychology is full of theories.

The best thing my therapist did for me was accept my love as something completely normal and natural. He did not question it. He did not analyzer it. He did not assume it was romantic or sexual. He did not assume it was just transference. He didn't question whether it was "real" or "because of therapy." He was not threatened by it. He was not afraid of it. He was not disgusted by it. And he did not shame me for it.

That was very important to me, to have him accept those big feelings without making them seem weird or abnormal.

Anyway, I think American society in general is very uncomfortable with the idea of love outside certain very narrowly drawn contexts. People also have a hard time divorcing love from sex. They have a hard time conceptualizing true platonic love outside familial relationships. That's why friends rarely tell each other "i love you." My best friend and I tell each other that, and I have a few other friends I say that to also. But I think close friends should love each other, but society in general has such a hard time with it.