True Love? Exploring Therapeutic Love Dynamics Utilizing a Positive Dialogical Autoethnography Approach

Questions about whether therapists genuinely feel love for their clients sit at the heart of ongoing debates about relational depth, emotional authenticity, and ethical connection in therapeutic practice. While therapeutic love has long been discussed in professional literature, conversations typically focus on client idealisation, transference, or the management of boundaries. Less attention has been given to therapists’ own emotional landscapes, and how they understand, experience, and name the feelings that arise in their work, including those they might describe as love. Using Therapeutic Positive Autoethnography (ThePosAE), the study employs interlocution as a dialogical autoethnographic method in which one author poses reflective questions to the therapist‑autoethnographer. These questions act as prompts that elicit emotional insight, surface tacit knowledge, and support an exploration of how therapists make sense of love in their everyday clinical work. Through this collaborative inquiry using combined guided questioning, the therapist’s voice emerges as central data, revealing how love functions as a sustaining, motivating, and ethically nuanced dimension of therapeutic care. This study highlights the therapeutic practitioner as a meaning-maker. It demonstrates how ThePosAE provides a structured and generative method for exploring clinically grounded positive emotional experiences, deepening understanding of how therapists hold love, and re‑positioning therapeutic affection as a legitimate and valuable component of healing work and yielding valuable insights for therapeutic engagement. Rooted in therapeutic practice, the article contributes to emerging scholarship that recognises love not as a boundary violation, but as an ethical, optimistic and relationally potent dynamic in therapeutic care.