A Therapist’s thoughts on Love

Last week, in a session with a client, we found ourselves circling around a familiar centrepiece of the therapeutic room: love. Not the cinematic version, not the fairy-tale arc, not even necessarily the romantic kind. But the quieter, steadier, more essential form of love: to be seen, accepted, and met as we are in the moment we are in.

We spoke about what it means to love someone without trying to shape them, fix them, or mold them into a more comfortable version of themselves. And what it means to be loved like that — without performance, without strategy, without shrinking or expanding ourselves to maintain connection.

In therapy, love is present in every session, whether or not the word itself comes up.

There is the abundance of it: the person glowing with the discovery that they are finally supported, finally safe enough to exhale.

There is the absence of it: the clients who learned early that love was conditional or unpredictable, something that could be taken away if they made the wrong move.

And then there is the longing: the ache for a kind of relational depth they have not yet known, but sense is possible.

Why is love so central to being human?

Because recognition is central.

Because belonging is central.

Because the nervous system itself is wired to come alive in connection — to co-regulate, to soften, to steady itself in the presence of another.

Infants don’t learn to understand themselves alone; they learn through the reflection in another’s eyes. Adults are no different. The mirror becomes more subtle, but the need remains. We come to know who we are because someone else meets us with curiosity rather than judgment, with acceptance rather than agenda.

This is why de Botton’s words feel so true.

To be seen is to exist.

To be understood is to have a voice.

To be loved — really loved — is to feel fully alive.

Love as Acceptance, Not Alteration

The greatest misconception about love is that it must improve us. That love is a refining force. But the love that heals, the love that enlarges us, does something quieter: it accepts.

To be accepted as you are in a specific moment — anxious, hopeful, messy, uncertain, grieving, unfinished — is to be given permission to exist. And in that permission, transformation becomes possible. Not because someone demanded it, but because someone made space for it.

Love does not insist on change.

Love makes room for it.

The Therapy Room as a Microcosm of Human Need

Every week, across countless sessions, I watch people metabolise the same core truth:

To be loved isn’t to be completed. To be loved is having someone witness us, gaps and all, but still accept us as a whole.

When clients feel truly seen — in their contradictions, in their shame, in their longing — something shifts. Their voice emerges. Their boundaries strengthen. Their story reorganises itself. Not because I, as a therapist, make them into something else, but because they experience themselves reflected without distortion.

And that experience is profoundly humanising.

To Love Is to Witness

Perhaps the deepest definition of love is this: to see another person without trying to shape them.

To say, through presence rather than words: I see you. I’m here. You don’t need to become anything else for this moment to matter.

In that kind of steadiness, people begin to feel themselves. Not corrected, not managed, but met.

Maybe that’s the quiet truth at the centre of us all: we come alive in the presence of those who can hold us as we are.