The Seduction of Being Admired

A few days ago, I came across a discussion among therapists around a question that made many people visibly uncomfortable: What happens when a therapist develops feelings for a client? I read the responses and moved on, but strangely, the question did not move on from me.

Perhaps it stayed with me because I did not arrive in counselling through a straight professional corridor. Long before I entered a counselling room, I had spent years in very different spaces—as an artist and performer, a teacher, a writer, in media, and in community work. On paper these roles may appear unrelated, but in reality they have one thing in common: people. And when you spend enough years working closely with people, you begin to understand that attachment does not restrict itself to romantic relationships.

A student can become deeply attached to a teacher. A young artist may begin seeking one mentor’s approval more than the applause of an entire audience. A junior colleague may admire a senior far beyond the professional role. Someone you help through community work may gradually begin depending upon you emotionally. Readers, too, sometimes feel they know a writer intimately because her words have entered a private corner of their lives.

Performers perhaps encounter a particularly interesting version of this. Someone may hear your music, watch you dance, listen to you speak, or read something you have written and feel an immediate connection. The emotion may be completely genuine, but the intimacy may not be. They know something you have expressed; they know the part of you that reached them. Sometimes, without either person consciously intending it, that emotional connection begins to feel like something more. For years, I understood this simply as admiration. Counselling gave me another language for some of what I had already been observing.

Psychology speaks of transference and countertransference: feelings, expectations and earlier relational patterns that can enter the therapeutic relationship. Therapists are not immune from attraction, attachment, protectiveness, irritation, affection or even the desire to be important to a particular client. Research has acknowledged this for decades. Pope, Keith-Spiegel and Tabachnick (1986) challenged the uncomfortable assumption that competent therapists simply do not experience sexual attraction towards clients. Ladany and colleagues (1997) later explored attraction among therapists-in-training and the importance of supervision in recognising and managing such responses.

But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that this conversation belonged outside the counselling room as well, because there is another side to admiration that we discuss far less often: What does being admired do to the person who is being admired?

hunger of the person who enjoys being needed. Perhaps real self-awareness begins there—not in declaring, “I would never feel something inappropriate,” but in being able to recognise, “Something is happening here. Before I act, I need to understand what part of this belongs to the other person and what part belongs to me.”

For a counsellor, that examination belongs in professional supervision. For a teacher, mentor, artist, manager or community leader, it may require consultation, reflection, firmer boundaries or simply enough honesty to notice that a relationship has begun to change. We cannot always control who admires us, nor can we necessarily control the first feeling that arises within us. But when another person has entrusted us with their vulnerability, their learning, their career, their art or their emotional world, the greater responsibility belongs to the person who holds the greater power.

Perhaps that is where the invisible line really lies—not between people who feel and people who do not, but between those who recognise what is happening and those who allow the feeling to quietly rewrite the relationship. The line is not drawn by what we feel. It is drawn by what we choose to do next.

References

Hayes, J. A., Gelso, C. J., & Hummel, A. M. (2011). Managing countertransference. Psychotherapy, 48(1), 88–97. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022182

Ladany, N., O’Brien, K. M., Hill, C. E., Melincoff, D. S., Knox, S., & Petersen, D. A. (1997). Sexual attraction toward clients, use of supervision, and prior training: A qualitative study of predoctoral psychology interns. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 44(4), 413–424. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.44.4.413

Lawson, J., Schröder, T., & Russell, K. (2026). How do therapists negotiate boundaries: A systematic literature review and meta-synthesis. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10879-026-09750-9

Pope, K. S., Keith-Spiegel, P., & Tabachnick, B. G. (1986). Sexual attraction to clients: The human therapist and the (sometimes) inhuman training system. American Psychologist, 41(2), 147–158. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.41.2.147