Yes. He told me straight out that he loved me.
Whether intentional or not, he set it up very well, but kind of following my lead.
One time I said to him, “You do realize that to a client unconditional positive regard feels like love, right?”
He replied with a longer than usual rant about how it should have been called love from the get go, that it only got called “unconditional positive regard” because it was atheists coining the term. Not the answer I was expecting. Um, OK!
The next time it came up we’d had a rupture, and in the repair process, he told me, just a bit pointedly, “So Fernanda, you know that unconditional positive regard? Well, it’s still there for you, even when you don’t feel it.” I do remember feeling quite skeptical about that, but… I couldn’t help noticing how he said “unconditional positive regard,” and after that rant about how it should have been called love. I wondered if he’d noticed the connection. He couldn’t possibly have, could he?
The very next session, what I heard, seemingly out of the blue was, “I can love you without feeling everything you’re feeling.”
Wait! Did he just tell me he loved me? Or was that a slip?
Then I started to become aware of how much he really did care for me. Things I plain hadn’t noticed before… or had noticed but interpreted them much less favorably. Oh my gosh, this man actually cares for me… a lot!
At the time that all these “slips” were happening, we had also had a number of conversations about the therapeutic frame, our relationship, what makes the intimacy, closeness and attachment safe.
Which reminds me… there was also that one session a bit later when he thanked me for making the trip down to see him—I’d had to drive a few miles more than usual to get to this new location. He went on to say he felt that session had been about our attachment.
Then there was the session mid to late November of this past year (2021). It had been a good session and as we were winding down, I said to him,
“OK, so I know I’ve been rather dense about this but… I’m now noticing that you really care about me… a lot.”
He immediately thanked me for saying so… and then went on and on about how true that was, how much he really did care. I don’t remember anything he said except “I love you,” repeated three times in that little monologue. Even so I had my doubts.
“You… you… love me?”
No hesitation. “Absolutely!”
A few sessions later I brought it up, and he repeated it. No backing down for him!
How did it land with me?
I felt very loved and supported, and my heart felt full. It was the most uncomplicated and straightforward “I love you” I have ever heard in my life.