What’s love got to do with it? A systemic view of agape

Abstract

In this article, we explore what love feels like in systemic therapy, for us, as practitioners. The idea for writing this article as a personal set of reflections was born in our walking to work relationship. We both have the same part time visiting position in a systemic training programme in a Norwegian University. We leave our hotel at 8a.m. to walk up the hill, talking about training, supervision and therapy as we go along. Increasingly our attention turned to the experience of love in therapy – to what it looked like, to what it felt like, to what it meant, and to the inevitable challenges, risks and benefits of naming love in the therapy process. We soon discovered there was a relative silence on this topic in the systemic literature, and we wondered why. We open this article with a series of further reflections and questions to each other, following our first publication on therapeutic love as agape (Sheehan and Vetere, 2023). We identify agape as the best characterisation of the kind of love emergent in therapeutic relationships and conclude this article with a brief look at the existing systemic literature on the topic. In turn, we invite you, the reader, if you will, to respond.