Core Concept

Attraction

Why this needs its own honest page

Attraction happening is not, by itself, a professional failure — bodies register attraction outside conscious control. What matters entirely is what happens next: whether it’s acted on, whether it distorts the therapeutic relationship, and whether it’s brought to supervision rather than carried silently.

The disability-specific layer

Disabled people are routinely desexualised, which can make a therapist’s own attraction to a disabled client feel unusually loaded to acknowledge — as though noticing it confirms some kind of transgression, or conversely as though it proves the therapist is admirably free of ableism. Neither is true. The same professional standard applies regardless of the client’s disability: notice it, don’t act on it, bring it to supervision. This page deliberately avoids romanticising this territory. Attraction here is ordinary and boundaried, nothing more.

A lived scene · fictional teaching example

A therapist notices a flicker of attraction to a client partway through a course of work, and immediately feels a wave of shame about it, compounded by an odd, unhelpful thought that noticing it at all somehow proves he doesn’t see the client’s disability as a barrier. He brings it to supervision rather than sitting with either the shame or the strange self-congratulation. His supervisor treats it exactly as she would with any other client: ask what, if anything, has changed in how he conducts sessions, confirm nothing has, and move on. No special weight was needed in either direction.

What might happen in supervision

A process to try

1. What am I actually sensing? Name the attraction honestly, to yourself first.
2. What are the possible explanations? It’s simply a human response; it requires no further justification or alarm in either direction.
3. What should I do with it clinically? Bring it to supervision, check whether anything in the clinical work has shifted, and keep the boundary exactly where it already was.

Where this concept can help

Keeping attraction from becoming either a source of shame that goes unexamined, or a point of unwarranted self-congratulation about disability affirmation.

Where interpretation should stop

When attraction toward a disabled client is treated as more significant, in either direction, than attraction toward any other client would be; when the feeling itself is treated as a boundary violation rather than the ordinary human response it is.

Evidence and status

Therapist attraction to clients is a well-established topic in countertransference and professional ethics literature generally, with clear consensus that the feeling itself is not the ethical issue, acting on it is. The disability-specific caution against over-weighting the feeling in either direction is a Disability in Psychotherapy clinical emphasis.

A question worth carrying

Have I actually named this to myself and, where appropriate, in supervision — or am I carrying it silently and hoping it doesn’t affect the work?

You may also want to explore

Disability, Sexuality & Pleasure · Supervision · The Therapist’s Body

Evidence & sources

Sources checked in October 2026, using targeted searches rather than a systematic review. “We have not located” means our searches did not find it.