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One very common reason for sexual feelings for a therapist is actually rooted in our childhood needs. Psychology sometimes refers to the “golden dream.” All human beings had the experience in the womb of being in a safe place, cared for, where all your needs were met and there was no separation between you and your mother; at that point in our development, we are not yet capable of even conceiving that we are a separate being. Then we’re born. No one really knows what a baby is feeling, but when we carry unfulfilled longings and needs from childhood, part of what we long for is to return to that time of perfect safety, where our needs were met without speaking them and there were no boundaries. Part of the maturation process for human beings is the realization that we are a separate person, with our own feelings and needs which are distinct from another person’s. But it is in a romantic/sexual relationship where an adult normally lowers their boundaries the most. Ideally, we allow a lover to see us clearly, both emotionally and physically. In the act of making love, we seek as much contact between us as is possible. The Bible actually refers to the sexual union within marriage as the two becoming one flesh. So when we enter therapy and those long dormant childhood needs and longings are stirred and awakened, we struggle to “fit” them somewhere. And the channel in which they flow most smoothly is in our sexual feelings. In other words, we are experiencing really intense, primitive longings from childhood and the closest thing we have to that as an adult is our sexual/romantic feelings. So we experience strong sexual feelings that ultimately, are really about what we wanted as children and didn’t get. It is this dynamic that is at the root of a client with a life-long heterosexual orientation to feel sexual attraction to a same gender therapist or a client with a homosexual orientation to feel attracted to an opposite gender therapist.