Exploring Professional Love in Therapy and Teaching: A Conversation with Julie
This week on Pondering Play and Therapy, I had the pleasure of interviewing someone very special — my co-host, colleague, and dear friend, Julie. Although we’ve worked together closely for years, we realised we had never actually sat down and shared our full stories with one another. What began as a simple idea — “let’s interview each other” — quickly became a rich, moving conversation about childhood, teaching, play, and the profound power of human connection.
Philippa with AI Assitance
11/28/20253 min read
From Car Mechanics to Classrooms
Like many of us who work with children, Julie didn’t follow a straight or predictable path. In fact, her earliest ambitions were worlds apart: car mechanic or ballerina. As a young girl helping her neighbour Stan under the bonnet of his car, she learned practical skills, patience, and the power of being trusted. And on Saturday mornings, she pulled on her ballet shoes and imagined herself on stage.
Teaching wasn’t always the plan. It arrived later, after years of musical work, community living, and travelling. But when Julie began training as a primary school music teacher in the early 1990s, something clicked.
She fell in love with the world of primary classrooms — the structure, the creative chaos, the tiny labels, the routine, and most of all, the children.
A Music Room, a Community, a Safe Space
Julie eventually became a full-time music teacher, a rarity even then. Every afternoon for 17 years, she taught music to every child in the school, from Reception to Year Six. That continuity — year after year, in the same room, with the same routines — created something powerful.
Children didn’t have to relearn the space. They didn’t have to relearn her. They grew up with her. There’s something profoundly regulating about that familiarity, and Julie only realised years later how much her classroom mirrored what she’d come to know as a therapist:
a consistent environment
predictable structure
shared rituals
relational safety
It wasn’t just music she was teaching — it was belonging.
Meeting Children Where They Are
One of the most memorable figures in Julie’s teaching career wasn’t a child at all, but a puppet named Rita — a bright red-dressed, orange-haired puppet who quietly helped children express feelings they struggled to share with adults.
Rita became a bridge. A way in. A voice children could borrow when their own felt too risky.
And sometimes, as Julie explained, Rita became a canvas for children’s hidden pain. She would return to the classroom to find Rita twisted, crumpled, or distorted — a silent, unsettling message from a child who couldn’t express their internal chaos any other way.
Those moments changed something in Julie. They opened a deeper question:
What’s really happening beneath the behaviour we see?
That question would eventually lead her straight into the world of play therapy.
Falling in Love With the Work
Before committing to a three-year MA in Play Therapy, Julie trained with Place2Be and spent a year working as a school-based counsellor. It was there that she met her very first client — a little boy she remembers vividly to this day.
She described falling in love with both the child and the work: the quiet rituals, the consistency, the creativity, the unspoken communication. Each week, they folded up a huge paint-covered ground sheet together, counting the days until the next session — a child-created ritual that turned endings into something manageable, predictable, and safe.
It was during this time that Julie’s supervisor asked a question she’s never forgotten: “Do you love this boy?” She panicked at first. Teachers aren’t encouraged to use that word. Therapists certainly aren’t taught to use it casually. But her supervisor introduced a concept that has shaped Julie’s entire career:
Professional Love
Professional love is the deep, boundaried, relational care that forms the heart of therapeutic and educational work.
It’s not romantic, parental, or blurred.
It’s not about crossing lines.
It’s about being fully present.
It’s warmth, empathy, attunement, and genuine enjoyment of the child in front of you. It’s the kind of love that says: “You matter. You’re worth my time. I see you.”
Julie shared stories of children who had rarely — if ever — felt enjoyed by an adult. One child described therapy by saying: “I like coming here because I enjoy being enjoyed.” That line alone captures why professional love matters so profoundly. For some children, it is their first experience of being deeply valued, liked, and accepted for who they are.
Becoming a Therapist, Becoming a Better Teacher
As Julie trained in play therapy, she found it became harder and harder to continue teaching in the same way. Not because she didn’t care — but because her view of children had expanded. Once you learn to see beyond behaviour, beyond labels like “naughty” or “attention-seeking,” it becomes impossible to unsee. She stayed teaching for a few more years, but her heart was already moving toward the one-to-one, relational, child-led world of therapy. Eventually, she stepped fully into play therapy — and now also teaches future therapists at the very university where she trained.
The Thread That Ties It All Together
What struck me most in this conversation was the thread running through Julie’s entire story:Connection. Warmth. Relationship. Love — professional love.
From a neighbour teaching a toddler to fix a car, to a music room that held generations of children, to a puppet who carried unspoken stories, to a little boy folding paint-covered sheets… Julie’s work has always circled back to the same truth: Children grow, heal, and flourish when they feel enjoyed. And perhaps that is something all of us — teachers, therapists, parents, practitioners — can hold onto. Because professional love isn’t a soft extra. It isn’t indulgent. It isn’t crossing a line. It’s the foundation.