Small things—‘It felt like love’—The experience of being deeply moved in therapy: Clients' stories of the small things that matter in therapy

ObjectiveThis study aimed to explore clients' lived experiences of being deeply moved or touched by something that the therapist said or did and to investigate to what extent this relates to the phenomenon of Kama Muta (being moved by love). Kama Muta is described as a social‐relational emotion, which seems to play a central role in connecting to others and is tied to emotional processes. It appears that research on Kama Muta is still in its infancy; while it has been explored and analysed within the context of social psychology and nature, there has been scarce analysis and research to date on the specific implications of Kama Muta for therapy; however, it seems to represent an appropriate way to think about the small things phenomenon proposed for this research. The purpose of this research was to explore whether ‘being moved by the “small things”’ in therapy matters to clients and what impact it has on the processes of change. It aimed at advancing our comprehension about which factors, outside the typical therapeutic treatment, may help strengthen the therapist–client relationship. Therefore, the author explores how clients are ‘moved’ in therapy by the small things, whether those experiences can be classified as Kama Muta and the implications of this for the therapeutic field.MethodSeven participants, five students in counselling and psychotherapy and two fully accredited psychotherapists, took part in qualitative semi‐structured interviews about their experiences as clients of being deeply moved or touched during therapy. Interview transcripts were subjected to thematic analysis. For reasons of ethics approval, the author selected participants who either were on a path to become therapists or were fully accredited. The interviewer asked participants to recall events retrospectively; thus, the interviewees were not clients who were currently undergoing treatment. The author used scripts to open and close the interviews, thus sharing all relevant information about the study with the interviewees, including informed consent and confidentiality. The same script with open‐ended questions was used with all seven participants. All participants were informed of the purpose of the research beforehand and had the opportunity to ask questions and share additional thoughts throughout the process. The interviews were recorded using a digital voice recorder and transcribed using a transcribing software.ResultsCoding schemes were inductively developed exclusively f