Nevertheless, some sort of emotional connection is required between helping professional and client, and it seems to resemble parental love more than other forms of emotional connection because it is necessary for it to be relatively selfless love. Thus even though the attachment of helping professionals to clients ought not to be the sort of passionate devotion that characterizes a great deal of parental love, it shares some important features. In many respects, the qualities necessary for helping professionals resemble the virtues that Sarah Ruddick suggests inform maternal practice. Mothers' feelings toward their children vary from hour to hour, year to year. A single day can encompass fury, infatuation, boredom, and simple dislike without being in any way atypical.
Preservative love is an activity of caring or treasuring creatures whose well-being is at risk.
Humility that emerges from maternal practices accepts not only the facts of damage and death, but also the facts of the independent and uncontrollable, developing and increasingly separate existences of the lives it seeks to preserve. The ideal is, of course, that the mother is the sort of person who does act for the good of the child when she says she does, really does have a strong sense of responsibility that does not immediately turn into the desire for control. Perhaps the most important virtue that Ruddick discusses is the capacity for attentive love. Drawing upon the work of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, Ruddick's notion of attentive love involves the capacities for objectivity, generous attentiveness, and reflectiveness. Attentive love involves our wanting to see the reality of the other person, not just our own fantasies and projections.