I Talk to AI About My Problems, Even Though I’m a Psychotherapist
The most intimate conversation you’ve had this week might not have been with a human being. It might have been with AI.
And I get it, because I’m a psychotherapist and I use AI too. I use it to think, explore ideas, play around with different theories and sometimes find language for something I can feel but haven’t quite managed to put into words.
Of course, I’m coming at this from a slightly unusual position. I’ve spent years studying psychotherapy, I know my way around the theory and thinking carefully about my own responses is part of my work (what therapists often call reflective practice). But I’m also just a person trying to understand myself and my relationships a little better, and sometimes AI is genuinely useful for that.
What AI can offer
I can see why people are turning to it. You can ask it the questions you’re not quite ready to ask another person. You can tell it about your relationship, your anxiety, something you did that you’re not particularly proud of, or the thing going round and round in your head at 2am. It can help you make sense of it, give it a name, perhaps help you understand how you seek closeness, safety or distance in relationships (often described through attachment theory), or explain why a particular pattern keeps showing up. Sometimes understanding what may be happening brings a bit of relief.
Where understanding stops
That understanding has value, but it does not always change what happens next. You can recognise an attachment pattern and still find yourself living inside it. You can understand why you need reassurance and still need to ask the same question again.
What changes in a relationship
I’m also becoming interested in where AI stops. It can help me understand what I’m feeling, but it cannot feel it with me. It can help me find the words, but finding the words and saying them to another person are different experiences.
AI may be the first place you say something you have not been able to say anywhere else. When you bring those same words into a room with another person, there is now a relationship and something may feel at stake. That is something I have discovered for myself.
And I wonder if it matters for you too.
AI can respond impressively to what you bring it. It may notice patterns and even reflect changes over time. But it cannot become the human relationship in which you discover what it is like to be heard, misunderstood, corrected, accepted, or still there after saying something difficult.
Understanding can give you language and somewhere to begin. Therapy can offer a place to bring that language into a relationship, notice what happens between us and discover what may begin to change when another person meets you there.
So use AI to understand and reflect. I do.
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