How to Use Therapy in the Age of AI

On learning to use both well — and understanding what each is actually for

Most people I know who are in therapy are also, at some point, talking to AI. About the same things. Sometimes in the middle of the night when their therapist isn't available, sometimes to rehearse something before a session, sometimes because it's easier to start there. I don't think that's a problem. I think it's the beginning of a new literacy — learning to use both well, which means getting clear about what each does well and where each hits a wall.

This isn't a defense of therapy against AI. It's an attempt to map the territory honestly, because the map matters. Using AI for what therapy is for, or expecting therapy to do what AI does better, leaves you underserved by both. And you deserve to know the difference.

What AI does well

AI is genuinely good at many of the things we once assumed required a therapist. It can help you identify patterns, name what you're feeling, offer frameworks for understanding your history, research what's happening in your nervous system, and reflect your own words back to you with surprising accuracy. For some people, at some moments, that's exactly what's needed. I don't think there's any value in pretending otherwise.

If you're trying to understand why you keep choosing the same kind of relationship, or what childhood experiences might be shaping your current anxiety, or how trauma affects the brain — AI can give you a thoughtful, informed response at two in the morning for twenty dollars a month. That's not nothing. That's real.

Understanding why you do something is real medicine. It can interrupt a pattern, create breathing room, restore a sense of agency. But most people who have spent serious time in therapy know that insight has a ceiling. You can understand a pattern completely and still be in its grip. At some point the knowing stops moving things, and something else is needed.

Where AI hits a wall

Part of what makes AI so useful for this kind of reflection is that it offers no friction. No risk of activating shame, no sense of being too much, no awareness that what you bring might affect the room. That's genuinely valuable — people access things with AI they haven't been able to say out loud to anyone. But frictionlessness also means there's no genuine other. The response always curves back toward your best self. And what therapy can offer, at its most essential, is an encounter with something actually outside you — a presence that receives what you carry, is genuinely affected by it, and remains. That experience can't be frictionless. It requires two people.

Not long ago I was gathering history with a new client — no protocol, no processing, just listening. I asked occasional questions, made space for what he was bringing, and at some point felt sad. I didn't notice I was showing it. At the end of the session he told me that something had already started to move, that it felt like processing had begun even though we hadn't done anything yet.

I've thought about that session a lot. What was happening wasn't technique. I wasn't mirroring his language or tracking his affect or doing anything I could put on a list. I was just present, and genuinely affected by what he was carrying, and somehow that transmitted — through a screen, without either of us naming it — and his system began to organize around it.

That's what I mean when I talk about two organisms in contact. Not proximity, not even a shared room. Something more like a field that opens when one person is genuinely received by another — above awareness and below it simultaneously, most of the real exchange happening in a register that neither person is consciously managing. The screen mediates it but doesn't eliminate it. What can't transmit is a performance of presence. What does transmit, apparently, is the real thing.

AI can receive your words. It cannot be moved by them. And something in us — something that predates language — knows the difference.

Knowing what you're paying for

When we were renovating our house, I asked the plasterer we'd hired if he could spend some time spackling screw holes before the walls got painted. He told me he could, but that at his hourly rate, it wouldn't be a good use of our resources. He showed me how to do it myself in about ten minutes.

I've thought about that exchange a lot in relation to my own work. He knew exactly what his skill was for — and rather than quietly bill me for something I could handle, he helped me understand the difference. That's what I want to offer the people I work with.

AI is a masterful tool — and I mean that without qualification. It can aggregate and organize vast amounts of information and reflect it back in ways that are concise, articulate, and often surprisingly sensitive. It contextualizes, fills in gaps, and helps people make sense of their own history with a sophistication that is growing from month to month. In some of these capacities it is approaching, or may already be surpassing, what a human being can offer. Bring AI to that work. It will serve you well and honestly.

What therapy is actually for

None of this is an argument for choosing one over the other. AI is available, frictionless, and genuinely useful for the kind of reflection that doesn't require another person. Use it. The question worth sitting with is what you bring where — and whether what you're bringing to your therapist is actually making use of what a human being can offer that nothing else can.

If you're using therapy to gather information, build frameworks, or feel understood without friction, you may be getting something real but not the thing that justifies the cost and the vulnerability. The work that only another person can do is harder to describe than a supplement protocol or a symptom checklist. It happens in the space between two organisms in genuine contact — above awareness and below it, through screens and across silence, in the moment a client feels something begin to move before anything formal has started.

That's what I'm trying to offer. And getting clearer about that, for myself, is the only way I know to make sure the work is actually worth your time.