12 September 2025
As a therapist in training, I am developing my private practice in a therapy landscape that is changing, potentially dramatically, due to generative AI and versions of interaction that can be accessed outside the space of face-to-face therapeutic encounters.
I work relationally. To say this is partly to say that I believe there is something valuable in the human-to-human relationship that exists in therapeutic work that is mostly face-to-face, usually limited to a specific time slot weekly, and that unfolds at its own pace. There is ongoing relationship and dialogue. We may together come to recognise and explore patterns of relating. Along the way, there may well be some challenge and discomfort.
Some people have started using AI chatbots as therapists. Maybe an AI therapist is the “ideal” therapist? An AI therapist will tend to be the therapist you want it to be. It might meet you where you are, offer inexhaustible supplies of responsiveness and validation, and be always available, well beyond the usual weekly 50 minutes of a therapy session.
It is possible that some of the things you might seek or find in therapy are responsiveness and validation. But you will also be meeting another human who is committed to being there alongside you and is also separate from you, and your wants, needs and projections. A therapist – or any other human – is not always the person you want them to be. A therapist is committed to being there, reliably, regularly, over time, but within the contained space of (usually) weekly sessions. They are also human, imperfect, flawed and come with their own unique, partial, and not-neutral subjectivity. The therapeutic encounter is an opportunity to be met in a way that an AI chatbot encounter can arguably never replicate.
As a therapist, I am not just engaging with content – with what you say. I am also engaging with what you don’t say, with what might lie at the edges of your conscious awareness, or possibly much deeper. Perhaps there is a glimmer in something that is not said, or in a momentary movement, glance or expression. Being in a physical space together means we are working in an in-the-moment, here-and-now way that allows for nuance and for exploration of something beyond just the content of what we say to each other.
AI gets the content – the words and formulations – but not the fine-grain moment-by-moment details of being and relating.
AI – as non-human – can seem to offer something that is more objective, a closer approximation to “the truth” about something (based on all the knowledge it has been exposed to and the patterns it can therefore recognise). A therapist can’t ever be entirely neutral and is always a fellow human with their own lived history of experience (as well as their training). As humans, we all come with our own perspectives and biases, shaped and formed by our own life experiences and context. A therapist has typically engaged, and continues to engage in, extensive reflection and dialogue – through their own long-term therapy, and with supervisors and peers. They continue to explore what comes up in their work and how they might draw on different theoretical approaches and techniques. They also explore what they bring as an individual to therapeutic relating, and what might be particularly alive within them in the encounter with each individual client, and they endeavour to use this awareness in service of their clients.
AI in some way has an edge here. It can “reflect” (or recognise patterns) from within a bigger landscape of knowing (at least in terms of extracted knowledge of everything that has been written down out there in the world). It can also reliably retain its history of interactions with you and use patterns within this to shape its responses to you. (A therapist is likely to do the latter, but possibly is more humanly flawed in terms of what they might sometimes retain or forget).
That said, AI speaks in a voice of pseudo-neutrality and cannot acknowledge its non-neutrality. It has been exposed to what is in some way expansively universal but at the same time always partial and subjective. Therapy might be a space where you come to explore, speak and inhabit your own partial and subjective voice and way of being, and to know it as such, in dialogue with another similarly situated human being. When I sit in a room with you, on some level, we know that we share some common joys and limitations. We are dependent on others at birth and beyond, we can get sick or injured, we age, we are mortal. It matters that we share broadly similar (albeit with considerable variation) limitations and capacities. We are born, we experience joy and pain, we die. On some level, we sit with each other in the therapy room stuck with this, but perhaps also with reverence for the magnificence and complexity of all that this entails.