How AI Is Showing Us a Big Gap In The Practice of Therapy

There’s so much buzz in multiple fields at the moment of AI replacing professional fields and filling professional roles. Many therapists are already in discussion about how their clients are bringing conversations with AI about themselves into their therapy sessions, and it’s creating a bit of, shall we say, insecurity for therapists with good reason.

Regardless of whether you are on the pro, or anti AI side of things, there’s one surprising and valuable thing we can learn from people’s excited inclusion of AI in their mental health process…

That the foundational skills of presence, listening, seeing, and reflecting back those things that are seen & heard, are essential to people believing that they are having a meaningful experience, either with another human or an AI. Because after all, that is what AI is doing. It’s summarizing the amalgam of all the data that has been input into the digital system by and about a person and reflecting it back to them.

Consider for a moment that therapists are taught the core foundational skills mentioned above in their graduate therapy training. But the most important question is, are they using those skills? After graduation are therapists honing the core skills of therapy, mastering them, so that any person who sits in front of them experiences the deep presence, and attunement that people are ascribing to AI? In my observation and from what I hear other supervisors talking about, that is not happening. Enter the Big Gap of therapists not doing the basic thing they were trained to do.

What we do see happening however, is the multitude of therapists graduating who don’t believe they are prepared to work with clients. They don’t feel like they know what to do with a client in front of them and they panic. After they panic, they start taking more trainings in more modalities, leaving behind the core experiences that make therapy effective in the first place, the relationship between therapist and client. They end up substituting meaningful connection with psychoeducation, worksheets, or techniques.

Yes, AI is cheaper than therapy (which can help give clients a head start on seeing how they are projecting their constructed self out into the digital world), but it doesn’t substitute for a real relationship, (unless you have narcissistic tendencies in which case, receiving self reflection of your projections is all you’d really want anyway).

My point is that with people flocking to AI, it demands attention to our own practices. If therapy is to be a key experience in achieving and maintaining mental health, then we’d better make sure we know what our clients want & need. Mental wellness, healing even, begins with building connection through clients being heard, being known, knowing that they’re not alone, they’re not weird, crazy or broken, and they are worth being seen by another human being who they can interact with.

The basics of therapeutic skill are taught first because they help people connect at the root shared experience of being human. When we meet each other at the root, we can support their healing journey to wholeness. When we don’t meet clients at the root of humanness, they search for connection elsewhere, finding something like AI that looks like connection, but is merely reporting back the data it’s been given.

Hone your presence, stop hiding behind modalities so that you can truly create the change you hoped to create when you decided to enter this field. I see you, I hear you, you are not alone, and you don’t need to panic, you simply need to practice.

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Therapist, supervision, mentorship, & coaching for those who want to bridge ancient & inner wisdom with modern psychotherapy.