2 weeks Ago By Sarah Carson
You can tell someone has misunderstood psychotherapy – or listened to too many podcasts – when they start to use therapy speak around you.Phrases creep in that raise alarm bells and make you cringe: they start diagnosing everybody’s “attachment style”, they label characters from their past “abusive” or “narcissistic”, they use expressions like “showing up for myself” and “intention” and “triggered”. All of a sudden they’re reminding you to “sit in your feelings” and to remember that they are “valid”.
I had an ungenerous thought about my mother-in-law – valid. I can’t be arsed going to work – valid. I have fantasies about hitting my neighbour’s cat with my car – valid.
This psychobabble is incredibly tedious, firstly because it is annoying, and usually uninvited, but mainly because it is obvious proof that the speaker has used therapy to seek confirmation and “permission” rather than to really engage with discomfort, address their own issues, or allow themselves to be challenged in order to work through a problem. That is not therapy, it’s enabling.if(window.
adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "inread-hb-ros-inews"}); }For these people, I imagine offloading problems to generative AI, which The Times reports more and more young people are turning to amid long NHS waiting lists, might seem a perfect solution.
Nobody is holding you to account, nobody is questioning your perspective – literally, nobody is there. And that does not really matter, if the exercise of typing out a problem to ChatGPT and having a response comforts you, or provides an opportunity to articulate emotions that you might otherwise bottle up or hide.Sometimes the act of talking is all you need anyway.
I am ashamed to say that I left a nine-minute voice note to a friend this week, and even before she (patient, and unfazed by my chronic self-obsession) replied, I felt lighter simply by having expressed everything I felt.But having someone to talk to should not be confused with having something to talk at. The real reason I felt so much lighter was that my friend had asked me a question in the first place.
She had let me know my feelings were not a burden, she had anticipated that I might be a bit vulnerable that day, and she had checked in. if(window.adverts) { window.
adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_mobile_l1"}); }if(window.adverts) { window.
adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l1"}); }AI might give you somewhere to dump all your emotions, and its language capabilities might be advanced enough to tell you they’re valid, or even offer constructive advice, but it can’t replace an honest, human conversation with someone who can help you make sense of them.#color-context-related-article-3491519 {--inews-color-primary: #3759B7;--inews-color-secondary: #EFF2FA;--inews-color-tertiary: #3759B7;} Read Next square KATE LISTER Your date isn't a 'narcissist' - they just don't like youRead MoreThat’s what therapy is supposed to be for, isn’t it? If we put aside serious mental ill health – for which AI would obviously be catastrophic as a treatment path – a lot of what therapy helps people with is figuring things out with an external party, and learning coping mechanisms.
Those skills will not develop if we start believing that therapy can be replaced by one-way thought deposits or diary entries. Therapy is not only about that other person listening to you: breakthroughs come from expert insight, your own active participation in new behaviours, and your willingness to self-interrogate and be honest. AI demands nothing painful or uncomfortable from you.
Like the worst therapists, it will only tell you what you want to hear.Aren’t we all self-obsessed enough already? Aren’t we deficient enough in the coping skills we once took for granted?Social media has not just replaced human interaction in almost every arena of modern life, but created a culture in which it is not enough to be a person, we must be a personal brand. The younger generations are so precious about their “boundaries” that they have a reputation for resenting hard work and refusing to make good impressions.
We are so mollycoddled that we now believe there must be an underlying reason for the essential frustrations of being a person – like disliking loud noises or getting distracted sometimes – that millions of people are wrongly diagnosing themselves with conditions like ADHD and autism after watching TikTok videos, and preventing people who really do have those conditions from getting the support they need.AI therapy will only further encourage our understanding of ourselves as special, important and the victims of any scenario we find ourselves in, instead of the flawed people each of us really are, with pasts and mistakes and real pain to acknowledge if we want to – and now I’ll use some therapy speak – “do the work”.if(window.
adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_mobile_l2"}); }if(window.
adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l2"}); }The more we share our problems with anonymous tech models instead of trying to solve them, the less we share them with the people who actually care about them.
If you’re pouring your heart out to AI, it’s not a therapist you need to speak to, it’s a friend..
