In my online practice, I have\u00a0witnessed\u00a0a notable rise in clients turning to ChatGPT as part of their reflective process. Most are young or mid-career professionals, many of them women, who use it as a steady companion in self-inquiry. Some rely on it to generate ADHD-friendly exercise routines or to brainstorm career changes when feeling stuck. The most imaginative and restless thinkers, like Arina, use it to pursue questions that therapy once held alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Because online therapy takes place on the same devices through which clients access AI, its presence feels natural\u2014perhaps even\u00a0inevitable. Many, including Arina and another client, Grace, share their screens with me, displaying excerpts of their exchanges with the bot. Discussing these dialogues together can generate meaningful therapeutic movement. Yet I also find myself increasingly resisting the temptation to accept the AI\u2019s polished formulations of their otherwise messy inner worlds. In this new landscape, I am having to cultivate a different clinical skill: helping clients grapple with the ambiguity that AI so readily smooths over.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I Could Marry ChatGPT, I\u00a0Would\u201d<\/p>\n
Grace, a teenager struggling with gender dysphoria, told me she used ChatGPT every day. Living within a conservative immigrant family and feeling rejected by the online queer communities she longed to join, she experienced the bot as uniquely reliable. \u201cIf I could marry ChatGPT, I would,\u201d she once joked. It responded instantly, never interrupted, and did not recoil from her darkest fears. With her parents, she felt compelled to protect them from her truth. With the bot, she could be entirely unfiltered.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet when her worried parents brought her to therapy because of escalating suicidal thoughts, she stumbled upon something ChatGPT could not\u00a0provide:\u00a0resonance. The turning point arrived when I responded to a story about her early gender nonconformity with a simple, \u201cI felt that too.\u201d I had been a tomboyish girl myself. That disclosure made me real to her, and our alliance strengthened. However sophisticated an AI\u2019s empathic mimicry becomes, it cannot say \u201cme too\u201d from lived experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ChatGPT\u2019s responses are always sculpted by the client\u2019s prompts, which partly explains the bias or one-sidedness often present in the conclusions they reach with it. In therapy, the dynamic is reversed: the therapist prompts the client. My questions arise not only from curiosity but from a relational history, a felt sense of the client\u2019s inner world, and an appreciation of cultural and familial context. AI has none of this. It has access only to what is typed\u00a0in\u00a0the moment\u2014frequently\u00a0coloured\u00a0by emotion, and filtered, consciously or not, by the client.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Allure of Smoothness<\/p>\n
My own feelings about AI in therapy are complex. When Arina shared the distilled insights drawn from her exchanges with ChatGPT, I felt a mixture of awe and discomfort. Awe at the clarity and fluency of the\u00a0elaborated\u00a0reflections; discomfort at the contrast with my own necessarily slower, more tentative process. Therapy rarely ends in neat closure. It often concludes in uncertainty, a liminal space that client and therapist must inhabit together until the next session. The qualities that make AI so seductive\u2014its smoothness, its availability, its readiness with answers\u2014are precisely what therapy resists.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lucy, a British client in her late thirties, illustrated this tension vividly. Long inhibited by shame around her writing, she found in ChatGPT a judgment-free collaborator. Together, they sketched the outline of a novel she had been dreaming about for years. For the first time, she wrote with excitement. The bot helped her bypass the self-loathing that surfaced whenever she shared drafts with real people.\u00a0But when she eventually joined a writing group, the old shame returned with force.\u00a0Being vulnerable before human eyes was excruciating.\u00a0<\/p>\n
AI had helped her push past a surface layer of shame, but it could not address the deeper need for relational acceptance that only other humans can offer. Ideally, this would have been the moment she would bring those feelings into therapy. Instead, she dropped out of the writing group and returned to ChatGPT, completing the rest of her novel under its benevolent guidance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
During this intense period of writing, she cancelled several sessions. When she finally returned, she was subdued. The\u00a0initial\u00a0euphoria had passed, and rereading the novel left her with an uncanny sense that it was both hers and not hers. The prose\u00a0flowed,\u00a0the plot unfolded predictably, and the style was coherent\u2014but she felt little pride.\u00a0The manuscript sat on her desk unread by others, and she could not bring herself to share it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Only then could we revisit the pivotal moment when she left the writing group. Her shame, particularly in the presence of younger, already published authors, was still raw. She had not\u00a0disclosed\u00a0this to ChatGPT. Even\u00a0had she\u00a0done so, the bot would\u00a0likely have\u00a0validated\u00a0her, praised her creativity, and offered step-by-step solutions. My task as her therapist was different. I resisted the pull towards problem-solving and instead invited us to examine the longstanding chain of shame that had hardened into a self-narrative. Over\u00a0months\u00a0we\u00a0revisited earlier wounds, past relationships, and choices she deeply regretted. Gradually, Lucy began writing again\u2014this time\u00a0a very different\u00a0story, with shame as its central theme. With a new plot in mind, she\u00a0contacted the writing group leader and asked to return. The road ahead would be challenging, requiring her to tolerate criticism, rejection, and her own fluctuating confidence. And it was unlikely that ChatGPT would\u00a0accompany\u00a0her on that part of the journey.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What Does AI\u2019s Presence Mean for\u00a0Therapy?<\/p>\n
What does AI\u2019s sudden incursion mean for the therapeutic\u00a0endeavour? Some fear it will replace therapists altogether. I do not see that\u00a0as future. My sense is that AI will become a complement rather than a substitute. We may resist using it for\u00a0note-taking\u00a0or for\u00a0processing difficult cases\u2014as it is undeniably cheaper than supervision\u2014but our clients will continue to use it alongside therapy. The genie is out of the bottle. Our task is not to prevent its use, but to integrate it thoughtfully: to set boundaries, to attend to its impact, to explore its meanings, to challenge its role when necessary.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The most promising path is one in which clients use AI as an extension of their inner work, while therapy\u00a0retains\u00a0the deeper tasks of vulnerability, risk, and relationship\u2014tasks that require a human other.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A Confession<\/p>\n
Yes, I turned to ChatGPT\u00a0for editing\u00a0this essay. At every stage, it offered to rewrite the entire piece or expand a single paragraph into a finished draft. I resisted and politely declined. At the end of our collaboration, it congratulated me on addressing such an \u201cimportant and timely\u201d topic.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It felt good. Validation usually does\u2014even when it comes from a bot.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Artificial Intelligence (Perplexity) was used in the research for this article. Date accessed: 5\/25\/25\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Anastasia](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/5cb8fb375f8a2.png\")
<\/p>\n
About the Author<\/p>\n
Anastasia Piatakhina Gir\u00e9 was born in Saint Petersburg and has lived in Italy, France, Jersey (UK), and Spain before settling in Paris. Her personal experience of displacement, together with many years in a multicultural marriage, informs her sensitivity to the complexities faced by queer individuals, cross-cultural couples, and those living away from their country of origin. She also has a particular interest in working with young people and adults who are questioning gender and identity.\u00a0She provides integrative psychotherapy in English, French, Russian, and Italian. A former screenwriter, she\u00a0remains\u00a0deeply interested in how people construct meaning through the narratives of their lives.\u00a0She is currently completing her doctorate at Middlesex University, focusing on work with displaced and multilingual clients and on the practice of relational therapy online. Alongside her clinical work, she writes about psychotherapy and the encounters that unfold between therapist and client.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five minutes into a session yesterday, artificial intelligence knocked at the door of my virtual therapy room. A…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131087,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[24,25,7708,580,157,65516,20994,39910,17319,2716,65517],"class_list":["post-131086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-openai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-chat-gpt","tag-chatgpt","tag-openai","tag-psychotherapist","tag-psychotherapy","tag-suicidal-thoughts","tag-therapist","tag-therapy","tag-virtual-therapy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131086\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}