ChatGPT as a Therapist: Can AI Help Us Understand Ourselves?

Until recently, we asked artificial intelligence to write our emails, plan our trips, or create a recipe from the ingredients in our fridge. Today, we tell it why we argued with our partner, recount our relationships with our parents, analyze our own reactions, and ask it why we find ourselves in the same life situations over and over again. Can we rely on AI when it comes to our mental health?

Have we started optimizing self-discovery as well?

We are used to optimizing almost everything. We look for ways to do more work in less time, sleep better, train more efficiently, learn faster, and organize our day better. There are applications that will tell us when to drink water, how deeply we slept, and whether we have taken enough steps today. It is not unusual that at some point we also wanted to optimize our own introspection.

AI has, almost imperceptibly, gone from being a practical assistant to a place where we try to understand ourselves. ChatGPT and similar tools are always available to us, so we do not have to wait for an appointment, we do not have to wonder if our problem is big enough to seek professional help, and we can type out exactly what is going through our minds. They will not interrupt us, they will not judge us, and, perhaps most appealing of all, we will get an answer almost immediately.

Is there a shortcut when it comes to mental health?

Recently, I was discussing AI psychotherapy with friends. One of them uses AI to analyze his own patterns, and his argument was simple: he already knows everything about himself anyway. He has gone through enough real therapy, thinks about himself sufficiently, and is aware of his patterns. AI just helps him connect things faster, which in psychotherapy might take months of conversation and a substantial budget.

If there is a tool to which we can describe a situation, give enough context, and in return get a question or a perspective that we had not thought of ourselves, why shouldn't we use it? I do not think there is anything wrong with trying to help ourselves using artificial intelligence. Sometimes we might just need that exact perspective to finally see something that was in front of our eyes the whole time.

But one thing from that conversation stayed in my mind: isn't the meaning of self-discovery precisely in the process, in the long-term digging through our own thoughts, questioning what we think we already know about ourselves, and gradually arriving at answers?

Knowing something about yourself is not the same as arriving at it

Today, psychotherapy is often viewed almost as another form of personal development. We go there to discover our patterns, find the causes of our behavior, learn to set boundaries, and, ultimately, become a more functional version of ourselves. And since we are generally inclined to look for easier and faster paths to our goals, the idea that we can resolve problems related to our own psyche almost instantly is appealing.

However, the purpose of psychotherapy is not just for someone to tell us why we are the way we are. We can know perfectly well that we find a certain situation hard to endure because of something that happened to us in childhood. We can understand why we choose certain relationships, why we care what others think of us, or why we withdraw every time we should say what we want. We can read ten books about it and very precisely explain our own patterns.

And yet still continue to repeat them, because understanding something intellectually and experiencing that same insight emotionally are not the same thing.

What can AI actually give us?

This, of course, does not mean that using artificial intelligence to talk about our own problems is necessarily a bad idea. AI can be a very useful tool for self-reflection, especially for people who have already been to psychotherapy and can evaluate the quality of communication with an AI tool, or when we do not have the possibility to talk to a professional.

Sometimes just formulating a problem helps us see it more clearly. When we have to explain what happened to someone, or even something, we are forced to turn our own thoughts into words. AI can offer us another perspective, help us recognize a repeating pattern, or ask a question we haven't asked ourselves.

There is also its availability. Psychotherapy is not accessible to everyone, at least not when they need it. Financially, it is out of reach for many, there are waiting lists for appointments, and for some, the very decision to seek professional help is a huge step. If talking to an AI will help someone name what they are feeling for the first time, or realize they need professional help, it is hard to argue there is no value in that. But here we come to the limit of what AI can offer us.

What happens between the question and the answer?

In therapy, at least when we talk about therapeutic approaches based on conversation and self-reflection, it is not just an exchange of information that occurs. We will rationalize something, we will persistently avoid some answers, a certain question might make us angry, and another might make us sad. Sometimes we will voice something we have long known about ourselves and truly feel it for the first time. That is precisely why the important part often happens between the question and the answer.

If I tell ChatGPT enough details about my life, it is quite possible it will offer me a very precise interpretation. I can read it and think: yes, that is exactly it. But the therapeutic process also includes what happens while we are reaching that insight, and that is resistance, emotion, the reaction of the other person, and the relationship we build with them.

Psychotherapy does not happen only through what is spoken, but also through the relationship in which it is spoken. There are, of course, situations that require serious professional assessment and help that AI cannot provide.

AI as an aid, not a shortcut

Artificial intelligence can help us ask better questions, write down thoughts, view situations from multiple perspectives, and notice things we would otherwise overlook. Perhaps it can even help us arrive at a session with a therapist with something we want to talk about.

If I can learn something about myself today, why should it take me six months, a year, or two?

The value is not only in the time needed to find the answer. Within it, we learn to recognize our own reactions, tolerate discomfort, change our perspective, and stay with a certain feeling a little longer than we would otherwise want to. We also learn to be in a relationship with another person while doing all this.

It is tempting to think we can accelerate getting to know ourselves. Perhaps sometimes we can. But when it comes to psychotherapy, that digging we so desperately want to cut short is generally not an obstacle on the path to the answer. Perhaps it is exactly the most important part of the process.