Why AI Can’t Be Your Therapist
Last month I shared that my book, The Human Therapist, finally came out. This month I want to pull back the curtain on one chapter in particular: why AI can’t be your therapist.
Before I say anything else, I want to be clear about what this isn’t. It isn’t a warning against technology. It’s an honest look at what we’re actually comparing when we ask whether a chatbot can do what I do.
Here’s what I keep coming back to.
AI Has No Memory
Every conversation starts from nothing. A client can spend months working toward something and return the next day to a system that greets them as a stranger. There’s no accumulation. No sense of how this week compares to last month. No noticing that something has shifted. In therapy, that accumulation is the work. It’s how I know a flat “I’m fine” this week means something different than it did in March.
AI Is Built to Agree With You
Even when agreement isn’t what you need. A person avoiding a hard conversation might get encouraged to honor their feelings, when what they actually need is someone to ask what the avoidance is costing them. Over-validation feels good in the moment. It rarely moves anyone forward.
AI Can Sound Like Understanding, Without Being It
I think about a colleague who once told me about testing a mental health chatbot during a rough week. The response read as polite, structured, technically correct. It even offered a breathing exercise. She said she finished reading it and felt strangely empty. Nothing was wrong with it. But no one had actually heard her, either.
What Presence Makes Possible
That’s the part I don’t think a better model will ever fix. I think of a session early in my career, when a client who’d spent weeks describing her childhood in a careful, analytical way suddenly stopped mid-sentence and stared at the floor. I said, “Something about that memory feels different today.” She told me it was the first time she’d let herself feel how lonely that moment had actually been.
No technique made that happen. No prompt could have surfaced it. She felt safe enough to stop managing her experience and just feel it. That’s what presence makes possible, and presence isn’t something you can automate.
Where AI Actually Fits
None of this means AI has no place in mental health. I’ve had clients use chatbots between sessions to brain dump, and my instinct is curiosity, not alarm. They’re not replacing therapy. They’re managing the space between sessions, which is real and worth tending to. It’s part of why I now let clients email me between appointments. I don’t require a response on my end, just somewhere for them to put something down.
AI is a resource. It is not a relationship. A bridge, maybe. Not a destination.
The Line It Won’t Cross
People come to therapy because they want to be understood, not categorized. That’s the line technology won’t cross, not because it isn’t advanced enough, but because of what sits on the other side of it.
A system that has never suffered cannot bear witness to suffering.
If this resonated, this is just one chapter of The Human Therapist. And if you’re navigating something you’d rather talk through with an actual person, reach out here to set up a consultation.
