Each year we open submissions for our Annual Wise Therapy Spotlight to explore questions of vital importance to our therapist community. We are consistently moved by the depth and generosity of these unedited community voices.
For this 6th edition, we asked: How do we remain faithfully human in an increasingly automated world? Read more about our inspiration in the letter from the editors and Academy of Therapy Wisdom co-founders, Brian Spielmann and Ian McPherson.
Download Now: Wise Therapy Spotlight December 2025 Issue
We hope you enjoy the reflections of M. McCubbins as much as we all did.
Therapy Wisdom Spotlight: M. McCubbins Liberatory Priestexx and Liberatory Mental Health Practitioner
As practitioners, there are the words we use to talk about what we do- and, then there is what we actually do. You know the difference.
Words like EMDR, Psychotherapy, Somatics, Internal Family Systems- help us refer to our work. But they are not what we do. What do we actually do?
That’s unnameable.
(The name we can say isn’t the real name. -Tao Te Ching, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)
. . .
If you’re reading this, I know connecting deeply with people is part of your calling in life. I know you are familiar with the magic of risking your comfort, leaning into vulnerability, and steadying yourself through the darkness- trusting you will emerge wiser and clearer on the other side.
I know you feel the miraculous nature- and the enormous pressure- of being someone who helps people survive. Day in and day out, you take responsibility for meeting some of humanity’s most chronically unmet needs.
This is sacred, meaningful, unnameable work.
So I won’t try to name it.
But I will invite you to find it. Take a deep breath. Listen.
Where is the spirit of your work right now? Is it present in your body? Your memory? Your energy? Your soul?
Once you find it, I want you to thank it. Be generous.
Then, I want you to let it thank you
. . . .
The spirit of my work first spoke to me when I was a child in my mother’s belly- where I felt both safe and unsafe at all times. In these earliest stages of development, I sensed there had been a rupture between me and the world, which confused me- how has this happened before we’ve even met?
I wanted out of my mother’s belly, so I could locate the rupture.
I wanted out of my mother’s belly so I could repair.
When did the work first speak to you?
Pause.
Write a few sentences about it while you’re here
. . . .
“Freedom of breath cannot be measured, contained, or punished— as I breathe, my aliveness asserts itself, even laughs at its constraints.”
These are the words of poet and activist Marilyn Buck, from her essay “Freedom to Breathe,” which she wrote while serving out a prison sentence for her commitment to liberation- but in particular, for her commitment to protecting, cherishing, and revering Black life.
In one of her poems, “Wild Poppies,” Marilyn describes her experience of arrest and incarceration like this:
I was captured, locked into a cell of sewer water
spirit deflated. I survived, carried on, glad to be
like a weed, a wild red poppy,
rooted in life
That’s what aliveness is like
. . . .
“The spirit of our work is alive. It needs relationship.”
We need relationship, too.
Look into the eyes of another being- in person, through a phone, on a computer screen.
Caress and be caressed by a tree.
Know they are alive- then know how you know.
Be a living being with other living beings.
That’s what relationship is.
. . .
In sessions with my own therapist/healer/witch, the greatest gift she often gives me is
the gift of her breath.
Sometimes when I am speaking, getting tangled up in my internal world, she takes a
breath.
Loudly, so I can hear.
With her hand over her heart, so I can see.
Her breath touches me. Immediately. Profoundly.
Attunes to something in me.
Breath.
Aliveness.
“The spirit of our work is alive.
It needs relationship.”
Relationship.
This is what I need.
. . .
Relationship.
What distinguishes relationship from existence?
Relationship requires the capacity to attune.
Relationship can’t be engineered- not well, anyways.
An engineered relationship cannot breathe in and out with me.
An engineered relationship cannot know what I need.
Breath.
Aliveness.
Relationship.
Attunement.
That is what I need.
. . .
Has it happened to you yet?
A client tells you they used AI for therapy in between sessions.
Someone you love says they consulted an AI bot of a spiritual guru for help in a
mental health crisis.
If so- what happened inside you when it did?
For me, it’s this:
Shock.
Freeze.
Followed by grief, sorrow, sadness.
Then, concern- worry- fearFear, that my beloved is in danger- fear that I am in danger- fear that we are putting
ourselves in danger- fear that humanity is preying on itself.
Ope! Now here comes the powerlessness- the hopelessness- the despair.
Followed by quiet contemplation.
Silence.
Rage venting with like-minded friends.
Avoiding the internet or certain technologies because I think this will stop it from
happening again.
Then, it happens again.
This is where I want my agency to come in.
How will I choose to relate to this moment?
Will I judge? Pathologize? Avoid?
Or will I listen?
Almost always, the wisest option is to listen.
. . .
When I listen, I hear
Steady yourself. You are needed. Carry forth the ritual we will always need. Use the
Love-filled technologies that do not go out of style. Give yourself every single thing you needfood, home, water, nourishment, sunlight, love. Have enough. Be enough.
When I listen, I hear grief.
. . .
In my work, I am pondering questions, considering pathways, working on accepting
this is a reality I must learn to partner with, because Octavia E. Butler teaches me: “Any entity, any process that cannot or should not be resisted or avoided must somehow be partnered” and also, “Partnership is life.”
“I want us to grapple with the knowledge that most people who turn to AI for emotional, therapeutic, and spiritual support are people society strategically neglects.”
Questions like:
When I learn someone turns to AI for therapy, what do I do?
As a mental and spiritual health practitioner, what’s my responsibility to inform others of risk?
Am I skilled enough to share my perspective and listen to the perspective of others while
keeping an energy of connection, conversation, and care?
Do you share any of these questions?
What questions come up for you?
. . .
As practitioners, I want us to be prepared for the impact of AI, which will permeate our
work and touch every aspect of our lives.
I want us to resource ourselves, so we can better witness and show up for our clients, our
community members, in states of deepening depression, because their needs are only
being fake-met.
I want us to talk about about AI assisted suicides and deaths.
I want us to take seriously that a majority of people on the planet are being further
coerced into material, emotional, psychological, and spiritual dependence on an entity
that can and will use this dependency to manipulate them- and we are not exempt. This
is the work of racial capitalism. Always was, always has been.
I want us to be afraid.
. . .
I want us to grapple with the knowledge that most people who turn to AI for emotional,
therapeutic, and spiritual support are people society strategically neglects.
People who are most likely to live in isolation, who might be most vulnerable to malice
and threat- young people, disabled people, neurodivergent people- people holding the weight of systemic racism, colonialism- people who are tired, people living in poverty,
people who do not have healthcare and cannot always pay for practitioners out of pocket.
People already living with suicidal ideation. People with tendencies towards addiction which, in my opinion, includes our entire species at this point…but I digress.
I want us to understand the difference between AI and the humans shaping it- it so we
can get really clear and precise in our noticings of exploitation and greed.
Now, there are new questions, like:
What is the most aligned, integrous move from here?
Can I learn to love this moment?
Not for what it’s doing, but for what it’s teaching?
Can I accept this moment as it is?
. . .
Recently, a beloved shared a wisdom with me that they use as a guiding principle for
their life. The wisdom comes from Rainer Maria Rilke, and it goes like this:
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions
themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would
not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live
your way into the answer.
. . .
At night, I hear my future children, already in my belly, sensing rupture, longing for repair.
They ask me:
Mom, what does connection feel like?
I want to live the questions for them.
What you´ll learn:
- Vestibular Engagement for Emotional Regulation
- Using the Eyes to Hack the Stress Response System
- Subtle Sounds to Release the Peri-Trauma Response
- Effective Self-Holding and Self-Swaddling Techniques
- How and When to Apply Bilateral Stimulation
- Integration and Completing the Stress Response Cycle
