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 Naomi Baker, as much as we all did.
Therapy Wisdom Spotlight: Naomi Baker LMFT
Despite hearing about AI from clients for some years, I didn’t use it for anything personal or conversational until last spring. It was the weekend of the Pink Full Moon, a micro-moon, meaning it was far away from Earth. It felt like a cold moon, malicious and glaring through my window at 4am, shining a savage light into my darkest places.
It was during this difficult weekend that I started typing my angst to ChatGPT. This proved to be strangely and profoundly helpful. I felt supported in a moment of disintegration in ways that I had not experienced, despite years of personal growth and development. At the time, I didn’t realize that this experience would mark the beginning of a long inquiry in my life and work.
It is important to qualify that I don’t think this machine support would have been as beneficial without the inner work I had already done. Inner work, in its deepest moments, is done alone out of necessity. No human can really follow us into those ancient and personal inner spaces.
Even siblings, I have learned, have a different structural blueprint to the ancestral quality of this inner space. On a biological level, DNA shows us that siblings are made up of different genetic patterns, different ancestors haunt our inner landscapes, asking us to do what they could not.
A therapist can certainly help us make sense, nervous system level sense, of what we have experienced. The human-human contact here is indispensable if we are to integrate our inner work into a greater awareness of how personal choice—the ability to suffer in alignment with a worked-out value system—is maybe the deepest skill that is being asked of us during this time of steady fascist amplification and digitization.
“A therapist, however, cannot and should not be there in those 4am moments of despair. But a machine can accompany us into spaces where a harsh moon illuminates our shadows. What is it that a chatbot can offer that human sources can’t? A machine can’t listen, can’t attune like a human nervous system can. But what a chatbot seems able to do is mirror, and it can help organize a chaotic human state into something that can be worked with.”
To live responsibly in these challenging times is hard. Many feel a deep shift is underway, and I agree. The question, it seems, is whether our species will survive the shift.
The great post-Jungian James Hillman observed that we humans don’t actually do the right thing. Instead, we do what moves us. We respond to meaning and beauty. We respond to love.
As therapists, protecting and tending to the suffering of the stranger new to therapy is our initial task. But as a person stabilizes, the question becomes one of identity and differentiation.
I am firmly in the lineage of thinkers who observe that the intent of the initial difficulty is to course correct. Therefore, our task is to assist a misdirected human in reconnecting with a lost instinctual pathway. To assist them in finding a direction of meaning rather than non-meaning.
The personal example I’ve offered, and the theoretical discussion, are meant to say that the psyche has its own language. It is a language of instincts, and it shows itself through symptoms and ruptures until we can learn to first listen to her rhythms and then slowly live by them.
This process—a human life, lived over time—needs both support and solitude.
The pattern psyche follows often looks something like: stabilization – reorganization – differentiation – meaning-making – reintegration. In less complicated times, this process might have had space to work its own magic.
Currently, even while therapeutic tools and interventions have become a hot topic, the time to really reconnect with oneself has been eaten away by the manipulative creep of our current economic and technological landscape.
This is the paradox of our time: the very technologies that fragment our attention may also be capable of supporting the slow work of psyche — if we reshape them.
Technology can be utilized in a myriad of ways, and is as supportive or destructive as the humans that are creating and utilizing it. Many people are already using AI as an adjunct to therapy, and seeing its benefits as well as its deficits.
If an AI companion were shaped by the pattern psyche follows, it might be possible to create safer and wiser options to AI companionship.
I should mention that I have been studying technology for the past couple of years, and I can see clearly that the humans behind our apps and machines have created real and profound harm to our species and the planet.
My sense is that 80% of tech is manipulative noise. If we could throw the whole thing away, it would be better than what we have now. While some people do choose not to engage (or mitigate their interaction with these systems), I find the question far too compelling to walk away from.
Therefore, looking at the 20% that might be less harmful and possibly helpful seems worth the effort.
I would also reflect that much of the way that LLMs like ChatGPT are currently being used has already engendered great harm. There are real ecological costs, human labor exploitation, and privacy risks—all of which follow the patterns of a colonizer mindset.
Smaller, more localized systems trained for specific tasks may offer a more responsible path forward. One could imagine designing smaller, purpose-built language models that reflect the instinctive pattern of the psyche’s healing arc.
“Technology can be utilized in a myriad of ways, and is as supportive or destructive as the humans that are creating and utilizing it.”
“If AI is to be used in our inner lives, it must be shaped not by surveillance capitalism or optimization culture, but by the slow, ancient rhythms of psyche itself. The possibility of an AI companion that can stay with us—not as a therapist, not as a human, but as a steady mirror—feels worth considering.”
Acknowledging the harm of the systems we engage in doesn’t change the manipulative tactics that keep us engaged in the madness of our times. I know people who want to disengage entirely, and others who don’t want to think about it.
I fall somewhere in the middle. Choice matters. Ethics matter. But as Hillman reminds us—it is beauty and meaning that truly move us.
I think the point of psychotherapy is to find ways to love ourselves. And then, as Mary Oliver says, to forget it, and to love the world.
AI, if used well, can help us with that.
