Therapy After ChatGPT: When AI Insight Isn’t Enough

ChatGPT and other AI tools can help you describe and understand psychological patterns. Psychotherapy offers something different: the opportunity to notice those patterns as they emerge, moment by moment, in the presence of another person—and to work with the feelings, anxiety and defences that keep them in place.

You may understand why you become anxious and still become anxious. You may know why you are drawn to unavailable partners and find yourself drawn to another one. You may recognise that you put other people’s needs before your own and still be unable to say no.

You can even explain exactly how you avoid difficult feelings while continuing to avoid them. At some point, another explanation may not be what you need.

Suppose conversations with ChatGPT or another AI tool have helped you recognise that you take care of other people while neglecting yourself. That can be an important insight.

In therapy, you begin telling me about a difficult week. A few minutes later, you ask whether I am tired. Perhaps you worry that you are talking too much, change the subject, or insist that your problems are not very important.

Something you have described many times has just happened between us. We can now explore what made your attention move away from you. What feeling appeared just beforehand? What happened in your body? Was there anxiety? What did you imagine might happen if another person simply remained interested in you?

We are no longer only discussing the pattern. We can see it happening.

Psychological insight is valuable, but insight and change are not the same thing. It is possible to become extremely knowledgeable about your psychology without substantially changing it.

When feelings are difficult to access, thinking about them can become a substitute for experiencing them. You might say, “I know I intellectualise my emotions.” Then, when anger, sadness or emotional closeness begins to appear in a session, you immediately start explaining it.

At that moment, we have something more useful than a theory about intellectualisation. We can notice the shift together, understand the anxiety it regulates and explore what becomes possible when the habitual defence is no longer doing all the work.

I am Dr Nikos Tsigaras, a Counselling Psychologist and Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) therapist. I work with adults in Kensington and online. Some come after previous therapy, reading, psychology podcasts or conversations with AI; others are beginning to make sense of what has been difficult. What matters is the wish to understand persistent emotional or relationship patterns and find a different way through them.

ISTDP pays close attention to what happens in the present: feelings, anxiety, bodily responses, impulses and the strategies used—often automatically—to avoid emotional experience. The aim is not to take away your capacity to think. It is to help thinking work alongside emotional experience rather than replacing it.

Therapy does not necessarily begin where AI failed. It may begin where AI helped you arrive.

• You understand your difficulties intellectually but keep repeating the same patterns.
• You may have read extensively, listened to psychology podcasts or had long conversations with AI, yet feel no freer.
• You tend to analyse, explain or debate your feelings rather than experience them.
• Previous therapy gave you insight or support but did not lead to enough change.
• Anxiety appears when you try to become emotionally close, assertive or visible.
• Work or other responsibilities may be going well while relationships, self-criticism or emotional disconnection remain painful.

You may also find the pages on anxiety therapy, individual relationship counselling, childhood trauma and childhood emotional neglect useful.