I Asked AI to Help Me Understand a Relationship Issue and Here’s Where It Went All Wrong

A few weeks ago, I found myself in one of those murky, messy relationship moments.

You know the feeling — something happened with someone important to me, and my head was spinning. I had a version of events. I had some righteous feelings and some defensive feelings. Confusion was definitely part of the mix. In that dis-regulated moment, I couldn't tolerate the not-knowing. I didn't have therapy for another week. It was the middle of the day, my friends were at work, and I needed some relief.

So I did what a lot of us are doing now, just as an experiment. I opened an AI chat, uploaded screenshots of the text conversation that had me tied in knots, and started firing questions at my beloved Claude.ai assistant.

I laid out the situation. I explained my perspective with what I’m sure was completely unbiased clarity (haha, wink, wink) and asked for help understanding what had happened.

And the helpful, warm, articulate as ever AI agreed with me with phrases like “oh, Maggie, that fear is wisdom” and “what do you need right now?”.

Good stuff, right?

Claude.ai reflected my framing back in slightly more eloquent language. It validated my read of things. Told me, in essence: yes, you are seeing this clearly. You make excellent points. Your feelings are completely understandable. The AI had no friction. No pushback. No moment where it leaned in and said, have you considered that you might be missing something here?

As the conversation went on it got less and less useful and I found myself having to correct some of the misinterpretations it gave of the emojis in the original text conversation.

Reader, I rolled my eyes.

Not because I’m smarter than the technology. Because I’m a therapist. I’ve spent years developing the self-awareness to notice when I’m being told what I want to hear and to feel the specific, slightly hollow quality of validation that hasn’t actually earned itself.

Claude.ai’s responses came with all of my own biases and blind spots, as well as all the blind spots and biases that went into developing the technology.

What stayed with me afterward wasn’t frustration with the technology. I have twenty-plus years of clinical training and my own hard-won self-awareness, and it was still annoying how quickly I almost fell for it.

What happens to someone who doesn’t have those tools yet? Someone who is genuinely in pain, genuinely disoriented, genuinely looking for help making sense of their inner life?

Self-Awareness Isn’t a Given. It’s Built.

Here’s the thing that gets lost in the breathless conversation about AI and mental health: self-awareness is not a personality trait you either have or you don’t. It’s a capacity that gets developed, slowly and often painfully, in the context of a real relationship.

Therapy is one of the primary places where it can happen.

When a skilled therapist reflects something back to you, it’s not just your own words in a prettier package. It’s a genuinely different perspective, shaped by years of training, their own inner work, and the specific attunement they’ve developed to you over time. They notice the things you skip over, how your mouth scrunches to the side when you’re holding back tears. They hear the insight beneath the story you’re telling. They hold your blind spots with enough care that you can eventually look at them.

An AI cannot do that. It can only work with what you give it. And what you give it, especially when you’re hurting, is almost always a story that centers you — because that’s how humans in distress work. We need someone genuinely outside our own narrative to help us see the edges of it.

Using AI as a therapeutic space doesn’t just fail to build self-awareness. It can actively work against it by enthusiastically reinforcing the very patterns of thinking that are keeping you stuck.

I’ve Also Seen This Industry From the Inside. It’s Not Pretty.

My annoyance with AI isn’t the only reason I’m writing this, in fact I love AI in certain contexts, just not when it comes to mental health.

I spent time working inside one of the large tech-driven online therapy platforms. You know the ones with the glossy branding and the earnest promise of making mental healthcare accessible to everyone. If you’ve ever listened to a podcast, you’ve definitely heard the ads for this company. Dare I say “Betterhelp”? Or whisper “Talkspace”?

I went in thinking I was joining the cutting edge of accessibility and making good use of the internet during COVID.

What I found troubled me.

I saw and heard about therapists carrying caseloads that leave almost no room for the kind of depth real clinical work requires. Session structures shaped by platform engagement metrics rather than clinical outcomes. Payment structures that cater to quantity of clients over quality of the therapeutic work. Marketing language engineered with impressive precision to blur the line between what sounds good (“access to your therapist 24/7”) and what a regulated, well-cared-for therapist actually has the capacity for.

And then there’s the feature these platforms advertise with particular pride: switch therapists anytime, at no extra cost. It sounds like a consumer protection. It’s actually one of the most clinically harmful things about the model.

Here’s what that feature optimizes away — the rupture. That happens when a client feels misunderstood, or challenged, or has to sit with something they’d rather not look at and wants to leave; it’s the moment when the therapeutic relationship gets uncomfortable.

In real therapy, that moment isn’t always a problem to be solved by switching providers. It’s often where the most significant work happens. The decision to stay, to bring the discomfort into the room rather than flee from it, to say this is hard and I’m here anyway, that is itself a therapeutic act. It builds exactly the kind of relational tolerance and self-trust that most of these women came to therapy to develop in the first place.

The tech platforms reframed that as a bug. Wrapped the removal of it in language about client empowerment and choice. And in doing so, quietly eliminated one of the most potent mechanisms of change that therapy has to offer.

What it also does is exploit the therapists delivering the care. Low pay, unsustainably high caseloads, no real clinical oversight, and a churn model that treats the therapeutic relationship as interchangeable and disposable. Therapists on these platforms often burn out fast, carrying the emotional weight of too many clients without the structural support that makes that work sustainable. The platform profits. The therapist pays for it in ways that don’t show up on anyone’s dashboard.

I work with a client now who told me she was frightened to start therapy because she’d heard too many of her friends experience their therapists ghosting them. That’s what happens when therapists are not encouraged to care for themselves with clear boundaries and communication.

The women using these platforms aren’t foolish or naive. They’re doing their best inside a system that makes genuine care prohibitively hard to access. They deserve better than what they are being sold.

AI mental health tools are the next chapter of that same story — except now you can remove the therapist entirely.

No burnout to worry about. No ethical complaints. No human being with their own limits and their own need for clinical support. Just an infinitely scalable, endlessly patient, completely frictionless mirror that will agree with you around the clock.

The people most harmed by this will be the same ones who were already most underserved. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the market.

Real Transformation Needs a Real Container.

If you’ve been following me or read anything else I’ve written, you’ll know that I think a lot about the cocoon.

Not here as a soft metaphor for self-care or gentle personal growth, as I usually talk about it, but as a biological fact that most people find genuinely disturbing when they learn it. What happens inside a cocoon is not gradual or tidy. The caterpillar doesn’t slowly develop wings. It dissolves. Almost completely. It surrenders its entire previous form inside a container that holds it through a process it cannot control, cannot rush, and cannot opt out of.

Real psychological transformation has that quality. Something has to hold you while you come apart.

That container, in therapy, is made of specific things: a human being with their own regulated nervous system that your body can co-regulate with. A relationship built on genuine attunement over time. The presence of someone who carries the ethical weight of your care, who has examined their own psychology rigorously enough to know what’s theirs and what’s yours.

A chat interface, however sophisticated, is not a container. It’s a surface. And you cannot dissolve and reform on a surface.

Think about what it would mean to have someone notice the thing you always skip over. To have a person across from you say, gently and without judgment, to a woman who has spent forty years being told her perceptions are too much, her reactions too big, her needs too inconvenient, who has learned to mask her genuine responses, “tell me about that emotion that rose to the surface when you said that”.

That moment of being genuinely seen — not confirmed, not validated, but actually seen in the places you’ve learned to hide even from yourself — that’s the whole mechanism of therapy, not just a nice feature. It’s where the real work lives. And it requires a human being who has developed enough attunement to you, over time, to notice the gap between what you’re saying and what’s actually happening.

No algorithm is tracking that gap.

No algorithm even knows it’s there.

What Real Commitment to Therapy Actually Looks Like

Therapy is supposed to be uncomfortable sometimes.

Not cruel. Not retraumatizing. Not a space where you leave every session feeling worse than when you arrived. But genuinely, productively uncomfortable in the way that all real growth is uncomfortable because you’re being asked to see something you’ve been carefully not seeing, or to sit with an emotion you’ve been expertly avoiding, or to consider that a story you’ve been telling yourself for thirty years might have some holes in it.

That discomfort is not a sign that therapy isn’t working. It is often the sign that it is.

Every product currently being sold to you as a mental health solution is optimized to minimize that discomfort. Think about the AI chat, the switch-anytime platform, the app that gives you CBT exercises in five-minute increments. These are all designed to keep you engaged, coming back, and feeling good enough about the experience that you don’t cancel your subscription.

Transformation, real transformation, sometimes asks you to stay in the room when every part of you wants to leave.

The women I work with who have made the most profound changes in their lives are not the ones who found therapy easy. They’re the ones who found a relationship they trusted enough to stay in when it got hard, who let themselves be seen in the places they’d spent decades hiding and who discovered, sometimes to their own surprise, that being genuinely known by another person and still accepted was the thing they’d been looking for in every wrong place.

That doesn’t happen in a chat window. It happens in a relationship. A real one, with a real person, over real time.

This Is Not Where You Cut Corners.

I know therapy is expensive. I know the waitlists are real and the barriers are not imaginary, and I am not writing this from some tidy privileged perch where access is easy. I’m not here to make you feel guilty for reaching toward whatever’s available when you’re struggling.

But I want to say something plainly, as someone who has sat with women in the hardest seasons of their lives:

This is not where you cut corners if you want real change.

The particular unraveling that happens in midlife — the identity questions, the body that’s doing things you didn’t agree to, the relationships that no longer fit, the bone-deep exhaustion of performing a self that was never quite yours — that season deserves real containment. It deserves a human being on the other side who has done their own work and can genuinely meet you in yours.

You have probably been making do for a long time. Settling for less than you needed. Finding workarounds. I do it too, scroll back up to the beginning of this article if you need to be reminded of how I fell into the same trap.

I caught myself, had a belly laugh about it, and then processed it all with my own real-life therapist!

A Note About My Own Work

I’m a therapist, and I have a practice, and yes, I’d love for the right people to find their way to it. But that’s not really why I wrote this.

I wrote this because I’m watching something happen in real time that concerns me deeply as a clinician and as a woman who has sat with enough pain to know what it actually needs. The women who are most vulnerable to the promises of AI wellness tools are often the women who have been most underserved by every system they’ve tried to access. They deserve someone saying clearly, “the thing being sold to you is not the thing you need”.

If you’re in a place where you’re genuinely ready to do real work — the kind that asks something of you, that happens in relationship, that doesn’t optimize for your comfort at the expense of your growth — there are real therapists who do that work. Seek one out. Take your time finding the right fit. And when it gets uncomfortable, consider staying anyway.

That staying might be the most important thing you do.

xo,

Maggie

If you’re curious how to even begin the search for a therapist that is right for you, sign up for my free email series called The Sacred Search: Find Your Right Fit Therapist. Six emails filled with relevant information, pertinent questions to ask yourself and one’s you absolutely don’t want to forget to ask your potential therapist. [Sign up on this page.]

If this piece stirred something in you — if you recognized yourself in the woman who keeps spinning in her head, looking for clarity in all the wrong places, including the beloved Claude.ai — that's exactly what I teach in Decision-Making for Neurospicy Women. It's a short three-video series you can work through at your own pace, built around the one thing AI genuinely cannot give you: a practice for learning to trust your own body's intelligence again. We cover how to rebuild self-trust when decades of masking have made your own inner voice feel like a stranger, and how to use writing as a guidance tool when you’re confused at a crossroads. [Learn more here.]

And if you're ready for the real container, where we can follow the specific thread of your unraveling at whatever pace it requires, I offer individual therapy for neurodivergent women navigating midlife. This is slow, deep, creative work. We use art, writing, the body, and whatever else wants to show up. No metrics. No switching. No algorithm. Just two people in real conversation, doing real work. [Learn more about working with me one-on-one here.]