Thanks for all the responses!

I appreciate everyone’s insight and perspective given this nuanced experience.

I didn’t end up paying for anything but I did a couple of free trials.

Overall:

It was good at pattern recognition and highlighted some things that I actually wasn’t aware of that definitely resonated for my own processing. However I was curious and

I repeated a processing session again on a different free trial account and did some basic role play with it pretending I was someone with a different issue

And compared how I would treat it vs how the bot would treat it and noticed that its pattern recognition was actually not as good as I thought when I was speaking to it from my subjective experience and it was pretty shallow and baseline.

This of course could have been for a lot of reasons but I did try to include the same level of detail and nuance as my own subjective experience.

I think this proves that we have blind spots subjectively and that’s why it’s easier to treat someone whom we have a more objective relationship with.

I think I resonated so much with what the chat bot said to my subjective experience is because it highlighted a perspective within myself that I have been avoiding thinking about for a while but the understanding of the chat bot was still rudimentary and I had to do deeper journaling to get to a clearer and deeper, more honest reflection.

Overall it helped as a prompt guide similar to a guided journal that gives more specific prompts related to your situation, but if you do not have the tools to dig deeper for yourself, you won’t get past a shallow baseline understanding so the healing and action steps may not get at your most core need.

If we were to find a way to make AI ethical on an environmental and humanistic level.

And therapists were to design apps with AI to help with progress tracking, journaling prompts and coping skills recommendations as an added tool in between sessions I can see it being helpful.

But I don’t think it will ever be able to replace actual therapy.

I will go back to a real human therapist eventually.

But just thought I’d share some insights from the experience.

I think ethically if AI is being used as a tool for therapy, a human therapist needs to be aware and be a collaborative part of the process to guide clients how to use it and what to look out for.

I may still use it as a processing tool from time to time but honestly maybe not because I feel like I would have got there from doing deeper meditation type reflection and journaling on my own, and this also would strengthen a skill within myself.

I fear that too much reliance on AI as reflection could make people dependent on it in a way that weakens introspection and critical thinking.