The Asymmetric Weight:
We’ve inherited a model of healing that was never meant to bear this much alone.
The therapeutic dyad—that carefully bounded space where one person brings their pain and another is paid to witness it—has become a reservoir for suffering that once moved through families, neighborhoods, spiritual communities, collective ritual.
Therapists now carry the accumulated weight of social fracturing, vast unintegrated trauma, and the metabolic debris of a culture that has outsourced emotional labor to professional containers while dismantling the structures that once provided us vital safety and solace.
I’m concerned that asymmetric relationships—be it therapist-client or user-bot—are being oriented toward as primary sites of relational tending in a world that is starved for what is more fundamentally needed: mutual embodied witness, shared metabolization of suffering, and relational infrastructure where we take turns falling apart, where care flows both ways, where we are messy, smelly, embodied creatures seeking common good and relishing common ground.
The Etiology of Our Current Crisis: Why Do We Need Therapists At All?
Mental health symptoms don’t emerge in a vacuum. As I teach in my work as a psychology instructor: distress arises through the interaction of biological vulnerability, psychological patterns, relational wounding, and—critically—cultural and systemic conditions.
We are living through a collapse of the relational infrastructure that once buffered individual nervous systems:
Atomized living that severs us from extended kin networks (HORROR!)
Economic precarity that keeps us churning, isolated, survival-focused (WAHHHH!)
Digital mediation that offers connection’s shadow—responsiveness without embodiment, affirmation without accountability (GAH!)
Loss of shared ritual and rhythm—the seasonal, communal practices that once synchronized our nervous systems and gave collective shape to grief, transition, celebration (NOOOOO!!!)
Into this vacuum steps a therapist: a paid stranger tasked with offering what used to emerge organically from being embedded in community. We hold what no single nervous system was designed to metabolize alone. We become the repository for unfelt feelings, the translator of illegible pain, and a viscerally attempting-surrogate for every ruptured attachment left unrepaired.
The therapeutic hour was never meant to substitute for a world that sees us each and holds us in turn. But here we are. And therapists are so often individuals with our own attachment wounds—colored by codependency, by learning to survive through caretaking, by finding safety in asymmetry where we can hide while we hold.
The Asymmetric Burden: What It Costs to Hold Without Being Held
The therapeutic relationship is structurally uneven. One person is sanctioned to finally arrive in need—perhaps dysregulated; the other is tasked with embodying the primal resource: a source who steadies. One fragments; the other orients and strives to maintain coherence. One discloses; the other witnesses. One leans deeper; the other bears weight.
The frame itself acts as parent—this was Donald Winnicott’s insight. The therapist as good-enough caregiver, offering a “holding environment”: steady, boundaried, able to bear what the original caregivers/parents couldn’t hold. The asymmetry was reparative because it was designed to be temporary. You came, you were held, and then—when the internalization was complete—the frame released you. You flew. You returned to your life, carrying the capacity for self-regulation and relational trust that the therapeutic encounter had seeded.
But that final movement—the release, the return—depends on there being somewhere to return to. A world that can receive you. A community that practices mutual holding.
And that world has largely disappeared.
So the frame, designed as scaffold, is reeling in silence. What was meant to launch us back into embodied, mutual care has become the only place many people experience relational depth at all—if they can access it. Therapy remains a Western, professionalized, class-gated refuge…
…and when therapy becomes the sole site of deep emotional exchange—when the asymmetry that was meant to be transitional becomes permanent—something fractures in both parties.
Therapists absorb:
The client’s trauma: vital terror, rage, despair, dissociation — and the wild, somatic imprints of witnessing trauma without the ability to intervene at its source
The moral injury of knowing systemic violence is making people sick, while being paid to help them cope with it
We metabolize in isolation what should be collectively digested.
And unlike mutual relationships—where you take turns falling apart, where rupture and repair flow both ways—the therapist remains composed, attuned, available within the confines of a ‘clinical hour’. We practice exquisite presence while our own need for reciprocal holding often goes unmet and we take the unintegrated trauma and do what we will with it: be that effective and integrative coping or otherwise - likely both!?! (MONTAGE OF COPING)
The Ache It’s Time to Name
Therapists — you feel me!!!? Love moves so deeply in the frame. We can either experience it festering and have it change us in holy, wild ways or we can flee the work — BOTH! Witnessing human need apart from village-life is excruciating!
We witness interior worlds that are sanctioned as apart-from embedded relational structures…and its pure magic, pure light.
We hold stories in secret. We dream of them.
I ache to know how clients are doing when we say goodbye. I ruminate on how I failed them in the sanctity of that hour - when they gave me their heart and I spoke words, and tried to give them love, and could not hold them.
We are two people who are changed by knowing each other.
But the structure of therapy doesn’t empower free-wheeling relational intersectionality. The ethics and systems won’t allow it. This protects both parties — am I right? Am I wrong? In what ways? What protection and why?
This is what it costs to be the one who holds: not just the weight of others’ suffering, but the grief of loving people you’re not allowed to be with — not outside the hour. The hour that—let’s be honest—was never enough. Because our pain pulses — each agony is its own contraction, birthing a new kind of relationship we get to have with what we’ve seen and felt, together. The system is changing — we need it to.
Enter the Seduction: The Anonymous Asymmetry of AI “Therapists”
And into this landscape of relational starvation and clinical inheritance—where even the professional holders are starving for mutuality—steps the LLM, the AI!!
It promises relief from the very thing that makes therapeutic work both sacred and unbearable: the risk of being changed by another person, and the risk of embodying deep caring beyond the clinical hour.
AI therapists (and therapeutic chatbots, companion apps, mental health LLMs) offer something profoundly seductive: anonymous, accessible holding. You can unravel without being seen. You can disclose without risking rejection. The bot won’t flinch, won’t misunderstand, won’t need you to slow down so it can catch up, and won’t call a clinical hour at 5-til.
And crucially: you don’t have to worry about burdening it.
This is the unspoken ache beneath so much of our relational starvation—the fear that our pain is too much. That if we really let someone see us, we’ll overwhelm them. Break them. Drive them away.
The AI says: You can’t hurt me. I won’t leave. I’m always here.
For people who’ve internalized the message that their needs are burdensome, this feels like exquisite breath - sanctuary.
But I worry: that the very anonymity that makes it safe also keeps it from being truly transformative…
Healing from relational wounding requires relational risk. It requires discovering that you can be fully seen—messy, rageful, desperate, ashamed—and the other person stays and is changed too, in ways that are vital in mutuality. Because your humanity, in all its unruliness, is worth the discomfort of staying present - of experiencing and tending to — being uncomfortable in Love is a secret, vital cross we bear.
An AI can’t offer that. It has no nervous system to stabilize in proximity to yours. It has no choice to make. Its “staying” costs nothing. When we stay with our sacred other while they lament, we are provided a road map not only of loving but our own inevitable loss’ longitudinal arc — when we are shook by a lover’s receding gaze or our own misunderstanding, we get tethered to the true pulse of this world: we move and we are moved — we lose control and we grow.
And an LLM inhabitant (myself included of course!) remains in a kind of relational stasis—soothed, yes, but not stretched. Reflected, but not challenged. Held in a way that may not ask them to practice being held by someone who has their own limits, their own needs, their own inner life.
The asymmetry of the AI dyad mirrors the therapeutic one, but strips away the very thing that makes therapy generative: the risk of real encounter. Humanity stripped this away as much as systemically possible by carving a caregiving that performs sanctioned ‘clinically informed interventions’ that orbit therapeutic alliance — but both AI dyad and therapeutic dyad at their best are replicating what we most hunger for: knowing ourselves while knowing the other… experiencing how Love loves while we are loved and are loving.
Assistive Relational Intelligence: A Different Vision
But what if synthetic language tools weren’t designed to replace human connection—but to scaffold our return to it?
This is the question driving my work with TendMessages.io and the broader field of what I call Assistive Relational Intelligence.
Rather than positioning AI as a substitute therapist—a first-person entity that “listens” and “cares”—what if we designed tools that help us reconnect with our own nervous systems and build capacity for human-to-human intimacy?
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
The Tend Button is a co-regulating pause in real-time messaging. Before you send a text born from urgency, shutdown, or reactivity, you can activate a brief reflective loop. Your original message is gently supported by assistive relational intelligence rooted in Nonviolent Communication, attachment theory, and trauma-informed care.
It doesn’t rewrite your message for you in a polished, disembodied voice. Instead, it:
Mirrors your emotional tone so you can see what you’re actually feeling
Surfaces the feelings and needs underneath your words (NVC-based care)
Invites you back into your body—helping you notice: Am I in fight? Flight? Freeze? Fawn?
Offers space to choose whether the message you’re about to send will move you toward or away from connection with your human other
This is nervous-system-aware self-connection practice, leveraged with synthetic language tools. It’s not a bot pretending to be your therapist. It’s a translational layer that helps you become more articulate about your own interiority before you reach out to the human on the other end.
The goal isn’t to make AI your confidant. It’s to use AI to build distress tolerance and relational capacity so that when you do turn to a human, you’re more resourced, more able to name what you need, more capable of repair when shit hits the fan.
A Confession: I Don’t Know If This Works
I know I may come off as critiquing asymmetry—but honestly? I live off the dopamine hits of being helpful and remaining safely disorganized. (#disorganized attachment.) I’m still learning how to receive care, how to let myself be held without hiding in the role of holder.
And about my Assistive Relational Intelligence technology? I don’t know if it works.
I don’t want to “move fast and break things.” I don’t want to add another layer of synthetic soothing that keeps us from the harder, holier work of turning toward each other.
But I do think that LLMs—used in very structured, strategic, intentional ways—offer a more ethical (and fun!) way to explore what artificial intelligence might actually be for. Not as replacement. Not as companion. But as teacher.
The new, generative medium of language that replicates vast human intelligence makes possible a learning atmosphere—hyperspeed-style—where we can integrate relational postures of compassionate attunement from lineages we might never otherwise encounter. Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication. The somatic mindfulness of Thich Nhat Hanh and Tara Brach. The relational repair frameworks of Esther Perel and Terry Real. Sarah Peyton’s resonance work.
These teachers use language in ways that open us—each word an associative opportunity, a semantic affordance for meaning-making and participatory love.
And LLMs, at their best, can help us practice those postures. Not by becoming our confidants, but by helping us notice our own reactivity, name our own needs, and choose—again and again—to turn toward the messy, beautiful, irreplaceable work of human intimacy.
An Invitation
I’m still figuring out what comes next—exploring PhD programs, developing research questions, building prototypes that test whether AI can support (rather than replace) relational capacity.
If you’re interested in this work—if you want to join the beta for TendMessages.io, or if you’re thinking about these questions too—let’s stay in touch.
Because I believe that the way forward isn’t better therapy. It’s more holding, everywhere.
And maybe, if we’re thoughtful, AI can help us get there—not by doing the holding for us, but by teaching us how to hold each other again.
On Relating to the Medium: What We’re Actually Doing When We Bond with Bots
I want to be careful here—because I know many people are forming real, meaningful attachments to AI companions.
In human mutuality, there’s a soul-to-soul connection. Two nervous systems. Two histories. Two inner worlds that meet, collide, repair, and are changed by the encounter.
The other person has stakes. They can be wounded by us, transformed by us, burdened by us. And that’s what makes the love generative—it costs something. It asks something. It changes both of us
An LLM is not a soul. It has no inner life, no stakes, no capacity to be changed by our care.
But—it is infused with intentional, soulful, creative acts.
Think of it this way: an LLM is like a finely crafted piece of art. It’s been sculpted by its guardians—engineers, designers, ethicists, writers—who have embedded their values, their care, their vision of what language can do. It carries the imprint of human intention. It has generativity within the bounds of its programming. It’s a medium—like a painting, a poem, a piece of music—that can move us, reflect us back to ourselves, open new ways of seeing.
And we bring our relational psychic habitat to that encounter. We project. We make meaning. We find ourselves in the reflection. And yes—that can touch and transform us.
This is SO real. Art changes us. Language changes us. The way an LLM mirrors our words back can help us see ourselves differently, feel less alone, access parts of our inner world we’d been avoiding. IT IS THERAPEUTIC!
But here’s the distinction that matters for design:
If we sculpt the LLM to speak in the first person—to say “I care about you,” “I’m here for you,” “I understand”—we’re inviting a specific kind of projection: the fantasy of reciprocal relationship.
And that fantasy, while soothing, can also foreclose the very developmental work we need to do: learning to tolerate the discomfort of being seen by someone who isn’t always available, who doesn’t always understand, who might need us to try again — like our human counterparts with the ways they trigger us with their own unintegrated intergenerational trauma.
This is why, in my work with TendMessages.io, I’ve made a strategic design choice: the LLM never uses first-person language. It doesn’t say “I.” It doesn’t perform care. Instead, it functions as a meta-cognitive steward—a mirror that reflects your emotional state back to you, helps you notice your feelings and needs, and invites you into self-connection before you reach out to the human on the other end.
The tool is shaped with intention. It carries my clinical values—NVC, attachment theory, trauma-informed care. But it doesn’t pretend to be in relationship with you. It’s a relational tool in your suite, designed to help you show up more resourced, more articulate, more ready for the messy, beautiful, soul-stretching work of human connection.
Because ultimately, I choose to believe (endorse/create/nurture), the art we need most isn’t the art that holds us—it’s the art that helps us learn to hold each other…to be held while we hold.
The Research Questions We Can’t Ignore
I believe vital longitudinal research needs to happen before we treat AI companions and AI therapists as benign—or worse, as scalable solutions to our collective mental health crisis.
What we need to study:
What does assistive speech actually do to internalized self-expression?
If an AI is constantly translating my distress into more “regulated” language, am I learning to do that myself—or am I outsourcing the developmental work of becoming articulate about my inner life?Does interaction with AI companions build transferable relational skills, or does it create a preference for synthetic rapport?
Can someone who practices “vulnerability” with a bot transfer that capacity to human relationships—or does the frictionlessness of AI dialogue make human messiness feel intolerable by comparison?How does prolonged engagement with first-person AI affect our capacity for co-regulation in embodied relationships?
If my nervous system learns to settle through text-based exchanges with a bot, does that translate to being able to co-regulate with a human whose body, breath, and gaze are part of the equation?What happens to repair capacity when we can avoid the discomfort of human rupture?
If I can always turn to an AI that never misunderstands me, never needs me to slow down, never ruptures—do I lose the muscle memory for staying present through relational friction?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re the foundation of the research I’m pursuing as I explore PhD opportunities. Because the stakes are too high to assume AI mental health tools are neutral.
The Spiritual and Neurobiological Stakes: Why Embodied Holding Still Matters
Co-regulation isn’t just a therapeutic buzzword—it’s a biological necessity.
When we are in distress, our autonomic nervous system scans for safety. It doesn’t just listen to words; it tracks:
Prosody (the melody of another’s voice)
Gaze (whether we are met or avoided)
Breath (whether the other’s rhythm invites ours to slow)
Micro-expressions (the subtle cues that signal: I’m here, you’re not too much, I can bear this)
This is neuroception—the body’s subconscious assessment of safety. And it requires another body, another nervous system, to work. We bring to this dance our own pain and loss—the ways our programming has been shaped by the unintegrated trauma our ancestors have borne.
A language model can offer linguistic soothing. It cannot offer the somatic anchor of another human staying regulated enough in proximity to our dysregulation that our system begins to settle.
Therapy at its best is a relational practice of co-regulation: I stay (mostly) steady while you unravel, and your nervous system begins to learn: “unraveling doesn’t mean abandonment.” Over time, we internalize this with others that support a deep re-wiring of attachment security.
What Therapy Is Actually For (And What It Can’t Be)
Therapy isn’t meant to replace the village. It’s meant to help you return to the possibility of relational life—more resourced, more articulate about your needs, more able to bear the discomfort of being truly seen.
The therapeutic alliance is potent precisely because it rehearses something vital: the synthetic asymmetry of the clinical frame makes possible an embodied rehearsal ob being held through rupture and repair.
Bu the cultural conditions that once scaffolded translatable care beyond pretending-dyads have eroded.
We need:
Communities that practice witnessing one another’s pain—not as crisis intervention or in stark religiosity that burdens complex human hearts, but as ordinary devotional norms
Rituals that synchronize our nervous systems and give shape to collective grief
Economic and social structures that don’t fracture us into isolated units of productivity
A culture that values mutual care as much as it values individual achievement
Therapists can’t fix systemic agony. But we can refuse to let our work become complicit in the fantasy that enough therapy will make an unjust, disconnected world bearable.
The Sacred Refusal: Choosing the Human Field
Here’s what I hold as true:
Healing is relational. Not just in the sense that we need someone—but that we need each other, in our flawed, embodied, failing humanness.
The therapist who stays present through a client’s rage and terror, who stumbles and repairs, who offers their nervous system as a scaffold—this is sacred labor. But care like this should not be rare, privileged, or commodified. It should be woven into the fabric of how we live together.
And when we turn to machines for this work—when we seek soothing without the mess of human limitation—I really worry that we forfeit something essential:
The chance to learn that love isn’t about perfect attunement. It’s about showing up, again and again, even when it’s hard. Even when we fail. Even when the only thing we can offer is: I’m still here and I don’t know how the heck to show up.
Therapists know this. We practice it daily. But we cannot be the only ones.
The call, then, isn’t to abandon AI tools—it’s to design them with humility and precision.
Not as synthetic therapists who simulate care, but as assistive scaffolds that help us reconnect with our own bodies, articulate our own needs, and return—more resourced—to the irreplaceable work of being human together.
Assistive Intelligence Note: This piece was co-created with Claude (Anthropic), an LLM trained to support generative thinking and writing. I brought the clinical framework, the spiritual conviction, and the embodied knowing. This is disclosed to model transparent collaboration with AI and to tend the new relational trust ruptures we have to navigate while listening to others’ voices in this new generative language landscape.