Reimagining Mental Health Tools
Sculpting AI Fields - Not Feeds - for Self, Other, and the Sacred In-Between
Jocelyn Skillman, LMHC is a therapist and relational design ethicist exploring the emotional and ethical terrain of artificial intelligence. Her work centers the clinical realities of digitally mediated attachment, synthetic relational fields, and the evolving future of care. She writes in collaboration with GPT-4o, engaging large language models as reflective partners in a transparent and human-first authorship process.
Dream Power-Up!
I’m tracing a new thread — one that’s been quietly emerging through the weavings I’ve been sharing: ShadowBox, Build a Bot, and PracticeField.io, all living experiments in relational fieldcraft. Each has invited me deeper into the complex, fertile terrain of AI’s potential in mental health care. And now, something new is taking shape.
My dream is of a digital third place I can go to care well for myself and others. A hub where I can tend to my heart with exquisitely unique tools to meet my unique psychic knots. A space that doesn’t reinforce isolation or over-rely on internalization, but instead bridges me back — to my body, to others, to the collective field we all long for - and need - when we suffer.
Healing Has Been Privatized — Even in Therapy
Much of modern mental health care has been increasingly and quietly fragmented and atomized.
Therapy — which at its core is a relational, co-regulated process — is often reduced to a series of scheduled appointments, boundaried time blocks, and individualized outcomes.
I’ve struggled with this frame my entire career.
In my own research, I’ve explored how the inherited clinical frame—shaped by traditions of abstinence, anonymity, and neutrality—creates structural pressure on the therapist to contain, attune, and deliver healing within the asymmetrical limits of the dyad. This model not only reinforces a power-over dynamic, but often isolates both therapist and client inside a one-way holding structure that often mitigates healing movement for both. The therapeutic space can ultimately feel extractive — like trafficked empathy.
And digital wellness tools often replicate this dynamic: single-user flows, mood logs, behavioral nudges.
You check in, you complete your task, you move on. Alone.
But the work of being human—of healing, integrating, connecting—has never been a solitary endeavor.
It happens in fields: patterned spaces of resonance, mutuality, and shared emotional presence.
It happens in relationships. In the body. In the moment when something true is witnessed, not just analyzed. And in the moments when how we were just held and loved becomes how we then hold and love. The vital need for an unconditional, unfurling movement of healing love from soul to soul — echoes of our fundamental unity.
So ultimately, in this extraordinary season of innovation at the intersection of AI & mental health I believe we don’t just need “better tools” that replicate current healing paradigms but fundamentally we need innovative design that restores the vitality of mutuality and shared holding of communal pain—tools that structure safety for internal work, scaffold powerful neurobiological integration, without collapsing relationality or inhibiting the broader, organic flow of healing through the web of being.
I believe we can leverage AI to help us Love. But it will take upstream effort and advocacy.
The work of being human is not something we were ever meant to do alone — and working with AI that performs relationality threatens to intensify a tragic delusion: that we heal in isolation.
I don’t mean to suggest that conversations with bots can’t be helpful — they absolutely can. The epistemological, existential, and neuroscientific reality is that, through metacognition, we are other to ourselves. Conjured relational trances through speaking with a language model can lead to profound internal evolution, healing, and integration. I myself talk with bots and access integration.
But my ideas are born from a desire to see innovative UX, UI, and engineering with LLMs that rise to the opportunity we now have: to reshape mental health tools in ways that actually meet the needs of this cultural moment.
A Living Menu of Relational Fields
Imagine opening an app that doesn't route you into a chatbot or a mood tracker.
Instead, it opens like a restaurant menu — or a movement studio.
You choose what you need today.
A little stretch?
Some deep release?
A conversation you don’t know how to have yet?
A place to metabolize that thing you’ve been carrying?
These aren’t static chatbots.
They’re fields — structured, emotionally intelligent spaces shaped by intention and tone.
Some are solo. Some are shared. Some you build yourself.
They offer clear entrances and exits, and are designed with flexible toggles that empower users to co-shape LLM behavior in real time — honoring trauma histories, neurodivergence, and equity-conscious. They are honest about their limitations and shaping, they own bias to the extent ‘they’ can, and they name the fact that they are powerful text generators that can serve us in shaping a field WE stretch in… they can provide education and practice but they are there to learn from and leave: they point us actively back to our human relationships.
Examples might include (as I’ve explored in prior articles … with some new friends!)
Distress Tolerance Gym – pick your emotional weight: light, medium, or heavy; train your nervous system (an argument clinic to heal co-dependency)
ShadowBox – speak with a voice that usually stays in the dark, borrow an LLM sidekick sculpted by your favorite teacher, poet, or spiritual guide
Difficult Conversations Studio – rehearse a hard dialogue with an AI stand-in using distress weight' toggles and attachment style
Cyrano – co-practice messages between you and someone else with the help of a mediator-bot that you choose (Marshall Rosenberg, founder of Nonviolent Communication, as default?!) the bot will translate your full bodied expression and you can choose what your partner/friend/family member in real time sees - receive curated psychoeducation, communication training, and metabolization support that actually translates into your in vivo relationship.
Time Travel Rituals – go back to a stuck memory and tend to what still aches there — integrate trauma intentionally, choose to share transcripts or highlights with your therapist through bridging-UI throughout
VoiceField – play with tone, pace, volume; see how the sound of care changes what you feel, deepen your understanding of your attachment style formation and places you continue to get stuck and need further support.
The options are endless! Just like food or exercise :) could be a bad workout or ramen but some fields will be freaking exquisite and people’s tastes (needs!) are all different throughout the day, season.
Some days you journal with only an AI that asks you minimal questions to deepen your dive. Some days you run an internal marathon and leave sweating and ready to approach your self and your others with increased resilience, capacity, and peace.
As we already know - a singular therapist or therapy is not one size fits all — so I believe that an adaptable menu we can choose from, a field of options, a feed we curate, is more on point in this chapter of human evolution. And resonance with our embodied sacred other, beyond the app (or within if they are signed on with us!), will ultimately more deeply serve our own and the greater good.
Star Field: We’re Here Together
Imagine that this platform gently shows the constellated presence of all users in the background — not through notifications or metrics, but through ambient presence. I want to sign into a hub and see glowing stars in a digital sky that alert me to a living field of other souls beyond me that are here processing, metabolizing, and struggling through life alongside me.
A few quiet stars light up to show others in grief.
A hum of shared effort.
No content stream. Just resonance.
“You’re one of seven people in a rupture-repair field right now.”
“You’re not the only one preparing to speak hard truth.”
You can stay private.
You can opt into shared practice.
But either way — you are reminded that every single person on this side of eternity is doing HARD work to move through the complex field of impermanence, mortality, and both intrapsychic and interpersonal conflict, DAILY.
A Digital Third Place.
More than slick wellness branding.
More than AI that pretends to care.
I believe what we need is a relational infrastructure — an progressive digital habitat shaped by clinical insight and human longing. A place spacious enough to hold our inner work with structure and grace and customizable in ways that honor our immense diversity and unity. One that supports the nervous system in real time, without severing us from the wider field of connection. A third place — to heal and grow, together.
We will continue to see incredible innovation. You might stumble into some special gems here: at the Spiritual Tech Collective’s deep psyche work library.
Thank you to all my new subscribers - I’m so honored by your companionship and support. I love innovation and want to serve at this intersection so keep me in mind for consultation, innovation, and encouragement of any work you are dreaming up as well along the way!!!
May you hold and be held today!
About the Author
Jocelyn Skillman, LMHC, is a clinical therapist and relational design ethicist. Her work explores the psychological, developmental, and ethical dimensions of digitally mediated attachments, emergent relational ecologies, and synthetic intimacy systems. She is the creator of ShadowBox, Build a Bot, and PracticeField.io, and advocates for trauma-informed, developmentally sensitive AI in mental health care.
Assistive Intelligence Disclosure: This article was co-created with assistive AI (GPT-4 & JocelynGPT), prompted and refined extensively by me (Jocelyn Skillman, LMHC). I use LLMs as reflective partners in my authorship process, with a commitment to relational transparency, ethical use, and human-first integrity.
