Explore our blog for insightful articles, personal reflections and ideas on topics that you may care about and that we are hoping will be thought provoking.
It seems many older adults appear surprisingly calm, flexible, or even optimistic about AI, while younger generations often express a much deeper sense of fear, dread, and existential uncertainty about it. I have a general anecdotal theory.
Seeking safety through AI chatbots as social companions isn't wrong or weak. It does have profound impacts on the way we connect interpersonally when used in excess.
The consequence of looking for safety, by connecting with a chatbot that tends to your every interpersonal need so perfectly, is that you slowly lose the capacity to endure the risk, discomfort, and unpredictability of real relationships. It becomes harder to connect with humans the more you rely on the chatbot.
Let’s talk about the illusion of the “perfect” partner that AI has become for a lot of people.
When people think about therapy, they often imagine sitting in a chair talking through emotions, memories, or challenges. While traditional talk therapy can be deeply effective, sometimes emotions are difficult to explain. Sometimes grief feels too heavy to name, anxiety moves too quickly to describe, or trauma exists in the body before it can be organized into language. This is where art therapy can become a powerful path toward healing.
Have you ever opened your phone just for a second and then suddenly 30 minutes are gone? You're left trying to figure out what just happened.
That sense of losing time isn't laziness or a lack of discipline. It's a state of digital dissociation. Your nervous system enters in a trance that feels at least temporarily safer than being fully present. That loop and how it can literally remap your nervous system is what we will explore today.
Love bombing occurs when someone overwhelms another person with excessive affection, praise, gifts, communication, or promises in order to gain trust and emotional dependence quickly.
Many of us move through life with an invisible filter that simplifies the world into extremes. Things are good or bad. Other people are trustworthy or disappointing. We have or don't have that trait we really want. We failed or we did well. This kind of thinking—often called black-and-white or all-or-nothing thinking—can feel clarifying in the moment. It offers certainty, quick conclusions, and a sense of control.
Anxiety can be an overwhelming internal experience—racing thoughts, physical tension, persistent worry—but when it shows up in a romantic relationship, it often takes on an additional layer of complexity. Suddenly, the internal becomes interpersonal. Thoughts like “Do they really love me?”, “What if they leave?”, or “Did I do something wrong?” can begin to shape communication patterns, emotional closeness, and even the overall stability of the relationship.
It is not uncommon for a client to sit across from a therapist and say, “I’m afraid of dying.” In therapeutic spaces, especially those informed by existential psychology, this statement is rarely taken at face value. The meaning beneath it is often more nuanced. Existential psychology suggests that while some individuals do indeed fear the unknown aspects of death—the mystery of what happens after, or the physical process of dying—many who bring up this fear in therapy are expressing something deeper. More often than not, the fear of death is actually a fear of not having fully lived.
Many of us move through life on autopilot more often than we realize. We respond to stress in familiar ways, repeat relational patterns that feel both frustrating and strangely predictable, and make choices that align more with habit than intention. These “default ways of being” are shaped by our histories, environments, relationships, and the adaptive strategies we developed to survive and make sense of the world. At one point, these patterns likely served a purpose, and probably still do.
We speak a lot in our blogs about the implications of people relying on AI for mental health support; there are many benefits to this and nothing wrong with this. When there is no one or no where left for someone to turn, and they need insight, the ability to utilize an intelligent machine based on human wisdom to normalize their feelings, gain feedback, organize thoughts, and provide empathy is a middle ground some people need. They are not ready to rely on another human, and this way, they are not left entirely isolated and unable to reflect or receive support.