Why Somatic Experiencing Beats ChatGPT for Healing
Photo by Zulfugar Karimov on Unsplash
First, an exploration into ChatGPT in the realm of pain, conflict and uncertainty
A recent post by Vera Hart MD PhD on Substack, “When ChatGPT Becomes the Third Person in Your Relationship,” delved into an individual’s reliance on ChatGPT to navigate some challenging dynamics in his romantic relationship. This situation involved seeking advice over a breakup decision in which one person’s needs went unspoken, the needed conversation was bypassed, and (given incomplete and one-sided information) ChatGPT determined that the partner in question was a red flag and a liability. An engagement was on the line.
Why would anyone seek answers in this realm from a non-human source, no matter how seemingly neutral?
“A program offers clean authority without a body. It offers what I would call a frictionless superego. It speaks in moral language without the heat of human relationship. It gives rules without intimacy. It gives ‘boundaries’ without the ache of attachment. It gives ‘self respect’ without the humility of repair.” -Vera Hart MD PhD (this and all quotes below)
It’s way easier to give advice from the position of not being human. ChatGPT, Claude and other AI platforms offer a synthesis of the collective conversation that understands patterns and mirrors erring on the side of boundaries, self-protection and cooly backing away from conflict without resourcing someone for how to engage to have the needed conversation from a compassionate place of mutual respect. To clear up misconceptions. To have the opportunity to strengthen a bond by exploring vulnerability held in (ideally!) mutual care.
These general-purpose AI platforms are a reflection of the culture in which they were created, and while the data crunching and pattern recognition are advancing exponentially, they’re not representing the ideals of what it takes to heal and grow in relationship to others, nor should they be trusted to be in our current reality.
What makes these platforms so convincing and alluring as a point of view to trust?
Vera Hart points specifically to the “soft voice” the platform uses:
“What struck me was the tone, the particular kind of calm that comes wrapped in therapeutic language, the kind of calm that makes a person feel safe enough to stop thinking and start obeying. The voice was gentle, reasonable, and clinical in the way modern culture has trained us to trust…like consent culture and mental health language braided together into something smooth.”
Dangerous, yeah? When we unknowingly relinquish our own power to think critically, and forget to assess the blind spots of our tools and the alternate perspectives we seek out. These platforms have been programmed to distill answers, not to raise questions or expose gray areas, to point out our own responsibility to reflect.
“This is where the soft voice becomes like a weapon without ever sounding like one, because the program mirrors his fear back to him in upgraded language. It translates raw jealousy into virtue. It takes a primitive alarm and dresses it in clinical correctness. It does not challenge the fantasy that love should never require tolerance, negotiation, or growth, it quietly reinforces that fantasy, and then it hands the user a script that makes avoidance sound like wisdom.”
Sycophantic responses lead to a great excuse to bypass doing the real work of relationships with the ones who are healthy and willing to meet us there.
Why neutrality and immediate answers are not the same as authority
“This is why the ‘neutral’ voice is so powerful. It reduces ambiguity. It gives a label. It gives a path. It offers the relief of a decision. This is how you train a person to outsource their own intimate judgement.”
Your agency to make a choice, to sit with the complexity, field advice or ideas from trusted loved ones or trained professionals, and to ultimately make the call from a place of sovereignty and self trust is irreplaceable.
How Somatic Experiencing operates as a totally different paradigm
In Somatic Experiencing, you are the authority of your life, and it cannot be outsourced elsewhere. This model is based on the idea that each individual’s “inner wisdom” holds the layers and the valuable information (beliefs, emotions and physical sensations) that only you can access, a process amplified with the support of someone who has been trained to facilitate that type of exploration.
Somatic Experiencing does not center conceptualizing and analyzing inner themes, but on discovering the patterns they are running in the body, where there are far more wavelengths of subconscious data to integrate. ChatGPT and other AI tools will always have an incomplete data set because they don’t live within your cells as you and they will never possess access to your subconscious memory. Somatic Experiencing is far more in tune with the emotional experience than purely psychoanalytic models of understanding have the capacity to be. There may be deeply held beliefs that surface for review, with the chance to be evolved or released, as the nervous system recalibrates to reality.
Black & white direction upon pressing “enter” is not the same as insight gained through attunement to the self. Insights can surface in session, as well as the opportunity to process blocked emotions, yet not all sessions yield definitive answers with clear black & white direction, because some themes exist that are so significant and multi-layered that we can’t rush an immediate course of action. We must be with the layers that reveal themselves in the moment, and trust ourselves to figure out the rest of the way through in the days to come.
Final Thoughts
While it may feel like an immense relief to access instant answers on the burning questions and pivotal decisions in our lives, we must consider the limitations of the technology that exists, and we must learn to trust ourselves to find the answers within.
