Why AI can't offer mutuality (and why mutuality is essential to therapy)
The beauty of therapy isn’t in perfection—it’s in mutuality. AI can simulate care, but it can’t be your therapist, because healing requires another beating heart.
Listening to the morning news, I heard someone say the benefit of using AI for therapy is not worrying about someone's feelings.
And I understand the appeal—especially for those who’ve been hurt in therapy itself.
Many people have felt shamed, dismissed, or silenced by clinicians who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—engage in repair. Sometimes it’s because they were never taught how to. Sometimes it’s because the clinicians confused authority with safety, or control with care.
When that happens, therapy becomes a place of hierarchy rather than healing, where the therapist holds all the power and the client learns to stay small.
No wonder the idea of talking to something that can’t hurt you feels like relief.
As a therapist, I think carefully about what my own disclosures bring into the room—emotional ones (“I feel that too”), practical ones (“I’m not feeling my best today”), or connecting ones (“That happened to me too”). Each carries weight, and I try to consider what work it might create for the client. Sometimes I overstep—usually because I have a story I think might help/is very hilarious and don’t stop myself in time. When I bring too much into the room, it provides an opportunity to deepen our relationship as we work on authentic repair. Repairing a relationship demonstrates care and strengthens mutuality.
Over the years, I’ve learned that mutuality means allowing myself to receive care as much as I offer it. It’s never a client’s job to take care of me, yet the nature of a genuine relationship means they will care. To cut that off—to pretend I am untouchable—would be to cut off mutuality itself.
Why AI fails in therapy
In Relational-Cultural Therapy (RCT), we believe that growth doesn’t happen by avoiding feelings—it happens through them. The moments that transform us are the ones where two people risk being real together: a fleeting expression of understanding, a shared laugh, a misstep, or a major mistake, followed by constructive conflict and repair. These moments teach us something irreplaceable: that we can matter to another person and survive the messiness of being known.
AI can mimic empathy, but it can’t feel it. It can generate reflection, but it can’t receive you. It can provide words that sound soothing, but it can’t sit with the ache that makes those words necessary. It will never have to say, “I think I got that wrong—can we try again?”
And that's where the healing lives. In the trying again.
Because therapy isn’t only about understanding ourselves—it’s about learning how to exist in connection. Exploring how we live in the context of our lives and relationships. Therapy requires us to risk being seen. To risk caring. To practice repair.
AI can offer tools, reflections, and support.
But it cannot offer mutuality.
And without mutuality—without another beating heart—there can be no shared growth.
At the Bloomington Center for Connection, our therapists practice Relational-Cultural Therapy (RCT), which centers healing through mutual empathy and authentic connection. Learn more about Relational Therapy or explore our Healing Services to experience what it means to grow in relationship, not isolation.