Why Human Connection Matters in Therapy: What AI Misses About Mental Health

I logged onto my virtual appointment with a client. She smiled and began telling me she was doing great, sharing all the positive parts of her week. In my own body, though, I felt a heaviness and a sadness as she came onto the call. After she paused, I celebrated the good news with her and gently reflected the incongruence between what she was saying and what I was sensing. She then named that she was holding a lot of sadness about something happening with her family. I guided her to connect to that emotion in the body, which led to deeper processing — and to the emotions that had been activated this week about feelings of inadequacy in other areas of her life.

In this blog you’ll learn about the epidemic of disconnection and how it may be affecting you. You’ll learn the relational foundations of healing and therapy so you can better understand what you need to feel better. And you’ll see what AI misses when it comes to mental health — why you may need a human to support your emotional and spiritual healing.

The Epidemic of Disconnection

Cultural norms suggest you should always be doing more — that what you produce matters more than your relationships. You’re surrounded by people with the same expectations, many of whom feel tapped out and overwhelmed by the work required just to keep their heads above water in an unstable system. You’re doing what you can to get by, and you’re exhausted at the end of the day, depleted by week’s end. You barely have time to connect with loved ones, let alone carve out time to connect with yourself.

Not long ago, a global pandemic taught us that contact with other people could be dangerous. For years, we relied on screens and technology for any semblance of connection. The collective grief from that period still lingers — complicated by losses you may have experienced: deaths of loved ones, goals you had to give up, less regular connection with friends and community, and many small everyday losses. You are still feeling the impacts of that loss, and you may feel lonelier than ever.

Then there’s the political polarization, the normalization of violence, and leaders who stoke chaos for their own gain. The world feels less safe for many people. You have to navigate who to trust while witnessing policies and practices that dehumanize and terrorize already marginalized communities. That general distrust deepens the feeling of loneliness.

Healing is Relational

All of this is happening at the same time AI and technology are being marketed as the salve for every problem. You may be turning to AI or other tech to manage loneliness and the feelings that come up — and it might help you feel a little better temporarily. But it’s rarely enough to create a deeper sense of connection with yourself or others. This is where therapy matters, because at its core therapy is healing on a relational level.

Emotional wounding and trauma happen in relationships, so it can feel appealing to turn to a non-human chatbot — it feels safer when humans have hurt you. But a chatbot will never be sufficient, because real healing also needs to happen in relationship. Research shows the relationship itself is the largest determinant of therapy’s effectiveness — more important than the specific modality or the techniques a therapist uses. The presence of a therapist can create enough emotional safety for you to do the hard work of healing.

Trauma and wounding are often the result of harm and conflict that were never acknowledged or repaired. Therapy gives you a space to play out those emotional experiences with a person who can offer a different outcome. If you grew up feeling like you had to perform to be lovable, a therapist offers a space to be cared for regardless of achievement. You also get to have the messy moments — getting angry at your therapist, feeling abandoned by them — and then actually talking about it and repairing that rupture. The more you have new relational experiences like these, the easier it becomes to show up differently in your life.

What AI Misses

A good therapist holds space for your whole experience — not just the words you use. What a human can sense that a chatbot can’t is nonverbal information: body language, tone of voice, movement patterns, posture. These cues help a therapist understand the state of your nervous system, your relational patterns, and your emotional life.

Part of a therapist’s job is to bring awareness to things that may be outside your conscious experience. Noticing nonverbal communication is essential for helping you understand yourself and what you need to bring your system back into balance. It’s also how therapists spot incongruence between your words and your nonverbal cues — essential information for guiding where attention and healing are needed.

Therapists hold space for the harder, messier parts of life — the things that must be felt and processed to find real freedom and choice. A chatbot can help you research therapy types or organize your thoughts, but it can’t replace the relational work of healing. Leaning into technology alone can leave you feeling more disconnected. You deserve to heal in relationship with another human who can offer a regulated nervous system and the relational repair needed to help you process life’s harder experiences — so you can find more peace, freedom, and choice.