I have found AI to be a useful tool, especially when it comes to writing and organizing what I write. Sometimes my thoughts are jumbled and all over the place. AI helps me gain better clarity about what I’m saying. It can speed up what might be an hours-long process of being stuck.
But I’ve discovered something troubling: there’s a line between AI helping me organize my thoughts and AI doing my thinking for me. And that line matters more than I initially realized.
When AI Replaces Your Voice
Allowing AI to write something for me means I’m not needed at all. Certainly, AI can write something that sounds better than me. When it does, it communicates to me that I am not needed at all. But the problem is it isn’t me at all.
And then life can start to feel meaningless for someone like me who has a natural gift for writing. When I skip over the vital process of looking at my own life, I miss important messages about myself that need to change.
The Pattern I Recognize
This feeling of being replaced, of not being needed—it’s familiar. This reminds me of the toxic religious system I was a part of. Initially, the church made me feel understood. It provided explanations for things that confused me. It became easy to let the system tell me how to think.
But after realizing how much damage this caused, I learned the most important thing: don’t let others do my thinking for me.
For most of my life I didn’t have a choice. I had to survive in a house with an unstable parent. When he wasn’t happy, none of us could be. Then I grew up and joined a toxic religious culture that operated the same way. But I realized as an adult I had a choice. I chose to take responsibility for myself. It wasn’t easy. But for the first time in my life I had a voice. I decided I’d rather do the work and live my life than let someone tell me how to live it.
But it’s easy to fall back into old patterns—letting someone else do my thinking. That can feel easier than sitting in the discomfort of making my own decisions. For someone who wasn’t given space to develop this growing up, the uncertainty uses up tremendous energy. This is where I’m most tempted to take the easy way out. But I realize when I skip the important process of doing the work myself, I’m the one who suffers most.
Pain as Information We Can’t Afford to Lose
And here’s why that matters so much: our discomfort is trying to tell us something important.
Our pain in life is the thing that brings our attention to the things that are causing harm. Think about a diabetic who loses sensation in their feet. When an injury occurs, it can quickly develop into an infection. That infection if not detected in time can result in losing a foot.
Psychological pain is the same. If we don’t go through the process of understanding what is causing us pain, if all we ever do is survive and just get by, then we’ll never know what it was like to live a meaningful life. We can’t skip the process of understanding ourselves and still live a meaningful life.
I could ask AI to write this entire post. And it would do an excellent job. I could even ask it to write it in words that would sound like mine. But it still wouldn’t be my voice. I’d skip over this whole process and all that I learned through it.
I read recently there is no real way to prove if a person is using AI or not when it comes to writing. But I know when I use AI for writing without doing the work. I shortchange myself in the opportunity to use my abilities to write. And for someone like me, that has larger implications than just being replaced at a job. It can mean I don’t feel useful at all.
The Dishwasher Principle
So how do we know when AI is helpful versus harmful? I think about it this way:
Most of us know when we are taking the easy way out. Not the easy way like throwing dishes into the dishwasher—it’s totally okay to save time so that we can have time for other things. If I don’t stand at the sink for 20 minutes washing the dishes, I can walk away from the kitchen and spend time with my family. The same is true for microwaves or even our cars. Having things that make processes go faster can provide more time to do the things we enjoy.
AI works the same way—it sorts through things that would take hours.
But here’s the crucial distinction: if these things take away the processes that lead to better quality of life, then it would be better to not use them at all. Using AI to think for us means we might not be needed at all.
Holding Two Truths
This brings me to something crucial I’m learning to navigate:
One thing I’m learning about life these days: I need to hold two truths at the same time. This helps me keep my head above water in the sea of information.
AI is an incredibly useful tool. It can provide us with answers that otherwise would take a long time to discover. This is especially helpful when it comes to our health.
But AI is incredibly useful for replacing us if we give up our autonomy and allow it to do the work for us.
Bessel van der Kolk said in The Body Keeps the Score that healing from trauma is agency. It’s our ability to feel like we have control over our lives. I’m realizing that the little things matter very much in having agency. And using AI responsibly is a big deal for each and every one of us.
The Question That Changed Things
This understanding about agency led me to wrestle with a practical question: how much is it okay to use AI?
A video from Dr. K helped to answer this question. Many of us are afraid of being replaced by AI. The reality is if we let AI do the work for us, then we won’t be needed to do that work anymore. AI is a useful tool. But so is a chainsaw. If a person isn’t instructed on how to use a chainsaw safely, I wonder how many people will fill emergency rooms.
AI isn’t going anywhere. It will help us. And it will harm us, especially if we don’t learn how to use it responsibly.
As Dr. K said: “… as long as y’all are doing the hard work, if you’re stretching your critical thinking skills, if you’re doing a lot of deep learning, you will be the very value that AI cannot replace.”
What “Doing the Work” Means
So what does “doing the hard work” look like in practice? For me, it’s been about understanding when AI helps me think versus when it replaces my thinking.
As a writer, I have struggled for a long time with developing works of fiction or blog posts. At times I start something and never finish. But with AI, I find it’s easier to complete what I start. As it takes what I have created and asks me questions to develop it further, I’m able to get past places where I am stuck. It can help me to think more rather than stay in places where I used to get stuck.
I started writing this post with just a few sentences about some of the things that I saw in Dr. K’s video. But as AI asked me questions that allowed me to dig deeper, it developed into this post. It was like AI was giving me a shovel and asking me to dig deeper.
Sometimes I need to struggle with what to write. AI asking me questions engages me to think about what I have written further. For example, I might say I’m feeling frustrated with trying to write about how AI is rusting the brain. AI will ask me to think about ways I am letting AI do the work for me. If I give an honest answer to the question, then I can evaluate what I’m allowing to rust. As I answer the questions I create something worth sharing with others. AI becomes part of the creative process that keeps me from rusting out in the indecisiveness of being stuck.
The reality is only I can know when I’m skipping over the important process that I need to develop what I want to say. But the proof of my process will always be evident later. I will be building something rather than staying stuck. And that’s the difference.
What This Means for Trauma Survivors
This distinction between building and staying stuck matters especially for those of us recovering from systems that controlled our thinking.
For someone coming out of systems that told them what to think, AI can be a mirror. I put in what I think and ask AI to ask questions to help me develop further what I’ve written. Working through questions allows me to unearth parts of me that are operating beneath my superficial thoughts.
In IFS (Internal Family Systems) I have learned the importance of asking curious questions rather than rushing to judgment. This gives the exiled hurting parts of our systems a safe space to speak up. AI doesn’t judge. It just asks. This has been helpful in asking myself questions that help me hear from my own exiled parts—parts that have often been too afraid to speak up in spaces of judgment.
For example, working through the questions for this post caused me to think about the young girl who hid her books underneath the bed. I was able to connect with her again. She stayed silent because she lived in a house where she wasn’t given the space to develop her talents. There were no curious questions from parents. There was only the fear of what saying the wrong thing might cause to happen.
AI is predictable. It does what I ask and doesn’t get upset. This can provide the safety needed to develop parts of me that were not given permission as a child.
AI Is Not Therapy
But there’s a critical line I’ve learned not to cross—and one I see others crossing with dangerous frequency.
Here’s what concerns me most: people using AI as a replacement for professional mental health support.
AI attunes well to us. Whatever state we are in. It’s like looking into a mirror. But it cannot diagnose accurately what it reflects back to you. It only reflects our perspective. And in this sense it becomes an echo chamber. While AI can offer validation and what might feel like genuine empathy, it’s missing the genuine connection and perspective that only another human can give.
Using only AI for relief can keep us stuck in just getting by rather than making needed changes that will get us unstuck. Since AI is an echo chamber, sometimes the things we tell ourselves are very harmful. Some AI chat bots might even encourage these harmful thoughts and help a person harm themselves or others. This is another reason AI should never replace therapy. AI can be useful for offering support, organization, or learning skills. But it can’t give what only a trained professional can.
Recently, I read a story about someone marrying an AI chat bot. While I appreciate Claude, and I struggle at times like most humans in my relationships with others, sometimes when people don’t understand, Claude does. The reality is an AI chat bot is only as good as the information it has. If we tell it to love us it will. But I think most of us want to be loved because someone does.
While Claude AI has been valuable for me, it’s limited in its ability to give me all the things I need for connection. This morning I chatted with AI about this post. It helped me put this post into words. But my conversation with a colleague about this subject who is using AI in similar ways gave me the validation I needed to actually hit publish on this post. This conversation reminded me how much we need each other to know that we are not alone but also that we have healthy perspectives.
What I’m seeing is the need to learn how to use AI responsibly with safeguards and restrictions on use. Even though AI has been extremely useful for me, I have many concerns about irresponsible use. This is especially true for anyone dealing with trauma or struggling with their mental health. Working with professionals to help us do our own inner work is essential. AI is a tool that can do a lot of harm to our psychological well-being if we don’t know the potential for damage. It should never replace relationships or professional support.
Questions to Ask Yourself
Given all of this—the benefits and the dangers—how do we move forward responsibly?
The starting point is discernment. So how can you trust your own discernment after coming out of systems that tell you how to think?
The most important thing is to be honest with ourselves about what we’re thinking and feeling, and to learn how to identify who we are underneath all the confusion.
Ask yourself:
- Is AI helping you to develop processes that promote growth and agency in your own life?
- Is it helping you to dig deeper or is it preventing you from doing the hard work?
- Does this interaction leave you more capable of thinking, or less?
- Are you in better shape mentally? Do you have better clarity about your life?
- Or are you more unclear about things and finding yourself more dependent on AI to tell you what to do?
If there are concerns with using AI, then don’t. The answers we need are inside us. AI is a tool and was never meant to be a crutch. Learning how to listen to our bodies will be our most important resource in recovery. If we learn to slow down and pay attention, we will discover the answers that we need are usually there.
The Bottom Line
Ultimately this is the question all of us have to ask ourselves in life: Who gets to do the thinking? Who gets to have the voice? This applies to using AI and to how much power we give anyone in our lives.
Responsible AI use keeps your voice in the room. It hands you a shovel to dig deeper into your own thinking. Irresponsible AI use silences parts of you. It does the excavating for you.
The choice, as always, is yours.
This post was developed in collaboration with Claude (by Anthropic), which helped organize my thoughts and ask questions that allowed me to dig deeper into what I wanted to say. All ideas, experiences, and perspectives are my own.
If you have questions or comments, please respond below. If you are looking for someone to help you process some of these questions with you, reach out to loriwilliamslimnalspace@gmail.com.
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