Human Connection in a Digital Therapeutic World
With thanks to our member, Maria Kopec, for this article.
For people already carrying shame, failure, or a sense of being behind, digital spaces can reinforce the belief that change belongs to others, not to them. Online, lives appear coherent, successful, and continuously improving. Struggle is edited out. Context disappears. We see what others want us to see. For many clients, particularly those experiencing addiction, trauma, or social exclusion, this contrast does not inspire motivation. It kills hope. What digital environments often offer is rapid recognition without context, a form of self-knowledge that is immediate but unanchored. Therapy, by contrast, develops understanding slowly, through relationship, where meaning is shaped by what is said, but also by how it is received, questioned, and held over time.
At the same time, access to counselling remains limited. Long waiting lists mean distress does not pause while people wait to be seen. Therefore, it is unsurprising that many turn to digital mental health tools, such as apps, online forums, and increasingly AI-powered chatbots. This is not a rejection of therapy, more a way of coping in the gap. These tools offer immediacy, availability, and a sense of supportive response when human contact is delayed. Used thoughtfully, they can play a valuable supportive role. However, used uncritically, they risk offering something that feels like therapy without engaging the processes that make therapy effective. It gives the illusion of therapy, which later, when confronted with actual therapy, may lead the client to give up participating in therapy due to the complex process and the effort the client must put in to achieve the expected results.
This tension sits at the heart of what it means to practise counselling in a digital world.
Digital tools and the illusion of safety
Digital and AI-powered tools bring real benefits. They increase access, reduce administrative burden and can provide provisional support when services are overstretched. For some individuals, particularly those carrying deep shame, it may feel easier to disclose painful or stigmatised experiences to a chatbot than to another person. The absence of perceived judgement, the sense of anonymity, and the belief that no one is really there can lower the tension for disclosure.
This should not be dismissed. Disclosure can be an important first step.
However, disclosure is not the same as healing. What transforms disclosure into change is the experience of being emotionally met, of having one’s inner world received, reflected and responded to within a human relationship. Therapy is not just a space to tell one’s story. It is a space where that story is shaped, challenged, reflected and re-authored through connection over time.
Most digital tools are created with the intention of helping. Rarely are they designed to cause harm. Yet, unintended consequences matter. When tools designed to support care begin to substitute for relational work, they reshape how distress is understood and addressed.
Therapy is a process, not answers
It is the development of the capacity to arrive at insight through relationship, reflection, and effort made over time. As Carl Rogers argued in “On Becoming a Person”, a meaningful change emerges not from being told who we are or what to do, but from being understood in a relationship that allows growth to unfold.
Human therapy works at the level of process. Empathy is timed. Silence is held and not empty. It has a meaning and purpose. Challenge is offered when a client is emotionally able to receive it. Therapists notice shifts in tone, posture, hesitation and affect. They recognise patterns across time and context. Essentially, they notice when something has missed the mark and they repair it.
Misunderstanding is part of how therapy works, not a failure. When a tear is acknowledged and repaired, clients learn that relationships can survive difficulty without collapse or withdrawal. This kind of learning cannot be achieved in digital world. AI systems can simulate responsiveness, but they cannot sense readiness. They cannot know when not to respond, wait to hold the silence, or when uncertainty itself is therapeutically necessary. Psychological capacities such as emotional regulation, self-trust, and reflective thinking develop through engagement with uncertainty, not through the passive receipt of explanation.
Answers delivered without effort may feel supportive, but they risk weakening agency, specifically for clients who already doubt their capacity to change. When difficulty is removed the opportunity for developmental growth is often removed with it.
Life online, comparison and the foreclosure of possibility
In practice, the emotional impact of online comparison is often profound. Clients speak less about envy and more about shame: “There must be something wrong with me”, or “everything I do is wrong”. Others describe a deep sense of unfairness, working hard while others appear to succeed effortlessly. Over time, this comparison can harden into hopelessness, a belief that improvement is reserved for a different kind of person or into core believes like “I am not good enough”.
For individuals rebuilding life after significant disruption, this can be especially damaging. Many already carry narratives of failure and disappointment. Online spaces, filled with curated success and absence of struggle, can quietly confirm their worst fears. When people stop imagining a future self who could be different, progress stalls. In more severe cases, this foreclosure of possibility contributes to depression, disengagement, and suicidal thinking.
Therapy works against this by treating identity as unfinished. It does not offer perfected versions of the self, but a space where contradiction, effort and failure can be explored without judgement. This requires time, emotional tolerance and the presence of another human being who can remain engaged without rushing to resolve discomfort.
Where AI helps and where it begins to interfere
This is not an argument against progress. It is an argument for conscious progress that strengthens human agency rather than replacing it. Digital tools can be ethically and clinically useful when they point people toward support, provide education or offer suppression in moments when no human help is immediately available. In these roles, they supplement care and protect access.
The ethical line is crossed when substitution occurs without transparency. Therapy is not information exchange. It is a relational process through which people learn to navigate uncertainty, reflect on patterns and take responsibility for their personal change. When answers are provided without engagement, reflective thinking or emotional risk, the developmental work is bypassed. Tools designed to immediately reduce distress may weaken the capabilities required for long-term change. When uncertainty, frustration and relational risk are missed, agency is not supported but eroded. Clinicians, such as Gabor Maté, have emphasised that healing from trauma is rooted in authentic human presence and compassionate inquiry, rather than information alone.
From this perspective, the therapeutic relationship itself becomes the environment in which change is possible. Something that no algorithm can replicate.
Protecting practitioners
Life online affects practitioners as well as clients. Constant digital availability, blurred boundaries, and pressure to integrate new technologies without sufficient reflection can erode professional wellbeing. Increasingly, concerns are also being raised about practitioners relying on AI to plan sessions, select interventions, or structure therapeutic work.
Used uncritically, this risks hollowing out professional judgement. Therapy is not a formula that can be simply generated. It is a responsive process shaped by deep knowledge of the individual client, their history, defences and their capacity at a given moment. AI can offer options, but it does not know the client. It only knows what it has been told. It cannot sense the emotions of spoken words. It cannot see tears and pain that draws on the client’s face. Body language, which plays an important role in therapy, is missed.
When practitioners feel stuck, supervision, not automation, remains the ethical first response. Using AI as an occasional supplementary perspective may be appropriate. It provides its suggestions, however, it needs to be critically evaluated and grounded in the therapist’s own relational understanding. To outsource session planning entirely suggests a loss of confidence in one’s clinical role. When clinical judgement is routinely outsourced, responsibility becomes diffused. This raises ethical questions about competence, authorship, accountability and who ultimately holds responsibility when an intervention fails or causes harm. Supervision exists precisely to hold uncertainty, complexity, and doubt. These functions cannot be replicated by tools designed to generate certainty.
Importantly, when an intervention does not work, this is not failure. Therapy is a process of trying, reflecting, and adapting in collaboration with the client. Modelling this flexibility teaches something fundamental. The growth emerges through engagement, not perfection.
Relationship as the reference point
Digital tools are here to stay, and many will continue to improve. We should not resist innovation, but insist that human connection remains the reference point against which all tools are measured. Therapy does not work because it is efficient. It works because it is relational and real.
In a world increasingly lived online, protecting spaces where people can be seen imperfectly, challenged compassionately, and supported through change is necessary. Progress that strengthens human agency is worth engaging in. Progress that replaces it should be challenged. Is this what we are aiming for?
As digital mental health tools continue to expand, their ethical value should be assessed by access and efficiency, but also by whether they preserve developmental depth, relational integrity, and professional accountability.
