Season 3 Episode 5: Can AI Be Your New Therapist?
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Claire: [00:00:00] how AI has become my new cognitive behavioral therapist.
Claire: Hi, it's Claire, the host of the Small Town Entrepreneur Podcast. Thanks for being here. Today's a short one. It's all about how AI has become my new cognitive behavioral therapist. Before you freak out and think, Oh my goodness, is everything in this world being replaced? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I'm going to share my little bit of story because it might relate to you.
Claire: And how I use AI to continue [00:01:00] my therapy journey. So, when I was a high school teacher,I was 21, And I truly hadn't separated myself from the education world long enough. I had been in school every single year since I was, well, 5 years old.
Claire: And yes, I backpacked for 15 years until I was about 35. Every summer, every break I could take, I would backpack and disappear to another place. And that has been truly one of the most healing things I've ever done for myself and still continues to. It disrupts everything. It re inspires me.
Claire: It grounds me. It humbles me.But I want to discuss how therapy has been ultimately the greatest changer for my growth, whether you've done therapy or not, it's so important to recognize that. We all have different experiences, we all go through life really [00:02:00] truly thinking we are doing best we can for ourselves.
Claire: But sometimes what happens is, based on our experiences, our information we've gathered, what we've learned, There's always another perspective or some other piece of information that might be missing in how we take in the world. And so when I was a teacher, I had no idea, absolutely no idea that ADHD was a thing, especially for women.
Claire: It was never discussed and it's become my superpower, but it really took absolute horrible crash for me to wake up and to recognize that maybe my brain doesn't operate like Most of the brains that I was interacting with there at the school or how I was doing things. And so I always knew from a little girl that something was just different, but I never could put my finger on it.
Claire: And I thought, oh, I'm just being overly [00:03:00] dramatic as I was always told. And so. I just kept trying to keep up with everybody else, doing what they were doing, how they were setting up their lives. And at this time, when I crashed around 27, 28, I had to take a medical leave and whether it was a combination of, you know, just being completely burnt out.
Claire: I remember one day I was driving to work at 93 things on my to do list, Everything, I was helping with the play, I was coaching, I was teaching, I was starting business number one, business number two, I was starting Airbnb in my apartment, I have a big family of ten, I was orchestrating different holiday events, all this stuff.
Claire: While also trying to do my own personal stuff of growth of creativity. I was starting photography and building out all these other different things and one day it just all came crashing down and the only way that I could move forward was. Take a [00:04:00] medical leave get some therapy and it was at that time that I learned I was doing it wrong, that I was not listening.
Claire: I didn't know the resources out there. I had no idea that. How my brain was working I was being so disserviced in how I had set myself up. And so, once I started doing cognitive behavioral therapy, I worked with my therapist to simplify, to focus on my strengths, that my weaknesses, acknowledge them, find solutions to outsource them, learn how to say no.
Claire: That was so hard for me. And it still today is, but now I have the confidence to say no. And everyone says, oh, it's easy to say no. But what I learned over those years, really at the end of the day, was just to stop, acknowledge my thoughts, and to think.
Claire: I lived in the moment, which hence, I was always feeling it.
Claire: Feeding that thrill [00:05:00] and that adrenaline rush. And I was wondering why I would get sick or Why I would have anxiety or panic attacks because I was just pushing the dial every second of the day And it was really until I started stepping back and be like I had to start thinking about how do I want to show up for myself tomorrow?
Claire: How do I want to show up for my friends tomorrow? At that time, I didn't have a husband. I didn't have kids. It was just, how do I want to show up for myself? And I spent so many years, 17 years,and I was lonely because I kept filling the cup for that day, but I wasn't acknowledging tomorrow, next week, next month. And I think if, if anything, the game changer for me was addressing. The whole issue of how does Claire, how do I want to be tomorrow?
Claire: I have these goals I want to achieve. I want to hang out with my sisters, but I don't want to be tired or I want to be on time or I want to [00:06:00] be present or I want to do this for myself.
Claire: Cause I was having fun in the moment or I was so hyper focused on what I was doing. But over time, the more I built the muscle of like, ask yourself, what decisions do I need to make in this moment that are going to benefit me tomorrow and the next day?
Claire: So where does AI come into this? You said, this episode is how it places my therapist. Well, first, I built the foundation with a real human for nine years. Dr. Duffy, I hope one day you get to hear this, but he transformed the way I think, the way I approach how I'm thinking, what decisions do I want to be making?
Claire: am I in a thinking trap, which I always was in a thing. I either generalize, I hyper generalize, I created the worst case scenario. I was victimizing all the things. Our minds are powerful and how we follow through in our actions.
Claire: An AI is only coming to the surface now, where after nine years [00:07:00] of working closely I learned to reframe the question. I've changed the script and said, I'm feeling like this.
Claire: Now what do I do? So, anytime I'm in a place where I have a situation that I can feel, I've gone out to coffee with people and I come home and I have this huge weight and I feel sad or I feel not myself and I think, What would Dr. Duffy do? What would I do in this moment? I don't have him anymore. He has retired and moved on, which is why we have stopped our sessions.
Claire: Yes, I could get another therapist, but I also am challenging. I'm curious to think, I've trained my large language models, my chat GBT, or my other private ones on Descript. And using perplexity and it knows me and I say, okay, I've entered this situation. these are all the things I've learned about working in therapy. This is who I am. I have ADHD. these are my goals for the year. I want to learn to say, [00:08:00] no, I want to stay focused. I want to show up for these things.
Claire: Walk me through the mindset steps play devil's advocate, challenge me, act as my therapist. What would he say? And it's crazy. It used to be weeks and months. Now it's moments that I think,
Claire: This is all in my head. I've created these assumptions. I've made up this scenario. It's not as, this is not true and it's changed. So now I have it as this resource all the timeInstead of staying in these funks for longer periods of time and letting eat away. And one thing I've come to realize the anxiety and the rise of cortisol and, medically speaking, that I am not a medical doctor, but I have come to learn that the adrenaline, that it's always clinging to something, urgent, I have to let that go.
Claire: And I've learned to just breathe, take time. Look at the scenario and recognize it's just not as bad. [00:09:00] And so I challenge you to whether you feel comfortable, building that on an LLM using chat, GPT, keeping the details out.
Claire: And so having that resource 24 seven, having something, and this I will say right now, we'll never be able to completely replace a human therapist. We need that human connection. Someone that really, truly understands us that we can talk to. The reality is there might be moments where you're having a panic attack.
Claire: You might be just, you can't breathe, but we don't have a therapist on speed dial. And that's what happened for me is that there was moments where I'm like, I need help. Now, and having that resource of something to start bouncing off and re challenging our brain. So in these moments where we're anxious, where we feel low, where we're confused, where we don't know how to move through the space, just acknowledge how you [00:10:00] feel and map it out.
Claire: This is where I have absolutely been blown away by the prompting that I've done. And if you want, reach out. I can walk you through. I'm happy to show you who my honest conversations with chat GBT, engaging in it and using it as a therapy tool. So try it out. I'm curious. I know some people might absolutely think this is ridiculous, but
Claire: maybe it's something you just want to get a resource. Perplexity is fantastic. If you just want to go over and say, can you give me some resources, the best therapists, In my city, my town, my country that are focused on this type or for this kind of person. So use it as a resource tool for research, or it could be an accountability partner.
Claire: I believe. There's probably somebody out there and stay tuned for, or if there's a developer out there in the, in the meantime, creating a private therapy, [00:11:00] AI tool designed just for you. I can only imagine that there's a couple out there, but right now. Start just addressing the biggest question is how do you want to show up for yourself tomorrow next week and next month?
Claire: Thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll see you in a couple of days.
