Before there were prompts, there were rotary dial phones. What used to be the late-night call to “Domian” (a call-in show on German radio where people rang in at 1:00 in the morning to tell a stranger about their lives) is now a chat with an AI. Except now there is no one on the other end who “vibes” with what you say.
A person who listens is themselves moved by what is said. Their nervous system responds to yours . That is called co-regulation. The other carries something of what you said with them afterwards. Listening to you costs them something and this is exactly what makes it meaningful. An AI processes input and produces output, but nothing inside is touched, changed or carried forward. It has no nervous system that could resonate with yours.
Some things seem to work with AI. Some things really do not.
It can give you a phrase you had been missing for a long time. It can tell you your pattern probably comes from childhood. It can even sound remarkably attuned. More patient, at least, than most people I know.
What it can not do: actually change you. I notice what happens afterwards. Or rather, what does not happen. The insight tends to stay exactly where it arose. On the screen and in the head. Understood or perhaps even written down. And yet the old pattern is back the moment the next trigger appears.
This is not a criticism of the technology. I noticed the same thing long before ChatGPT and other apps, with an analogue, human-based method such as the classic talk therapy.
Talking is not the same as embodied transformation. I have experienced myself that good conversations – however wise, warm and well-intentioned – often do not lead to lasting change. Not because the therapists were not good. But because this kind of work mostly happens on an analytical, intellectual level. The client understands their pattern better and better. They can explain it eloquently, perhaps even entertainingly, over a glass of wine in the evening. But understanding and embodiment are two different things. (There are exceptions, of course, therapists who work at a deeper level, but the general tendency is clear.)
That is exactly where my observations about generative AI meet my older observations about talk therapy and psychoanalysis. Both can be brilliant in the head and both often fail to reach the levels where patterns actually resolve: the felt awareness, the subconscious, the body awareness, the spiritual aspects. None of these can be talked into changing.
So what does not work with AI at all? It cannot sit in silence with you. It cannot sense when your voice breaks even though your words sound composed. It carries no responsibility for what arises between the two of you, because, honestly, nothing arises between you. There is no gaze holding you while you let something true surface that you have never admitted to yourself before. No attentive pause when your breathing changes. The human element can not be simulated. Only a real other human creates resonance. And it is resonance, not information, that sets inner change in motion.
So my recommendation is this: use the technology, if at all, for what it is actually good for. Perhaps putting your first thoughts in order or being a dialogue partner at night when no one else is awake. I mean this sincerely and it does not contradict my work.
But life patterns cannot be prompted away. When a pattern has been recurring for years, when you can explain it and still find yourself stuck or triggered, that is no longer an information problem. No cleverer prompt will solve it, nor will an even more empathetic conversation. What is needed then can only happen in real encounter and a consciousness practice, with someone who has lived experience, who has broken through an invisible glass ceiling or two themselves, who stays while things get uncomfortable and who accompanies you until your nervous system is regulated and your own awareness sees clearly again.
That is the point at which both AI and conversations alone come to an end.
Yes, some doors only open when a human being – present with every level of their own multidimensional beingness – stands in front of them with you.
Title picture: rotary dial phone, etsy.de