AI may reshape the world. As it does, the human soul will need non-anxious guides who meet them with respect, awe, and reverence amid a tsunami of uncertainty.
To be a psychotherapist is to hold the souls of clients with a holy reverence.Compassionate witnessing restores agency in destabilizing times.To be a psychotherapist in the truest sense of the word is to care for and tend to the human soul.
The human soul, which so far as we know, did not ask to be incarnated or created in flesh and bone. No one consulted the human soul before it was thrust into a random set of human circumstances. No human soul chose its parents, its, or the geographic location it would be born into with all of its political, social, and economic implications. No human soul chose its race or, or how well its body would function. The human soul doesn’t choose whether the family it was born into would be marked by love and belonging or bitterness and disconnection. Souls don’t choose to be born into 14th century Europe, marred by the Black Death, or mid-19th-century China, during the Century of, and today’s human souls haven’t asked to exist in a period of time where the most influential voices in artificialIf this existential framing of the human condition feels reminiscent of some melodramatic phase you went through in high school that you ultimately grew out of, I’m comfortable with that fact, but I resist the pressure to habituate myself to our circumstances as often as I can. Einstein often reflected that his own scientific accomplishment was rooted in his opposition to moving beyond childish questions about the universe."Never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."and wonder. I would submit that standing before the great mystery of the human soul inspires compassion, reverence, and a deep respect.Today’s human souls are about to encounter a change so massive, radical, and powerful that AI executives are describing themselves as “simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet.” They are “admitting in new language that they aren’t at all certain of the ultimate impact” . To try to anticipate all of the potential ways in which this AI tsunami will transform society is an activity that could consume our entire days and still prove to be a fruitless endeavor. What happens to a person’s sense of worth when they are told that they are economically replaceable? What happens toIf you can primarily respond with compassion and awe for what human souls are about to go through, and not inCertain human souls will wander their way into a therapy room look for answers. They will come in confused, scared, angry, and lost. Prior to reducing symptoms or identifying distorted thoughts, the responsibility of a psychotherapist, as a tender to the soul, is to behold the person before them with a particular posture: You were given this life. These constraints. These advantages. These wounds. These temperamental tendencies. And now you are trying to make sense of this time in history.It is this posture of beholding the human experience that inspires sessions where souls feel that they are being cared for, and it is this framing of therapy that will survive the AI tsunami of change that awaits us all. It means seeing beyond the presenting problem, beyond work anxiety, relationship insecurity, and emotional volatility, and recognizing the unfathomably complex set of conditions that preceded every moment of that person’s behavior.This posture is very much sentimental and very much disciplined. It is non-anxious. It does not collapse into outrage or infantilize suffering. It does not treat people as fragile abstractions in political narratives. The tender of the soul remains unsurprised by human suffering because existence guarantees it, and the tender of the soul honors it as much as they grieve it, and boy do they grieve it. This combination of holy witnessing creates something rare: a space in which a person can face their suffering without being swallowed by it. In that non-anxious presence, agency sprouts from the dirt and core values surface. Better and better questions begin to be asked. And that posture, the disciplined tending of the soul, is what will endure and be needed more than ever as this present cohort of human souls find their way in a world overcome by the tsunami of AI.Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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