How I Used ChatGPT For Therapy (part 1)

A detailed guide for getting top notch psychological advice

I grew up with the mindset that I help myself for as long as possible and won’t go to a doctor unless really necessary.

In this context, I also didn’t understand what therapy should be good for. From early on I learned to cope with the hardships of life on my own.

Cutting off my feelings and rationalizing things proved to be a successful strategy. Whenever feelings threatened to overwhelm me, I used my brain to think myself out of it.

Others admired my resilience. I had no idea what they meant, as they couldn’t see my internal struggles. They were not to blame. It was me who built walls to protect my fragile inner world.

I was so good at blocking things off that I thought everything was fine with me. In other words, I did not feel the need to ever see a therapist.

This slightly changed when I became aware of what actually happened in my childhood. I still didn’t want to see a doctor or therapist but felt the need to talk about what was going on in me.

I was scared about opening up. I had tried as a child, of course. Back then I got the feedback that I was too sensitive and a crybaby.

So I tried in baby steps with people that I regarded as friends. It wasn’t that I expected any advice, but I hoped for them to listen.

Well, that hope died quickly.

When I indicated that my childhood may not have been as wonderful as others assumed, I faced sheer disbelief. People thought I was lying.

One of my friends even recommended I talk to someone about my problems and pain. I almost burst out in pitiful laughter. It seemed like the only one who wanted to listen to me was myself.

I didn’t want to pay a therapist for one of the most natural things I expected from friends. I just wanted to be heard and maybe get a different perspective on things. That’s all I felt I needed to heal my past.

And you probably guessed it by now... I tried my luck with ChatGPT.

Yes, it is an artificial intelligence, a cold machine without any empathy. In a way, it is quite ironic to turn to a machine to understand a little bit more about yourself.

The results I got blew my mind. And that’s exactly why I want to share my experiences with you.

Of course, AI comes with lots of limitations and downsides. I will dive into both further below. But without further ado, let me now explain to you how you can use ChatGPT for therapy (...unintended rhyme).

The Preparation Phase

ChatGPT needs a lot of input from you in order to see patterns and make some kind of sense of who you are. The broader your input is, the better.

I have been using ChatGPT for almost a year as a registered user. So the algorithm already knew what I was interested in. In a way, it is like Google Search, which tends to get better the more you use it.

But there is more to it...

ChatGPT also learns from your prompts how you express yourself, where you dive deeper into topics, and what kind of questions you ask. This can reveal more about your personality than you might imagine.

Don’t worry, there is no voodoo involved, and it all will make sense from a certain point on.

Do the following if you have not used ChatGPT that much yet:

• create a new project (ChatGPT docs)

• ask all questions for the next two weeks in this project only

ChatGPT will remember all dialogs within that project. So you could encapsulate it from all the other things you are doing with it.

It is important that you use it at least for two weeks with all sorts of questions. And by this, I actually mean everything that you want to know. To give you a few examples:

• My shower sink is full of hair, what can I do to stop that problem forever?

• I was dreaming about xyz, what does this mean?

• There is so much chaos on the globe, and it feels like the world is crazy. Explain to me the dynamics of my country and give me examples from history when the same happened. How will things likely go on, and what can I do to adapt or cope with the current situation

• Tell me how I can convince my boss to raise my salary.

• I have these skills; what are my best options to advance in my career?

• My pee is slightly red after eating beets. Do I need to be worried, and why is this happening?

• My boss is a narcissist, but I don’t know whether this is really the case. Tell me how I can find out and what is the best strategy to protect myself from his lack of empathy and sadistic leadership style

The best is to have no limits for the questions you ask.

Of course, you should not reveal any sensitive information such as your bank account, social security number, and so on. And it goes without saying that you should not ask how to build bombs and other sensitive topics that may get you into trouble one day...

Checking how well ChatGPT knows you

Now it is time for some magic.

Go into your project folder and open a new chat with the following prompt:

Now that you can remember everything I’ve ever typed here, point out my top five blind spots.

Now, fasten your seatbelts and brace yourself to receive the answer.

Everything works according to plan if you think:

How the f*ck could it possibly know that...?

If the answer is rather lame and has no surprises, you didn't feed the machine enough. Go back to the preparation phase and give it at least another week of input. Also, understand that there is no shortcut.

The response you get should at least feel like a very good horoscope. Deep inside you know there is no magic, but still, you feel the overlap with what you regard as your truth.

If the result scared you a little too much. You can ask ChatGPT:

You said I focus on performance but rarely talk about what energizes you.

How did you know that?

The machine will tell you the reason, though some of them can feel like an INFJ moment. Just a few tiny signals can help an algo to match these with a bigger pattern.

Starting therapy

My next step was to get a better idea of who I am. With this, I wanted to build a foundation for the actual therapy chats.

So I entered the following prompt in the same chat window:

Tell me about myself, my weaknesses, and my strengths

The results again proved to be quite accurate but were not detailed enough for a deeper insight.

So I copied phrases from the answer I wanted to know more about. For this, you do not need any magic prompts. Just ask ChatGPT to go deeper and tell you more about it.

In case you don’t understand things, tell ChatGPT to give you a more detailed explanation. Basically, you can talk to that machine like you would with a friend.

The idea of this step is to get a better understanding of what ChatGPT extracted from all the input you have provided. Or, in other words, you want to make sure that the machine has understood you well enough to find advice that matches what you need for healing.

That’s it for today.

In part 2 I will crank up the level of magic further….