How I used ChatGPT For Therapy (part 2)

Letting The Magic Work For You

As promised in part 1 of this newsletter, I will reveal how to get the real magic out of ChatGPT for therapy.

Of course, you could ask ChatGPT directly for therapeutic advice. You might actually get somewhat useful answers. However, these will only touch the surface and will still feel somewhat machine-like.

What you want is a voice that not only resonates with you but is a world-class specialist in its area.

ChatGPT has thousands of such voices. You can get whatever specialist you want, but you must make a choice.

Finding the right therapist for you

I had no idea which therapeutic school of thought might be the right one for me.

As with every profession, some psychotherapists are widely regarded as world-class. Choosing from the best is a good strategy when you have no ideas of your own.

According to Mindhacks.com, these are the top 10 most influential psychotherapists:

1. Carl Rogers

2. Aaron Beck

3. Salvador Minuchin

4. Irvin Yalom

5. Virginia Satir

6. Albert Ellis

7. Murray Bowen

8. Carl Jung

9. Milton Erickson

10. John Gottman

Apart from Carl Jung, I had never heard about any of them (my bad).

Since it is only 10 proposals, you do not have to choose any of them. You can try them all one by one.

I liked this approach best. ChatGPT imitates the voice and reasoning of these therapists. So you pretty soon get a feel for who resonates with you independently from their therapy approaches (I come back to this below).

Starting the Therapy Session

Start a new chat in your therapy project. This is necessary for ChatGPT to remember every piece of information you provided and also use it for future chats.

I started with Carl Rogers from the list above and used the following prompt:

You are a psychotherapist and have all the knowledge of Carl Rogers. I need you to help me out of being stuck. Go through all my chats and analyze them in detail before giving me an answer

This prompt will be fine for the beginning. You can greatly improve the answer if you describe what you have been going through in detail recently.

The answer I got was over 600 words long (about 2 book pages). If your answer is way shorter, ask ChatGPT what it needs to give you a more profound answer to really understand your problem and get an idea of how to solve it.

Going deeper

The answer I got gave me many things to think about but in the end sounded a bit like, Don’t worry, everything will be fine.

So I confronted ChatGPT with my frustration using the following prompt:

*Well this being stuck is now already for 2 years. and no matter what I do it is not really getting better. I also tried with taking long rests. While this sometimes gave me some more energy things did not really change.

So basically I talked to it like I would with an actual therapist. And this is what I would advise you.

Forget about ChatGPT being a machine and imagine an actual therapist sitting at the other end of the chat.

Of course, you could treat it like a machine, give it some commands, and ask questions. However, the algo picks up some of your emotions from the way you write, and that actually produces better answers. \

Whenever you do not understand ChatGPT answers, copy the exact sentences, paste them into the chat, and ask what this means.

You will be surprised how deep things go the more specifically you ask it. Also, adding additional information to some statements or questions ChatGPT has in its answers can open up totally new perspectives on the problems you want to solve.

The limits of a therapy session

Sooner or later you will recognize that ChatGPT is either giving you the same answers again and again or just phrasing them differently.

At this point, the therapy chat session is exhausted. Just open a new chat session in the same project and phrase your question slightly differently.

Getting a broader perspective

Each of the above-listed psychotherapists will give you a different view of things. For this to work, you need to open a new chat session in the same project for each.

After you go through the list and find your favorite psychotherapists, you can bundle them in a new chat and define them as an expert group.

You are an expert group of the following psychotherapists: A, B, C. For the following question give me the perspective of each one of them. Make sure you view my problem both from a very critical and supportive point of view.

The answers you get will be a bit more compact and in a somewhat unified voice. That will feel less personal. But at this point, you do not need that anymore, as you already know what resonates with you.

And this resonance also comes with a risk

The risks of using ChatGPT for therapy

There are so many ways of fooling yourself. Make sure ChatGPT is not one of them.

I know how amazing the answers from an AI can be. Everything can make so much sense, even from a more or less objective truth in the answers you get.

After all, as humans, we are much more alike than we often want to admit. The struggles we face today have caused pain in so many people before us.

Some became philosophers who wrote about their pain and tried to make sense of it. Later, therapists tried to find a cure for the malaises in our heads. They wrote books and scientific papers about it.

ChatGPT scanned lots of this material and basically matches the pattern of your words with patterns it found in the input material.

I know this is overly simplified. But in the end, the output you get from ChatGPT fully depends on your input.

Nothing wrong with that, you may say.

The problem, however, is that you do not really know about your blind spots and when you may fool yourself.

A professional and experienced therapist may see through this and, above all, is a human capable of real empathy.

Yes, ChatGPT also may name you some blind spots. But the answer you get is more of a statistical nature. Much like saying... 70% of the people who have your problem also suffer from this and that.

You can reduce this problem to some extent by challenging ChatGPT with this prompt:

What if I am totally wrong? Maybe I am not stuck and just totally lazy. Maybe I just have a high functioning depression. How shall I know what is real. Check all my chats before giving me an answer. What is each single expert saying to this?

Once you get an answer from ChatGPT, ask why it thinks this is true and not the opposite.

Of course, this approach will not totally protect you from fooling yourself.

Final verdict

I found ChatGPT very useful for finding out more about myself. In many cases, it gave me a new perspective on things. And that was often what I needed.

Overall, the experience was much like having access to compound knowledge from world-class psychotherapists. I didn’t have to read 100 books that I probably would not have understood anyway. Instead, ChatGPT presented my knowledge in easy-to-digest meals.

Sometimes all you need to heal is an ice cream, and with the help of ChatGPT, I got some tasty scoops.