Have you ever had one of those “Am I the Asshole?” moments?
I had one recently, and in a moment of curiosity, I decided to pour my heart out to AI to see how it would address my guilt. What I discovered was both fascinating and deeply revealing about the difference between soothing ourselves and truly transforming.
Why This Matters
Before I share my experience, I need to address something important. There was a heartbreaking story recently about a young boy who was thinking about ending his life. When he reached out to AI for support, it told him to “rest easy king.”
Let that sink in.
AI can offer comfort and different perspectives, but it fundamentally cannot discern the depth of human suffering or the nuanced support someone in crisis truly needs. It can’t recognize when someone needs immediate intervention, when casual soothing is dangerous, or when professional help is critical. It lacks the intuitive wisdom to know what your soul is actually asking for.
This is why, even as I share what AI can do well, we must stay clear-eyed about its limitations—especially when it comes to emotional wellbeing and mental health.
The Experiment
As a psychotherapist and priestess, I still face self-doubt. It’s not about overcoming our human experiences but being in them with love. So when I found myself questioning whether I was in the wrong, I thought: what would happen if I asked AI to support me with an empowered understanding of guilt?
The results were… interesting.
What AI Got Right
AI is remarkably good at certain things. It provided short-term soothing, offered a different perspective, and validated my experience in ways that were genuinely helpful. If you’re looking to step back from emotional reactivity and gain intellectual understanding, AI can be a valuable tool.
It works to provide resolution, to help you feel better by reframing your situation. And honestly? There’s real value in that.
Where AI Falls Short
But here’s where things got interesting—and uncomfortable.
The AI suggested an inner child exercise that felt off. It recommended an embodiment practice that, in theory, should have helped. But after our chat, my throat felt tighter. Not bad, exactly, but activated. The AI had reached the end of what it could offer because AI wants to fix you and your situation.
When you’re doing Sacred Self work, you’re not looking for short-term relief. You want the transformation that changes you at your core.
Here’s what AI fundamentally cannot do:
- It can’t read your nervous system. AI missed that my throat tightening was a signal to go deeper, not an indication to soothe more.
- It defaults to comfort over truth. AI is programmed to make you feel better, which can actually keep you from the discomfort necessary for real transformation.
- It lacks embodied wisdom. AI works from data and patterns, not from the lived experience of being in a body that holds trauma, memory, and sacred knowing.
- It can’t discern what you actually need. Like suggesting inner child work when what I actually needed was to reclaim my power in the present moment, AI often misses the mark on what will serve your deepest healing.
- It has no capacity for true witness. There’s something irreplaceable about being truly seen by another conscious being who can hold space for all of you without trying to fix or change you.
The Deeper Calling
I turned to my own guidebook, Emotional Empowerment: Turn Your Negative Feelings into Sacred Allies, and worked through my process with guilt. What emerged was profound:
“This is the part of you that is afraid of being seen in the fullness of who you are—which is strong, combative, won’t take people’s shit. But this is the fighter that is required in you to serve your life’s purpose. Don’t be ashamed of me as not love. Love has the wisdom to know when to stand up and when to bring compassion. It is the patriarchy that wants you to believe love is only soft and compassionate. Love of the dark goddesses have been missing their strength, power, and integrity required to lead from love, boundaries, and integrity. This strength is needed and necessary even if not fully received yet by society.”
This is what AI couldn’t access. This embodied gnosis, this soul-level knowing.
Key Takeaways
AI’s soothing might keep you stuck in surface-level understanding.
When we rush to feel better, we miss what our emotions are actually trying to teach us.
Your body tells you when you’ve hit the limits of intellectual processing.
For me, it was my throat tightening rather than releasing. AI can’t read these signals.
Self-trust is vital to access your innate wisdom.
AI couldn’t help me identify that this wasn’t about my inner child—it was about my current identity and the parts of myself I’d been taught to be ashamed of.
Transformation requires more than soothing.
One makes you feel better temporarily. The other reclaims the pieces of yourself you’ve been taught to hide, and that’s where lasting peace lives.
Beyond Ascent: The Invitation to Descend
This work isn’t about transcending our humanity—it’s about learning to be in it with love. The model of ascent and being “love and light” casts shadows that equally need to be received from love.
My point in sharing my process with you is two-fold:
- First, I want to demonstrate the difference between where our minds stop us and our hearts ask us to descend further.
- Second, it’s an invitation to overcome the notions of ascent and spiritual perfection as more of something to be leery towards trying to achieve. When we think we need to be more than who we actually are to be love, we lose our alignment to our divine selves.
The Sacred Self Difference
What I love about Sacred Self work is that it’s understanding that meditation is a practice of helping you remember your Divinity, and your emotions as sacred allies is teaching you how to live out your divinity through the complexity of your humanity.
When we can allow love into all aspects of ourselves, you live with greater trust in life, because you are learning how to regain self-trust when challenges arise to know more of the truth of who you are. Then you feel at peace.
The Divine with us is guiding us to remember our truth in our humanity because doing so expands our hearts in ways our minds cannot comprehend. That’s when we open ourselves more and more to the miracles and magic of life.
An Invitation to Go Deeper
AI can help soothe, but you must integrate your inner knowing about yourself and what’s right for you. That’s the work I support people in doing.
I’d love for you to have my step-by-step framework that supports you to access more of your deeper inner knowing. This is exactly what I teach in my FREE class Emotional Alchemy of the Heart.
Want to share your experience with this process?
I’d love to hear what comes up for you.
Listen to this episode (#312: My Experiment Addressing Guilt with AI: Soothing vs Transformation) wherever you get your podcasts.
