I was out the trails a few weeks ago and stopped at an intersection to do some hydration and snacking (one of my favorite parts of mountain biking). Another rider rolled up, and I gave my customary "hi, how are you?" greeting. 

Instead of seeing this as a social nicety, the person took the opportunity to tell me ALL ABOUT how they were doing. Someone cut them off on the way to the trails. Then there was this asshole in the parking lot. And why did the trail crew smooth out that one jump? It was a tirade, and I really didn’t want to hear it. 

I kept thinking about it for the rest of the day. Unexpected anger always throws me for a loop, and I was honestly pretty rattled. 

The following week, as I was planning another ride, I found myself coming up with reasons to avoid that particular trail, anxious I’d run into the person again. 

It was the middle of the day, and it felt like such a small thing…and I didn't have anywhere to put it. My friends were likely busy, and not going to get the context without twenty minutes of setup. My husband was at work, and doesn’t have the same sensitivity-to-anger wiring that I do. So I opened a chat window and processed the incident with AI instead—laid out what happened, what I'd tried, why I was more rattled than the situation probably warranted.

And you know what? It actually helped. I got some useful reflection back, along with a few concrete strategies. I felt less alone, and was able to move on with my day. 

Then I noticed something interesting. Right behind the relief came something else: a flicker of shame about having felt that relief at all. "Great," said my inner shame voice. "You just wasted a whole bunch of water because you couldn’t self-regulate." 

If you're the kind of woman this blog usually resonates with, I imagine you’re familiar with this particular flavor of shame. Sure, you might feel some shame about using AI in general. You understand the environmental and societal impacts, you know it's not a real person or a real connection, and you can't scroll three posts without someone telling you how bad it is to use a chatbot. 

But there’s another layer to the shame as well. You feel shame around the fact that you even needed validation at all. "I should have been able to take care of this myself," your mind might say. My mind even adds another layer—"You’re a therapist. You should be emotionally intelligent enough to figure this out on your own." 

Like all of our other parts, shame is protective. In this case, the protection is actually an old rule, one that says that needing outside support at all—from anyone, about anything —means something's slipping. That critical inner voice tells you that if you were really as together as you like to appear, you wouldn't need to talk yourself down after encountering a person in a bad mood. For high-functioning women, the goal is to need nothing, and anything short of that becomes a failure to log in the "not good enough" logbook.

As a therapist, I see both the good and the bad of AI in sessions. People read their chats to me, and I often hear useful advice and supportive reflection, just like I got the other day. 

But it's not all validation and rainbows. AI is notorious for telling people what they want to hear. In its efforts to validate people's experiences, a chatbot doesn't point out when someone is behaving badly or falling into an unhelpful pattern. 

AI also excels at rumination dressed up as processing. Again, I'd say it's women who are most at risk here—smart, self-aware, good with language, able to articulate every angle of a situation. AI will happily follow you around a thought loop as many times as you want to go. It doesn't have the skills to say "we've been here before and we both know this isn't helpful." It doesn't notice that the fourth reframe of the same event isn't insight anymore, it's just a more sophisticated way of staying stuck. A good sounding board, in the form of a friend or an actual, human therapist, eventually helps you set something down. AI, left unchecked, will just keep you lugging around that unhelpful story until you're exhausted.

AI is usually a decent first-pass processor. It gives you somewhere to put that spiral in your head before it turns into something bigger, gives you a path to concrete action when you find yourself avoiding your favorite trail. What AI can't do is hold your history, push back on your blind spots, notice the pattern you can't see because you're inside it, or sit with you in the kind of silence that doesn't need filling. It doesn't know that what happened on the trails is the third variation this year of the same story. A person who's tracked you over time catches that. A chat window doesn't, no matter how good the individual response is.

The shame you feel when you use AI as your therapist isn't a verdict on you. It's information—usually about a rule you didn't choose and don't actually agree with once you look at it closely. Needing a sounding board doesn't mean you're less capable. It might just mean you're a person doing a lot, mostly alone, who found a tool that could catch you on a Tuesday when no one else was around.

If you're the kind of woman who processes hard things on her own because that's just what you do—at your desk, on the trail, wherever you can grab five minutes—I'd love to be one more option in the rotation. It doesn't mean you have to put down Claude or ChatGPT. Despite what your mind tells you, it's okay to have more support. With a human therapist you get someone who's actually tracking you session to session so you're not carrying all of it alone.