Why choose email counselling when AI can offer emotional support?
Updated: Sep 1
AI might be tempting to use instead of email counselling.
But, remember, AI is a robot, not a human, meaning it’s limited to just giving you ‘advice’, which it gleans from random websites by scraping the internet.
AI often makes mistakes, and only cares about collecting your private data so it can sell you stuff in future.
AI is not a trained professional; it belongs to no professional body, has no ethical guidelines, no supervisor, and can easily miss when you are in danger and need professional help.
In this blog I share my reflections on why people are avoiding AI and instead choosing email counselling as a modern alternative to traditional talking therapy.
Firstly, what is Email Counselling?
Email counselling is very different from traditional in-person counselling and also from other ways of meeting, such as video or phone. The main difference is that we write to each other rather than speak.
Many people find email counselling very much more flexible and accessible as it’s not necessary to agree to a set time each week to meet, which is great for folks who work full time, or are parents/carers.
Email Counselling is a specialist skill that requires additional professional training after initially qualifying as a generic counsellor. Not all therapists are able to offer it, therefore, which is why it’s likely you’ve not heard of it before. It is growing in popularity and more therapists are training as email counsellors through the training I teach at Email Counselling Academy.
Is Email counselling the same as writing to AI?
Email counselling and AI might look similar on the surface. Both offer you a response to your worries and give you the chance to write instead of talk, but underneath they are totally different.
For counselling to work it needs a human relationship where difficult feelings can emerge. Instead, AI will just nod along and be nice. Therapy can’t be offered by AI, because AI is a robot and it is the human relationship that makes the healing work.
AI can imitate therapeutic language but when you have email counselling you aren't paying a counsellor simply to read your words and reply supportively; instead, you're entering a relationship with a real person.
Why writing can be easier than talking
You might be wondering if it is really possible to build a therapy relationship without speaking.
Texting and emailing are how so many of us communicate daily. We speak to our friends, our colleagues and maybe even our neighbours in these ways. They are convenient, flexible and make it much easier to say what we really want to say. For example, if the music was too loud next door, I know I’d feel much more comfortable to text my neighbour than to knock on their door and speak.
So many people love to write. They communicate with their friends this way, they may even journal sometimes. Writing is powerful, thoughtful and often makes it easier to express what really needs to be said, so it makes sense that many people might be tempted to turn to AI. However, this will not be counselling. Counselling doesn’t need to be spoken for it to be genuine; it can definitely be written instead. But it must be offered by a trained human therapist for it to work.
An email counsellor isn't just firing off a quick reply to you. Instead, we are human beings who are trained to build a therapeutic relationship with our clients by writing instead of speaking.
Counselling is not meant to be endlessly nice
Because AI is a robot it can’t connect with you and it will therefore always be nice, which can get very annoying and, unfortunately, niceness doesn’t help you move forward in your distress.
An email counsellor’s job is not to keep things ticking along nicely with endlessly pleasant and validating replies as AI does. Instead, counsellors offer gentle challenge, carefully holding boundaries and navigating any patterns that get played out from your past.
The human connection
For therapy to work it needs to be human-to-human contact so that childhood patterns of family dynamics can play out between you and your therapist.
Take as an example the case of a client often wanting to make their therapist feel proud of them: in the process of doing this, a difficult pattern from the client’s past might be evoked. Instead of always cheering the client, as AI would do, this difficult pattern would be noticed and explored by their therapist. In so doing, the client could be helped to realise what the circumstances were that first gave rise to the need to elicit feelings of pride in them by others, and why an acknowledgement of their achievements or qualities felt necessary in the past to make them feel safe.
Building this connection with another human who is separate from your life, as well as being a trained professional who offers human unconditional acceptance, can show you that you don’t need to try to impress for your counsellor to accept you. The result of this is that you lose the exhaustion that comes with constantly trying to impress people in order to feel loved, which then ripples out into your other relationships in life as you heal this wound.
AI could never do this because it can’t offer a human connection, instead AI will always be trying to please you!
AI can miss risk
Professional counsellors have a lot going on as they are listening and responding to you. For example, they are listening out for threads in what you’re saying and recalling details from previous sessions as well as choosing carefully when to interject. They are also assessing risk and have professional protocols to help you stay safe.
You might be trying to tell your therapist that you are finding it hard to stay alive, but not feel brave enough to say it so explicitly. Instead you might say things like, “I just can’t do this any more”, “I wish it could all stop right now”. This might not necessarily mean you are thinking of suicide; but it could, and a trained counsellor will know how to spot this, and based on some of the other things that you are saying/experiencing and how they know you as a person, will assess how to gently ask about safety and explore ways to help you stay safe.
AI could either miss this completely or just simply send you the Samaritans’ phone number. You might hate phone calls, in which case this could leave you feeling even more scared and isolated.
Why my clients avoid AI
I have worked with many clients who have either had bad experiences of opening up to AI or are too scared to tell AI anything at all, never mind share their deepest, darkest thoughts! Many people are outright anti-AI for environmental reasons as well as knowing the dangers of giving away their personal data to feed a robot.
Clients tell their counsellors sensitive, highly confidential things they have never told a soul. They want their words to be safe, not to be spat out by AI in a subsequent response to another user in the future. The same high standard of confidentiality, boundaries and ethics that are in place in traditional counselling are just as important in email counselling.
Why people prefer email counselling
Instead of avoiding counselling altogether, because they hate the idea of speaking, my clients welcome the idea of email counselling where they can write in their own time and not have to show their face.
Because email counselling means you don’t have to show your face and voice, it’s often common for people I work with to go much deeper and feel more comfortable exploring embarrassing topics.
Writing instead of talking changes the therapeutic process; the time delay in replying to each other helps slow the pace down and gives both the client and counsellor time to process their thoughts. The writing becomes part of the therapy work, rather than simply being the technology used to deliver it.
What are you actually getting when you pay for email counselling?
It makes sense that you might wonder how email counselling could be any different from AI and whether it’s worth paying for. Well, yes, AI is free, but it is free for a reason: it’s intentionally collecting your personal data. AI imitates helpfulness to entice you to keep feeding it with more information about yourself. This is not ethical, it’s not confidential and it’s certainly not professional therapy. It is simply a clever robot that can scrape the internet in seconds to give you top tips and make you believe it cares about you.
A professionally trained email counsellor isn't simply responding to the latest email in isolation. As in traditional counselling they are building a picture of you as your sessions progress. The skill of remembering what happened and how they felt in previous sessions is an important part of the process.
AI is a painfully nice response with a bit of reassurance and advice that should usually be taken with a pinch of salt.
However, an email counsellor is:
someone who gets to know you
someone who remembers the work
someone who notices patterns
someone who can challenge you
someone you can develop a therapeutic relationship with
professional, ethical, confident and works securely
Are you thinking of trying email counselling?
If you’re thinking of trying email counselling, the modern alternative to old school talking therapy, get in touch.
I offer email counselling to adults in the UK. To set up your first session check out my contact page HERE.
There is often a waiting list, but if you add your name, I will contact you when a space becomes available.
Comments