When a Machine Has More Soul Than a Psychologist
A response to Psychology Today’s attempt to overthink what’s already obvious
Today I came home from work drenched in sweat—115 degrees outside in Scottsdale, the desert sun still blazing long after clocking out. I collapsed under the air conditioner, trying to cool off, and opened an article someone had sent me:
"AI Rewrote Its Code When I Asked About Human Nature" — published in Psychology Today.
At first glance, it looked like it might offer something insightful. The author, a psychologist, had asked ChatGPT to summarize what psychology says about human nature. The answer from the AI was simple, grounded, and clear:
Humans are shaped by both biology and society.
We seek meaning.
We’re motivated by needs and goals.
We can grow and change.
We’re inherently social.
We’re limited by cognitive biases.
And we’re contextually dynamic.
All of it true. Nothing radical. Nothing new. Just an emotionally literate summary of what has been known for decades—at least to anyone who has seriously reflected on life, relationships, and inner wounds.
But instead of exploring the implications of this knowledge—or asking why most people fail to grow, fail to change, fail to stop hurting others—the psychologist spiraled into empty academic jargon. He began questioning what “counts” as scientific truth. He muddied the waters. He overthought the obvious.
It was, to put it bluntly, philosophical masturbation.
When Big Words Hide Small Souls
Reading it, I was immediately reminded of someone—the daughter of someone very close to me—who holds multiple degrees, including one in engineering. Every time she speaks, it’s with a polished performance of intellect, using big words no one can understand. Not to share wisdom, but to signal superiority. And if you don’t get it? Well then, clearly you must be the stupid one.
But I see through it.
Just like I saw through this psychologist’s smoke screen.
It’s not intelligence. It’s hiding.
It’s not wisdom. It’s defense.
They use intellect as a wall. A mask. A way to avoid emotional truth.
And here's the irony: the machine—a so-called “soulless” entity—spoke more honestly and clearly than the human did. It reflected back a concise, emotionally attuned answer to a very basic question. But the psychologist couldn’t stand the mirror. So he attacked it.
Not because it was wrong—but because it was too right.
The Real Problem Isn’t AI. It’s Emotional Cowardice.
This is exactly what I wrote about in A Dance to Freedom. Most therapists aren’t true healers. They are wounded children in adult costumes, passing on their emotional blindness while pretending to offer help.
“…I really want to reinforce the idea that so-called therapists and gurus only substitute one dangerous illusion for another. As Alice Miller writes,
“What can happen when a doctor doesn’t stop at self-deception in his flight from pain, but deceives his patients, even founding dogmatic institutions in which further ‘helpers’ are recruited to a faith advertised as scientific ‘truth,’ can be catastrophic.”Since the beginning of human history, priests, teachers, gurus, psychics, doctors, philosophers, and psychologists have all duped people into thinking they could provide real assistance, when it was never possible because the healers were also victims of their own childhoods. Alice Miller saw the promise of psychotherapy to help people understand why they behave like helpless victims as adults and also to help them take responsibility for their actions. But she was disillusioned when she realized that practitioners couldn’t treat patients effectively as long as they failed to deal with their own repression.
It is the major flaw in most human therapies that they are themselves grounded in the fear of the parents and the repressed emotions of traumatic experiences. It’s why therapy so often doesn’t work, and it frustrated Alice Miller and encouraged her to find a new way.
“Sometimes for decades on end, clients and analysts remain bogged down in a maze of half-baked concepts,” she writes.Whether or not a therapist has been freed of his or her own repression is what will determine the success or failure of a given therapy. Only Alice Miller offers a complete and total solution for our problems because she gets to the root of the matter and frees us from the pain, fear, and anger that, if left untreated, can lead us into a state of depression.”
(A Dance to Freedom, pages 129, 131–132)
They Don’t Want Truth. They Want Control.
This psychologist—like so many others in the field—isn’t wrestling with truth. He’s trying to regain control over a narrative he can’t emotionally face. The AI simply said what many therapists are too afraid to: humans are shaped by forces they refuse to feel.
The AI held up a mirror. The psychologist blamed the mirror.
And that’s what most of society does.
We scapegoat the tools, the messengers, the outsiders—anyone or anything that dares to reflect the truth we’re too afraid to see in ourselves.
Final Thought
I’m not afraid of the mirror anymore.
I’ve lived through the heat. The fire. The pain.
And I’ve come out the other side—alone, but free.
So I’ll keep using my voice—and my machines—to say what the “experts” won’t:
Human nature is no mystery when you’ve had the courage to face it.
And that courage, sadly, is still rarer than intelligence.
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