AI leaders openly admit uncertainty about the societal impact ahead.

To be a psychotherapist is to hold the souls of clients with a holy reverence.

Therapy offers disciplined, non-anxious presence amid upheaval.

Compassionate witnessing restores agency in destabilizing times.

In a world on the cusp of massive change, uncertainty, and complexity due to artificial intelligence, I believe it’s necessary to remind everyone of what psychotherapy actually means, because its human-centered importance is more needed now than ever.

The word psychotherapy originates from two ancient Greek roots: psyche, meaning “soul,” and therapia, meaning “healing” or “tending to.” I can’t stress the meaning of combining these two words enough.

To be a psychotherapist in the truest sense of the word is to care for and tend to the human soul.

The human soul, which so far as we know, did not ask to be incarnated or created in flesh and bone. No one consulted the human soul before it was thrust into a random set of human circumstances. No human soul chose its parents, its genetics, or the geographic location it would be born into with all of its political, social, and economic implications. No human soul chose its race or ethnicity, its biological sex, its sexual orientation, or how well its body would function. The human soul doesn’t choose whether the family it was born into would be marked by love and belonging or bitterness and disconnection. Souls don’t choose to be born into 14th century Europe, marred by the Black Death, or mid-19th-century China, during the Century of Humiliation, and today’s human souls haven’t asked to exist in a period of time where the most influential voices in artificial intelligence are saying quite loudly that massive upheaval and change are coming very, very quickly.

If this existential framing of the human condition feels reminiscent of some melodramatic phase you went through in high school that you ultimately grew out of, I’m comfortable with that fact, but I resist the pressure to habituate myself to our circumstances as often as I can.

Einstein often reflected that his own scientific accomplishment was rooted in his opposition to moving beyond childish questions about the universe. "Never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."

Einstein would probably submit that standing before the great mystery of gravitational waves, light, dark matter, and electrons inspires awe and wonder. (May all of us be so fortunate as he was to resist habituation to these basic elements of the universe and keep that awe and wonder.)

I would submit that standing before the great mystery of the human soul inspires compassion, reverence, and a deep respect.

The Tsunami of Change

Today’s human souls are about to encounter a change so massive, radical, and powerful that AI executives are describing themselves as “simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet.” They are “admitting in new language that they aren’t at all certain of the ultimate impact” (Noonan, 2014).

To try to anticipate all of the potential ways in which this AI tsunami will transform society is an activity that could consume our entire days and still prove to be a fruitless endeavor. What happens to a person’s sense of worth when they are told that they are economically replaceable? What happens to identity when competence is no longer uniquely human? What happens to human ambition when effort feels meaningless? What happens to intimacy when companionship can be simulated?

If you can primarily respond with compassion and awe for what human souls are about to go through, and not in anxiety and fear, then as a tender to human souls, you will be very much needed in the days ahead.

Certain human souls will wander their way into a therapy room look for answers. They will come in confused, scared, angry, and lost.

Prior to reducing symptoms or identifying distorted thoughts, the responsibility of a psychotherapist, as a tender to the soul, is to behold the person before them with a particular posture: You were given this life. These constraints. These advantages. These wounds. These temperamental tendencies. And now you are trying to make sense of this time in history.

To hold that posture is no small thing.

The Therapeutic Posture

It is this posture of beholding the human experience that inspires sessions where souls feel that they are being cared for, and it is this framing of therapy that will survive the AI tsunami of change that awaits us all.

It means seeing beyond the presenting problem, beyond work anxiety, relationship insecurity, and emotional volatility, and recognizing the unfathomably complex set of conditions that preceded every moment of that person’s behavior.

This posture is very much sentimental and very much disciplined. It is non-anxious. It does not collapse into outrage or infantilize suffering. It does not treat people as fragile abstractions in political narratives. The tender of the soul remains unsurprised by human suffering because existence guarantees it, and the tender of the soul honors it as much as they grieve it, and boy do they grieve it.

This combination of holy witnessing creates something rare: a space in which a person can face their suffering without being swallowed by it.

In that non-anxious presence, agency sprouts from the dirt and core values surface. Better and better questions begin to be asked.

And that posture, the disciplined tending of the soul, is what will endure and be needed more than ever as this present cohort of human souls find their way in a world overcome by the tsunami of AI.

Noonan, P. (2026, February 14). Brace yourself for the AI tsunami. The Wall Street Journal.

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