Dr. GPT, Therapist?

Can AI help you wade through life's sticky situations?

Disclaimer: This post in no way is meant to suggest that technology is a replacement for trained professional support. As in my primary example, AI can augment support from a mental health professional.

Struggling with something? Interpersonal issue? An internal conflict? Can’t quite put your finger on it?

Maybe you know what is causing the conflict but your emotions are clouding your logic to determine the best path forward?

“Dr. GPT” may help!

Regardless of your LLM of choice (MS Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc)… I’ve found a utilitarian way to use them is to help get a strategy to navigate a sticky situation or to process through a situation where there’s “no right answer”.

About a year ago, I found myself struggling to connect with a coworker that I needed to better connect with to ensure success on our objectives.

The one thing I knew was that we rarely agreed (we actually chose to disagree almost always) - and while this was perhaps a shared issue, I knew it required action.

Out of curiosity, I wondered what ChatGPT would say, so I tossed in a prompt:

“what is a good resource for strategies to engage with a person at work with whom you often disagree”.

It spit out 4 books including Crucial Conversations, 3 few online resources including HBR articles, and 2 online course suggestions. … then the golden moment was 7 strategies it suggested I follow. Number 6 on the list was “Avoid Argument Traps: Don’t get caught in escalating conflict or drawn into personal attacks. Keep the focus on the issue at hand.”

This was my “a-ha” moment. This was the root issue of my conflict. I immediately wrote:

What are 5 ways to deescalate argument traps?

The suggestions were helpful:

From this I was able to reframe my future discussions with this coworker, specifically focusing on the small change of avoiding accusatory language - which I reflected to see that both of us were doing that escalated arguments.

I also took this topic to my therapist to further work on improving the situation. Strategies they suggested further guided me into even more meaningful conversations with the coworker. The results? One year later that relationship is now one of my healthiest relationships at work.

So the combination of getting a starting point with AI and reinforcing support from my therapist positively affected my work environment.

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A few bonus examples of less-high-stakes situations where I’ve relied on ChatGPT (and Copilot since ~February of this year) to provide mental relief/guidance:

• I often times take sentences that I write with emotion and spend less mental energy to rewrite them myself, instead prompting: “remove any emotion or aggression from the tone of this sentence:” and generally from there it’s easier to edit (and learn future strategies for language choice).

• I tend to have cynicism as a fallback coping mechanism when I get pissed off - similarly I toss those thoughts into AI and ask questions like “what are alternative ways to reframe [this topic] in a more positive way?” - generally giving additional ideas for how to see lemonade when there are lemons.

• If I get a negative response from someone in speech or written language, I sometimes put the situation into AI to ask for what the common triggers could have been for the other person - how to acknowledge them - and how to consider avoiding similar situations in the future by predicting/addressing issues up front.