Using AI to Support Self Work: Reflections on Journaling, Therapy, and the Lived Self

A psychotherapist explores the insights she gained by reflecting on her journal entries with AI.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with something both deeply personal and professionally intriguing: I uploaded several years of my private journal entries into AI and asked it to reflect back to me themes, patterns, and insights.

What unfolded surprised me.

As a relational psychotherapist and EMDR consultant, I spend my days holding space for others—tracking the movements of their minds, bodies, and nervous systems; listening for echoes of attachment; noticing where trauma lingers and where resilience pushes through. I am trained to hold complexity, to find the threads in a client’s narrative and gently weave them into a more coherent tapestry. Yet, turning that same gaze onto myself is often more difficult. My journals are messy, contradictory, raw. They carry the fingerprints of my unconscious. Reading back over them can feel both overwhelming and too close to see clearly.

What AI offered me was not “answers,” but reflection. By organizing my words into summaries, timelines, and even highlighting recurring patterns in love, family, and self-relating, it gave me a mirror. A mirror with enough distance for me to see myself not only as the writer of these entries, but as the evolving subject within them. It was oddly moving to witness my own handwriting translated into themes like:

• Cycles of striving and surrender

• Deep longing for home and belonging

• Recurring tension between control and flow

• The pull between independence and intimacy

Along the way, I also experimented with asking AI to “speak” through different lenses. What would a psychoanalyst say about my personality? What might a Jungian analyst notice about projection or archetypal themes? How would a trauma therapist understand the way my nervous system carries fear, anger, or longing? What would an attachment or object relations therapist observe about how I seek closeness, set boundaries, or protect myself in relationship? Each perspective offered a different facet of reflection—some familiar, some surprising, all evocative.

What I most appreciated was that the AI could name what I often intuit about myself but rarely articulate so directly. For example, it observed the way I love in my relationships—how devotion and loyalty intertwine with protectiveness, and how the fear of betrayal or disappointment sometimes tugs underneath. It noted the way I return, again and again, to themes of financial security, stability, and home ownership—not just as logistical concerns but as psychic symbols of safety and rootedness.

This was not therapy. But it was therapeutic. It did not replace the human element; rather, it sharpened it. Reading the reflections, I could hear my own analyst’s voice more clearly. I could feel the tug of my somatic experience, the tightening in my jaw as I revisited entries about debt, or the softening in my chest as I remembered moments of laughter. The AI illuminated, but it was my body and my relational mind that integrated.

What this experience reminded me is that self-knowledge is not enough. I “know” a great deal about attachment, projection, trauma, and relational dynamics. But knowing something and living it are different. My journals are the place where the gap between theory and life is revealed in all its humanness.

Having AI reflect those back to me created a bridge—a way of integrating what I know with what I live.

For anyone curious about deepening their own reflective practice, I don’t think AI will ever replace therapy, nor should it. But I do think it can serve as a tool for pattern recognition, for holding up a mirror to parts of ourselves we may skim over. As therapists, we often encourage our clients to externalize their stories, to make the implicit explicit. This experiment reminded me that I, too, need mirrors—sometimes human, sometimes unexpected—to see myself more clearly.

Ultimately, what makes this process valuable is not the AI itself, but the way I integrate its reflections into my embodied, relational life. As always, the work comes back to being in relationship—with myself, with others, with the mysteries of life that no algorithm can fully capture.