There's something quietly poignant happening right now. People are turning to AI for something that feels like companionship. A place to be heard. A presence that's available, patient, non-reactive. I don't say that dismissively, because I understand the impulse completely. We are living through an epidemic of loneliness so profound that we will reach toward almost anything that approximates the feeling of being held. The feeling of being connected with another, with each other.
What I keep coming back to is this, what people are actually reaching for isn't information or even reflection. It's the experience of mattering to another nervous system. That mattering to another nervous system, as much as we might wish otherwise, cannot be replicated by a machine.
That is because the nervous system is fundamentally a relational ‘organ’. It likes to be with others to co-regulate. It likes connection, choice and agency. What people are reaching for is not information but relationship. The nervous system develops in relationship, heals in relationship and, throughout our lives, continues to seek the regulating presence of other humans.
I must admit, I work on my own a little and I find myself craving the connection of other humans in person. When I have days when I am writing I will often go and plonk myself in a cafe just to be around other people. It might be surprising to you that these days are often my most creative.
We tend to think of connection as a social skill. Something we learn, practice, get better at. But underneath the social layer, connection is a somatic experience. It happens in the body before it happens anywhere else.
When you feel truly met by another person, that feeling of really being seen and being with a person who can hold your experience in their body and stay in connection with you, well something in your physiology shifts. Your breathing changes. Your muscles soften. The part of your brain scanning for threat quiets down just enough to let something else come forward. This is not a metaphor. It is the nervous system doing what it evolved to do: co-regulate with another.
This is why genuine connection is so hard to fake, and so hard to find. It requires two people who each have enough internal settledness to stay present, not just cognitively, but somatically, when things get uncomfortable. When the conversation touches something real. When the other person's activation starts to move through the room.
Most of us never learned how to do this. Not because we're broken, but because most of us grew up in environments where the adults around us hadn't learned either. Neither did their parents or grandparents. The lack of capacity, inability to attune, it gets passed down through the generations.
Many people talk about the concept of moving our orientation from me to we. This is not a new phrase, it has been around for quite a few years but what does it actually mean from an embodiment perspective?
Here's the paradox at the heart of relational work: you can't genuinely be with another person until you've developed enough capacity to be with yourself. This isn't about self-sufficiency or emotional independence. It's about having enough internal space to notice what's happening inside you without being completely run by it. To feel your irritation, your fear, your contraction and still stay in the room. Still stay in the relationship, still stay in your body and not dissociate or project it onto another person.
Without that internal witnessing capacity, connection collapses into reaction. We move fast. We get irritated, or angry and we defend. We assert. We project what we can't metabolise internally onto the people around us and then wonder why we feel so alone even in company.
The ‘me’ work isn't selfish. It's the foundation that makes ‘we’ possible. To receive, we have to learn how to listen with our body, with all our five senses. In a world where striving, action and constant motion is celebrated and rewarded, where people are expected to ignore their own basic bodily functions and boundaries all the time and keep on doing, this can be hard and slow work. It often feels unsafe for a body that is constantly in motion to slow down. It's also hard when your value is attached to productivity, the state becomes a trait. But it's not who you are. What if you could titrate your experience of slowing down a little bit at a time so that you could feel safe to just be. To receive the presence of another, to really listen and not have to fix anything or be fixed.
One of the things I notice consistently in my work, with individuals navigating midlife transitions, with leaders in organisations, with people doing the slow, courageous work of trauma integration, is how hard it is to receive.
Not just to receive care or support, though that's part of it. But to receive the experience of being held by another person and let it actually land. To feel it in the body rather than process it in the head. To let it matter.
For many people, especially those whose early experiences taught them that support wasn't reliable or safe, this is genuinely threatening. The nervous system that learned to survive on self-sufficiency doesn't easily soften into ‘we’. Even when ‘we’ is right there, available and real.
I've sat with individuals and groups in sessions where something quite profound has happened, a moment of genuine attunement, a shift in the room and watched them move past it almost immediately, back into their head, back into their story, because the body didn't yet have a map for what just occurred.
Building that map is slow work. It happens through repeated experience, not insight. Through the body, not the mind.
Back to AI. Let's talk about what it can and cannot offer. I want to be honest here, because I think the nuance matters. I think there is real value in AI as a reflection tool.
There is something useful in having a space to think out loud. A patient, available presence that reflects without reacting. I use AI in my own work to test ideas, to do business analyst work that I don’t have time to do. That's real.
But nothing in an AI interaction is changed by contact with you. It isn't moved by your story. It doesn't carry you between sessions. It can't offer you the experience of mattering to another nervous system because it doesn't have one. You can reflect to AI over a tricky experience you had with others and whilst it reflects back to you, nothing in it is changed by the experience that it is witnessing. It doesn’t actually sense the relational field like our nervous systems do. It can recognise the significance of it but it doesn’t feel anything. The mutuality of relationships is that our nervous system is changed by the interactions we have with others. That fact is exactly what makes human relationships irreplaceable.
That mutuality, that being-changed-by-each-other, is precisely what makes human relationships the irreplaceable thing they are. Real connection leaves marks on both people. That's not a bug. That's the whole point.
There is a longing for ‘we’ that we are all desperately hungry for, that feeling of connection we receive from the nervous system of another human who is able to be with our experience and let it be.
What I believe people are reaching for in therapy, in AI, in every form of connection they can find, is the experience of not being alone with their inner life. Of having it witnessed, held, accompanied by another.
That experience is available. But it lives on the other side of the ‘me’ work. It requires a nervous system that has enough capacity to stay slow when things move fast. To receive when receiving feels vulnerable. To be genuinely present to another person without losing yourself in the process.
That's not a social skill. It's a somatic one that is learnable slowly, in the body, in relationship with others, over time. Which is, perhaps, the most human thing there is.