The Most Courageous Invitation
I Was Ever Given
“I'll be whoever you need me to be.”
A sentence that fell from my supervisor's lips and left me stunned.
We were doing an exercise most trainee therapists slightly dread because it is so very exposing. It's called the goldfish bowl.
Two people sit in the middle of the room, one therapist and one client, while everyone else watches.
And I mean watches.
Every nod, every hmm, every pause, every shift in the chair. Afterwards, it is all noticed, debated and analysed. Not an eyebrow can be raised without comment.
It is INTENSE.
My supervisor was about to model being the therapist when he said it:
“I'll be whoever you need me to be.”
I remember being shocked by the extravagance of the offer.
We spend so much of our lives defending ourselves against our own difficult feelings and those of other people. We explain ourselves. Protect ourselves. Push back. Try to be liked. Try not to be blamed.
And here was someone deliberately opening himself up to something different.
He wasn't saying, “You can treat me however you like.”
He was saying something much more powerful:
We don't have to be frightened of what you bring here.
The anger that rightly belongs to a parent, sibling, boss, old rejection or years of disappointment might find its way into the relationship with him. So might the longing to be rescued, the fear of being abandoned or the desperate need to get things right.
And he was willing to meet it. To resist immediately defending himself against it. To help hold it, understand it and perhaps transform it into something else.
There was something almost like exposing his belly in it. A willingness to make himself vulnerable for someone else's sake.
He was captivating to watch. There was something magnetic about his presence. The whole room was utterly still. You could have heard a pin drop, or my tummy rumble as the case may be!
And yet he wasn't filling the room with himself. Somehow, his presence created more room for the other person.
The energy he brought into that room was powerfully inviting of all the things that usually feel unwelcome.
Anger could come in. Shame could come in. Resentment, disappointment, grief, envy and fear could come in.
I could come in.
Not the polished version. Not just the parts that made sense or were easy to sympathise with.
All of me.
It was the first time I really understood how extraordinary an offer therapy can be.
And I've been thinking about that moment again recently because of AI.
The freedom to be unedited
Recent research from Mental Health UK found that 37% of UK adults said they had used an AI chatbot to support their mental health or wellbeing.
I understand the appeal.
There is something extraordinary about having a space where you can say almost anything.
We spend so much of our lives editing ourselves. We worry about sounding unreasonable or ungrateful. We don't want to burden people. We watch their faces and manage their reactions.
With AI, you don't have to do that.
I'm so pissed off. I know it sounds little, but...
It's not fair my partner gets to...
I love my children, but...
Everyone thinks I'm coping and I'm really not.
You can say the thing and have space to work out what you think and feel.
There is real freedom in that. It's like an advanced journal in that respect.
I don't think therapists should be dismissive of it. I think it tells us something important:
We are hungry for places where we don't have to edit ourselves quite so much.
But therapy offers something similar and yet profoundly different.
There is another person there.
And that means there is something to risk.
When another person is there
I can tell AI something I'm ashamed of without having to wonder whether I've changed the way it sees me.
Telling another human being is different.
In therapy, I might say something and immediately scan my therapist's face. I might desperately want their approval. I might become angry with them, try to please them, withdraw, or need them to understand something I can't quite put into words.
These aren't necessarily interruptions to the therapy.
They can be the therapy.
Because the relationship gives us somewhere to encounter some of the ways we have learned to survive relationships.
And that asks something of both people.
Every new client I meet, and every new session with someone I have known for years, asks for some of my courage too.
I bring my training, theory and experience into the room. But I also bring myself.
My clients get to know something of how I think and see the world. Sometimes I tell them what I notice happening in my body as they speak. I feed back patterns I notice in how they interact with me and wonder with them whether they recognise similar patterns in other relationships. It gives them real information about how they may interact with people in their lives.
I offer metaphors that make us laugh and occasionally stretch them considerably further than they should go. I get things wrong. I have limitations. Sometimes I need to ask for grace. And that often helps them accept their need for grace too.
The session isn't there to meet my needs, and I have particular responsibilities for its boundaries and safety.
But neither am I an invisible expert observing somebody else's humanity from a safe distance.
I am in the relationship too.
Perhaps that is what my supervisor was modelling all those years ago.
He wasn't disappearing.
He was making himself profoundly present without making himself the centre.
Perhaps that is some of the strange intimacy of therapy.
Two people risking enough of themselves for something real to happen between them.
Not equally. Not in the same ways. Not with the same responsibilities.
But genuinely.
To be known and still belong
So I don't think this needs to become AI versus therapy.
AI may be giving millions of people somewhere to begin saying things they have never said before. I think there is something rather wonderful about that.
But being given an answer is not the same thing as being truly seen and held.
And being understood is not quite the same thing as being known.
Being known requires some risk.
It means allowing another person to encounter more of us: the contradictory, shameful, hopeful, angry, courageous, needy, generous, frightened and decidedly unpolished bits.
But perhaps the extraordinary thing about being known isn't simply discovering that another person can bear all of that.
It is discovering that we can bear knowing more of ourselves too.
Someone else can sometimes see what we have learned to hide. Not only the parts we are ashamed of, but the courage we dismiss, the needs we apologise for, the generosity we take for granted, the hope we hardly dare admit is still there.
Sometimes another person can help us discover that some of what we've kept hidden isn't shameful at all. It's treasure.
Things in us that deserve to be seen and treasured, not hidden.
In being seen differently, perhaps we begin to see ourselves differently too.
Perhaps that is the courageous invitation at the heart of therapy:
To bring all of ourselves into relationship.
To be known.
And to discover that we still belong.
Source: Mental Health UK, Over one in three using AI Chatbots for mental health support, as charity calls for urgent safeguards, November 2025. Nationally representative Censuswide polling of 2,000 UK adults aged 16+. The research found that 37% reported using an AI chatbot regularly or occasionally to support their mental health or wellbeing.