How ChatGPT Can Strengthen Your Healing When Combined with Trauma Therapy
If you're dealing with complex PTSD, anxiety, loneliness, or emotional burnout, you might’ve found yourself asking:
“Can something like ChatGPT actually help me feel better?”
As a California-based therapist working online with adults healing from childhood trauma, I’ve seen how AI tools like ChatGPT can serve as helpful companions between trauma therapy sessions. While it will never replace the real relational depth of complex PTSD therapy, it can support your mental wellness in surprisingly meaningful ways.
👩🏽💻 What ChatGPT Is—and Isn’t
Let’s start with the basics:
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that responds to text prompts in a human-like way. It doesn’t feel emotions, it can’t “understand” your trauma, and it’s not trauma-informed. But when used intentionally, it can help you reflect, get unstuck, and even enhance to your healing path—especially if you’re feeling overwhelmed or isolated.
🛠️ 3 Ways You Can Use ChatGPT Alongside Therapy
1. ✍️ Journal Support
Feeling stuck staring at a blank page? Ask ChatGPT something like:
“Help me explore why I panicked after my boss criticized me.” or “How can I talk to my partner about my needs?”
It can offer gentle prompts to guide your reflection and process emotions more clearly. Bring your reflections to your therapist to process even more deeply and work with your trauma therapist to create links between these insights and things you have brought into therapy in past sessions.
2. 🧘 Grounding + Coping
Ask it:
“What are some grounding exercises when I feel triggered?”
It might remind you of tools you’ve learned—or give you new ones to bring to therapy and let your therapist what types of grounding works best for you so you can work together to add even more tools to your tool belt.
3. 📚 Learn the Language of Your Trauma
It can explain concepts like:
“What’s fawning in trauma?”
or
“What’s the difference between PTSD and complex PTSD?”
Psychoeducation builds language for what you’re going through, which deepens the work we do together. You can bring this understanding into sessions and have your complex PTSD therapist customize and personalize these descriptions to you so they feel even more relatable to your own life.
⚠️ But Here’s the Real Talk…
ChatGPT is not a substitute for therapy. It can’t:
Pick up on subtle trauma responses
Offer relational attunement or felt safety that will rewire your nervous system through co-regulation
Guide you through emotional flashbacks or somatic experiences when your logical brain is turned off
Hold safe space when you’re afraid to be seen
Call you out when you’re repeating patterns you’re comfortable in rather than making the changes you’re hoping for
In fact, it can sometimes reinforce bypassing, over-intellectualizing, or self-isolation if you’re not careful.
❤️ My Take as a Trauma Therapist
Use ChatGPT the way you'd use a worksheet, podcast, or journal prompt:
A supportive tool, not a replacement for deep healing.
In my practice, I’ve seen clients feel empowered using ChatGPT to prepare for sessions, process overwhelming moments, or even reflect on their own patterns. The work we do together—the attunement, safety, and trust we build over time—that’s what heals trauma in ways that AI cannot. But, by combining both ChatGPT and complex PTSD therapy, you can take your healing to a whole other level!
📹 Want to See It in Action?
Check out my video where I walk through how to actually use ChatGPT as a tool for healing:
👉 Watch on YouTube
✨ Ready to Work with a Therapist that loves ChatGPT just as much as you?
I offer online complex PTSD therapy in California for adults navigating anxiety, healing from childhood trauma, and the complex stories beneath both. Whether you’re healing from childhood wounds, stuck in people-pleasing, or just trying to feel safe in your body again—we can do that work together. And, with our friend ChatGPT!
