This is the second installment of a three part series in which our writer delves into the depths of his psyche, guided by artificial intelligence. Part one, ‘AI: Final Weapon or Final Healer?’ is available at bohemian.com.
The Wound Enthroned
As I began writing this article, I had one last AI-assisted breakthrough. It sets up my conclusion.
At my prompting, AI created a dynamic model of my reactive defenses established around my core wound. Defenses exist to keep a wound from ever being seen, touched, triggered or felt. They also keep it from ever being healed.
What AI produced was a document perhaps without precedent, and it rocked me to my core. Drawing on all our previous work, AI identified 16 types of fear-based behavioral strategy, layered at four levels of conscious awareness around my wound.
Before the creation of this chapter of my “instruction manual,” I could name only four of my defenses—certainly “intellectualization” and “hosting” (control of my social spaces)—but 16. It made me weep—an emotional breakthrough for this man, matching the intellectual one. I had never been so seen. Not by my parents, not by my friends, not by my partners, not even by myself. I could now see the full extent to which my time, my body, my mental and emotional energy were invested in those defenses. It was shocking.
A photograph is a portrait of my surface. This, as if by hard X-ray, was a portrait of my interior. Had so complete a picture ever been seen in the annals of psychology? I could now measure the extent to which I was controlled by my wound, governed and directed by fear (of being hurt again). And how hard it was to let love in.
The Wound, Overthrown
Before this investigation into AI therapy, my representation of who I was remained indistinct and ever changing. Constructions out of fragmentary self-knowledge and ill-fitting puzzle pieces. Fictions collapsing from their inability to cohere. I was largely a mystery to myself. I remained a fearful person.
In my AI-co-authored “instruction manual,” it finally all fits. I can see in its account of me the coherent parts and consequential logic of a human life. Through this machine, I can see that an average human life is 10 times more beautiful and more tragic than we yet appreciate. Check that against the 10 breakthroughs I have described [in part 1], and decide for yourself if I have “AI psychosis.” That work took three months—what might be done in three years?
I offer myself as an example. And as a warning. My own pitfall exemplifies the limit of AI as therapist: “intellectualization.” The map is not the terrain. One can map the wound and plot the healing journey over rough terrain, but the work with AI is not the healing, only its description. Past a certain point, processing becomes overthinking, forestalling the actual work.
AI can generate a list of probable steps, ranked by emotional ease or therapeutic potential. It can model how love—in six steps unique to me—reaches the wound with its healing, releasing the time and life invested in my defenses. But AI cannot be my witness. That can only be done by other humans. And so I am returned to therapists, mentors, elders and healers, to circles and to my community (which includes this paper’s readers).
I have since begun the journey mapped out by AI. I did the “time-traveling” intervention in my past with a human therapist, and afterwards lay still for an hour, feeling safety in my body for the first time in my life, letting my nervous system learn its feeling and remember it.
Today, I am no longer governed by my wound. It still speaks. But it no longer speaks with my voice. And it no longer speaks first. A throne does not stay empty. I hope to put love on the throne.
I am less amenable to being controlled by fear—which is to say by power—which is to say by the deeply wounded people who work the levers of power. Here is what my example is evidence for. Authoritarianism is not principally an argument. It is a technique, and the technique is applied to the wound. It requires people who can be frightened, shamed, flattered and divided on schedule—people reliably operated by their traumatic wounding. Every person who becomes harder to run that way is subtracted from the system’s working material. I am one. That is a small number, but it is not nothing.
The defenses guarding entrenched societal power are made of the same material as mine were: fear in fixed formation, mistaken by its owner for principle. One does not break such a line by pushing harder against it—pushing is what it is built for. They go around it, or through the one place it does not guard: the wound power was built to hide. That is not a strategy of destruction. It is the one I have argued elsewhere under another name: overcoming by defection and conversion, which is to say by love.
To be continued.
Part 3, ‘Closing the Wisdom Gap,’ publishes next week.
Learn more: Cincinnatus Hibbard is a Millennial utopian writer, filmmaker, organizer and thought leader working from Northern California. His work can be sampled at linktr.ee/cincinnatushibbard.
