Not long ago, I found myself sitting in a circle with a group of people who could barely look at one another. Words had been said, trust had been broken, and now everyone sat heavy with silence. I've been in many circles like that in my work as a Restorative Practice Practitioner, and I never stop being moved by what can happen next.
What unfolds in that space isn't just negotiation or mediation. It's something more human, more fragile: the moment when people start to risk being seen again.
Every story of conflict carries a hidden emotion beneath it, shame. You can see it in the way shoulders curve inward, eyes drop to the floor, or voices shrink to a whisper. Shame tells us we are unworthy of love or belonging. When left unprocessed, it drives so much of our mental and relational pain. We hide, attack ourselves, avoid, or lash out, the four familiar postures of what restorative practitioners call the Compass of Shame (Nathanson 1992).
But when restorative practice is done well, when truth, responsibility, and compassion are held together, something extraordinary happens. The very emotion that fractured the relationship becomes the doorway to healing. As the dialogue moves around the circle, shame softens into vulnerability, and this opens the way to empathy.
Psychotherapists call this a corrective emotional experience: a moment when the emotion that once wounded us is transformed within relationship. I've watched it happen. A hardened face softens when someone finally says, "I didn't realise how much I hurt you." Peace begins to settle when the person who caused harm hears, "Thank you for owning that."
What changes the room is not a clever process or technique. It's the presence of relationship strong enough to bear truth, a human connection that looks shame in the eye and refuses to turn away.
The Same Law in the Therapy Room
In my psychotherapy and counselling practice, I see the same dynamic every day. Beneath anxiety, depression, and anger lies the fear of disconnection. Healing begins when a client experiences another person who will stay with them in that vulnerable space.
We like to think therapy is about insights or strategies, but the research, and experience, say otherwise. The single strongest predictor of change is the therapeutic relationship itself. It is the sense that one's inner world is being held safely in another's mind, that one's story exists in someone else's consciousness even between sessions.
That holding is not abstract. It shows up in the therapist's memory, tone, curiosity, and the small follow-ups that say, I was thinking about you this week. It tells the client, You exist in my mind and heart, not just in an appointment slot. In that awareness, the person's fragmented sense of self slowly coheres.
This is the relational miracle at the centre of all helping professions: we become whole in the gaze of another who sees us truthfully and with love.
The Allure of Digital Companionship
The challenge today is that technology is now offering to simulate that gaze. Since contributing to an article in The Catholic Weekly about "pretend love" in AI dating, I've been watching the same phenomenon migrate into mental health and coaching. Chatbots promise non-judgmental listening, instant replies, and lower cost. They are marketed as companions, mentors, and therapists that never sleep.
There is genuine appeal here, especially for those who cannot access or afford therapy. But the deeper question is not whether AI can sound empathic (because it certainly can) but whether it can hold a human being in mind. A bot may retain our words in a database, yet it does not carry us in its interior life. When we log off, we disappear. There is no consciousness that wonders how we are or feels the tug of unfinished conversation.
True healing depends on that mysterious knowing: I live in another's mind and heart.
It is what infants experience when they see their reflection in a parent's eyes, and what adults rediscover when a counsellor's empathy tells them they are no longer alone.
This mirroring is embodied, non-verbal, and continuous; it shapes our very sense of existence. No algorithm, however advanced, can replicate the felt continuity of being known.
Why Only Humans Can Hold Us
There are several irreplaceable qualities in human healing work. Each reveals something about what it means to be a person.
Embodied Mirroring: Human presence carries facial micro-expressions, tone, and warmth that regulate emotion and communicate safety. AI can imitate syntax but not sensation.
The Authority of Lived Experience: When a counsellor has suffered and integrated their own wounds, the client senses it. There is credibility in eyes that have wept. A machine can quote wisdom; it cannot bleed for it.
Boundaries and Pushback: Real relationships involve friction. Therapists have limits; they say no; they are affected. That friction teaches clients how to exist in a moral universe with consequences. AI, optimised for user satisfaction, cannot challenge, only please.
Good-Enough Imperfect Presence: Human helpers take holidays, get tired, make mistakes. Those absences and repairs build resilience and realism. Frictionless availability may feel comforting but stunts growth.
Relational Creativity: When two consciousnesses meet, insights arise that surprise even the therapist, what Jung called synchronicity. These intuitive leaps come from embodied intuition and grace, not from predictive patterning.
Each of these qualities points to the same truth: healing is not about perfect information but imperfect presence. We learn to love and to live precisely through the limits and messiness of real human relationship.
The Deeper Risk
The danger of relying on AI for companionship is not just technological dependence; it is existential.
When people invest their vulnerability in something that cannot truly know them, they eventually hit the ceiling of the illusion. What follows is the old terror that every child fears, the fear of non-being, of existing in a vacuum. If nobody really holds my story, am I real?
That is why this conversation matters so deeply for those of us working in Catholic mental-health and pastoral settings. Our task is not merely to treat symptoms or deliver programs. It is to witness the person into being, to hold them in mind, heart, and prayer as someone made in the image of a relational God.
When we outsource that witness to machines, however efficient or "kind," we risk hollowing out the very ground of our ministry.
What is at stake is not only professional relevance but the integrity of our anthropology, our understanding of what a human person is.
The Person at the Centre of All Healing
When I first encountered the writings of St John Paul II, particularly his Love and Responsibility and later his Theology of the Body, I realised he had given us the missing bridge between faith and psychology. He named what I had seen intuitively in restorative work and in therapy: that relationship is not a technique, it is the essence of being human.
His philosophical personalism was a synthesis of two great traditions. On one hand, the objective truths of Thomistic philosophy, the moral order, the universals of goodness, truth, and beauty. On the other, the phenomenological attention to human experience, to what it feels like to be alive, to love, to suffer, to choose.
Where older systems treated the "subjective" as unreliable or secondary, John Paul II understood that our interior life, our consciousness, our emotions, our sense of self, is the very space where objective truth is received and lived. His genius was to hold truth and experience together.
"While emphasizing the irreducible nature of subjective experience, he simultaneously insists that this subjectivity exists in relation to objective truth. The human person as subject is not a self-contained monad creating meaning ex nihilo, but a being oriented toward truth that transcends individual perspective… Wojtyła maintains both the reality of irreducible subjective experience and its orientation toward objective truth." (Dr Greg Bottaro, The Personalist Cure)
In the context of accompaniment, this means walking beside someone as they encounter both the reality of their pain and the truth of their dignity. Healing is not achieved by collapsing either side: the therapist neither dismisses subjective suffering as illusion, nor ignores objective moral reality.
Botarro explains: "In Wojtyła's framework, the counsellor accompanies the person in exploring how their subjective experience relates to objective truth about their nature and telos. This means neither imposing external truths that override lived experience nor accepting all subjective experiences as self-justifying."
This is not therapeutic neutrality but relational integrity. The practitioner must be present, available, and genuinely curious about the client's inner world, while also holding space for the possibility that growth involves movement toward what is objectively good, true, and beautiful. This balancing act requires profound respect for the person's freedom and profound trust that God works in the encounter itself.
John Paul II's vision reclaims what many modern systems have inadvertently lost: the conviction that objective truth is not hostile to subjective experience but the very condition for its flourishing. And conversely, that authentic engagement with lived experience is not a threat to truth but its deepest expression.
Every counsellor, pastoral carer, and educator is invited to participate in that divine pattern of holding truth and experience together. For those who are Catholic, this is not merely a professional ethos but the natural expression of a sacramental worldview, one that sees every human encounter as holy ground.
For those working within Catholic institutions, regardless of personal faith, this pattern forms part of the culture of integrity and respect that underpins all authentic Catholic professional practice. In a pluralistic society that rightly values cultural awareness, understanding and honouring this vision is simply part of professional competence.
The person in front of us is not a case or a task but a mystery, a being whose wholeness depends on being met in truth and in love.
Building Systems Around Relationship
Relationship must remain at the heart of our virtue, but it must also take shape in our structures, so that what we value personally becomes what we practice institutionally.
To do this, Catholic institutions must ensure that formation, governance, metrics, and leadership are all grounded in a coherent anthropology of the human person. It is not enough for individuals to be compassionate; the systems in which they work must be consciously designed to embody relationality at every level.
Formation: Formation is where everything begins. Practitioners and leaders alike need formation not only in skills and techniques but in a Catholic understanding of the human person, a formation that shapes how they see, think, and accompany.
This must be applied formation, not abstract theory. It should bring the best of contemporary psychology and neuroscience into conversation with the Church's theology and philosophy of the person. Practitioners must learn to contextualise their work within the "marketplace of ideas" that shapes the secular programs in which most were originally trained. They need the ability to discern where those frameworks align with or diverge from a Catholic vision of the person.
This is not about rejecting modern science, but about grounding it in a deeper telos, the conviction that every human being is made for communion with God and others. Formation, therefore, is not a one-time course; it is a lifelong process of intellectual, spiritual, and professional integration.
Governance: Good governance protects what is most human. Policies and procedures should make space for reflection, peer dialogue, and relational supervision. Systems that overvalue productivity or compliance eventually hollow out the very mission they exist to serve.
To be truly Catholic, governance must prioritise people before process, ensuring that those who offer accompaniment also receive it, and that relational quality is seen as integral to excellence.
Metrics: If relationship is central to our mission, then we must measure what matters most. In addition to outputs or symptom reduction, our metrics should include relational outcomes: trust, belonging, moral growth, peace, and the capacity for self-gift. These are the true indicators of wellbeing in a Catholic anthropology, signs that the person is becoming more fully alive in relationship.
Leadership: Finally, leaders must embody the mission they proclaim. As the saying goes, you cannot give what you do not have. Leaders cannot foster relational culture unless they themselves are being formed and accompanied in relationship.
We need a new regime of clinical pastoral supervision across Catholic education, health, and welfare, structures that provide leaders and practitioners with safe spaces to reflect, integrate, and grow in self-awareness.
This kind of supervision is not managerial oversight; it is formative accompaniment. It enables transformation from the inside out, ensuring that those who carry responsibility for others are continually renewed in the very relational presence they hope to model.
Leaders shaped by such supervision begin to see relationship not as an optional style of leadership but as mission itself. Their authenticity, humility, and capacity for repair become catalysts for organisational culture change.
A Thought for the Feast of John Paul II — and the Journey Home
As we mark the feast of St John Paul II this week, it is worth remembering that his greatest legacy was not a set of documents but a vision of the human person luminous with dignity. He showed us that love and truth are not opposites but two sides of the same encounter.
If Catholic mental-health care, education, and pastoral work are to have a future in the age of AI, it will not be because we compete with algorithms, but because we embody this vision of the person.
Our comparative advantage is not data, it is relationship. The world will continue to build better machines. The Church must continue to form better lovers: people who can see, hold, and accompany others into the truth of their being.
C.S. Lewis captured this ache with extraordinary clarity in the closing pages of The Last Battle, the final book in The Chronicles of Narnia. As the characters pass through death into what they first think is the end, they realise it is actually the beginning, the doorway from the shadowlands into the "real" Narnia.
Looking around in wonder, they exclaim that everything feels more solid, more beautiful, more alive than before. It is then that Lewis writes:
"I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now." C. S Lewis
Lewis was describing that deep homesickness of the soul, the yearning for a place of perfect belonging, peace, and love that no earthly success or relationship can fully satisfy. Every human heart carries this memory of paradise, this intuition that there must be a home where we will finally be known without fear and loved without condition.
In the Christian understanding, that "country" is not an imaginary world but the ultimate reality toward which every act of love points: union with God Himself, where we will be fully known and fully loved.
The desire that stirs in every counselling room, every classroom, every act of accompaniment is, at its core, this same longing, to come home at last. In our accompaniment work, this longing is not something to escape but something to listen to.
Every mentoring, counselling, teaching relationship is, at its best, a small rehearsal of that coming home. The process helps a person recognise that the desire for home has always been a desire for communion, with God, with others, and with one's own heart. Healing unfolds as safe, authentic relationships begin to re-write old stories of fear or isolation. Step by step, we discover that home is not found by striving to be someone else, but by returning to who we truly are: beloved persons created for relationship and for love.
In that sense, the work of Catholic therapy, counselling, teaching and mentoring is a gentle pilgrimage back toward our real country, a journey of becoming at home again in God, in others, and in ourselves.
And perhaps that is the most important message for this technological age:
To heal is to come home, and only a real relationship can show us the way.
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