November 13, 2025
AA few weeks ago, my schedule created an accidental interesting mashup of ideas: the CCPL conference (which I wrote about here), overlapped briefly with a trauma care course. To join a live small group conversation with the course trainer, renowned psychologist Dr. Dan Allender, I step out of the conference, where thoughtful people dig into hard questions: how to live faithfully in our current moment. How to combat divisiveness within as a precursor to crossing divides out there. And, of course, what to make of AI.
Dr. Allender, meanwhile, is walking through secure attachment and why it matters. He explains the fundamental need for a human to choose to embrace you, not their image of you, but you, in your full array of weirdness and wonder. To be seen and known, held and contained. As he put it, to know that someone can look at you and say, I get you, you are understood (attunement), and I got you, you are not too much, there are sufficient boundaries to hold you (containment)—and where they are lost, repair. These, he explains, are the building blocks of secure attachment, itself a primary ingredient in our sense of being OK. Secure attachment fosters a foundation of faith, hope and love which allows flourishing. Without it: paralyzing, deadening shame.
Secure attachment may be foundational but probably isn’t normative. Few of us start life receiving all the attunement, containment and repair we need. But all is not lost. Secure attachment, Dr. Allender describes, is both past tense—what we learned early on—and progressive, something we can be building and rebuilding, in real time. In any human interaction, whether weekly counseling, a meaningful coffee, a wholehearted engagement while waiting in line, we can offer attunement, containment, and repair. Whatever another’s starting point, we can continually put a thumb on the scale toward secure attachment.
Back at the conference, a panel debates the merits of AI. Not whether, but how—a backwards way of asking, what can it not do, what can only humans do? When AI was first released, we breathed a collective sigh of relief at our initial exploration of its 1.0 capacity. We write better poems, make better songs. Phew, our role as human is safe. But what happens when we can’t? Behind the anxiety this technology triggers looms more than an economic fear: Who are we when the robots’ work is better? If you are your work, it’s an existential threat.
Last week I encountered this question not as a theoretical musing on AI, but in vivid embodied form. In the midst of a client call the pixels on my monitor started to crackle and glow, the faces on Zoom blurring. It had been years since I had experienced this strange warping of vision, but I recognized it immediately. I grit my teeth through the call, managing to opine on the tax code while praying for a slow onset, for speech not to slur. When the call ended, I immediately pulled from my purse the pill whose purpose is to ward off the coming migraine. But neither that pill nor Tylenol ended up being enough. I spent the next four hours prone, blanket over my head to keep out light, waiting for the pain to resolve.
More distressing was the psychological pain. I had begun my workday buzzing with productive energy, eager to knock out projects—until I was knocked out. Forced to lie still without distraction for hours, the sense of being behind crouched at my door. This interruption of relentless productivity would not disturb any specific deliverable. But a day of task execution squandered? I squirmed with discomfort. I felt annoyed. Bored. And to my surprise . . . shame.
When I later told my son about my day he said, not without sympathy, “But mom isn’t that what you’re always dreaming of? To be left alone in the quiet?” Touche.
The rest I dream of is earned, on the back end of work complete, the hammock repose after the tidied yard. A forced pause—the recovery week I wrote about recently, illness or furlough, even the weekly invitation of Sabbath—can land like a burden. Laying under the covers immobilized, why would I feel shame? Because rest can expose and threaten a corner of misplaced identity, the part of me who relies on work to feel enough. It’s the same existential threat AI poses: who am I if not my output? Who are we when the robots’ work is better?
Primed with the Allender teaching, I realized as I heard that question voiced on stage there is something AI will never be able to do, no matter how it is trained:
It can never choose to see and know another person.
It cannot choose to accept a whole person as they really are.
It can never choose to persevere when someone is difficult.
Because it cannot willingly choose to honor and behold a human, it cannot offer the embrace we all crave: “I get you and I got you.”
My AI-experimenter husband created, for fun, an agent he calls “Assistant Spiritual Director.” It can ask one or two plausibly spiritual directorish questions, seeming to invite conversation. But it soon peters out, going in loops—sounding, in fact, like I fear I do, nowhere to go but my trusted building blocks. Why am I nonetheless sure that my role as a spiritual director is safe? Not because I ask better questions, but because what makes spiritual direction powerful is not the content I generate, but the fact that I choose to sit and hear another person’s story within the secure boundary of our relationship—attunement and containment. That I create a physical setting, a visible symbol, of God engaged of the work of drawing a person, offering enduring repair.
AI may parrot back patience better than we humans can. It may be more pleasant to a difficult customer, may better resist the snide remark. But it doesn’t do it as a choice to love. Only we humans can do that. The real value of words of patience, kindness, peace is not the expert delivery, but that they are willingly given. We desire not only the sound of a kind word, but the choice to offer kindness.
All this means that we humans are the only ones, and will remain the only ones, who can offer the gift of what we all need most, the secure attachment that creates the foundation for faith, hope and love that allows us to thrive. It’s the I-thou of Martin Buber, where we mutually relate to each other as whole beings—the base ingredient for becoming fully human. AI can only meet another as I-it.
As a formula, it’s a bit self-referential: to be human is to uniquely have the capacity to allow others to be fully human. But any theoretical coldness dissipates when experienced:
A child filled with shame at their failure to make the right choice, crumpling into your arms for a comfort only you can give as an act of choosing.
The well of relief at unburdening yourself in the presence of a dear friend who chooses to listen well.
The eyes lighting up when a door opens to you on the other side, a voice proclaiming “we’re so glad you’re here, welcome!”
Can you recall such a moment of connection, how it felt, what happened in you?
It’s true that the offering can certainly be hard, even painful. It’s necessary we don’t behold other humans I-thou for the warm fuzzies it generates. BUT, but—when I play this role for another, I find I tend to feel fully alive.
Perhaps the beauty of the self-referential formula is that in giving what another needs, we may receive the gift in return: I feel joy and delight in having been a source of joy to another; feel honored to have played a role in honoring another, feel comfort in having offered comfort.
Perhaps this is because humans, unlike AI, are meant to be in relationship.
Perhaps we are most fully human, fully alive, when we meet this other human with our whole self as their full self, extending a mutually reinforcing olive branch of secure attachment. Work the robots will never be able to do.
Post-script: What about me, under the covers with the migraine, unable to work? Like any person unwillingly kept from work, I remained fully human. My husband came to check on me, acknowledging my distress, serving me a sandwich to eat laying down, encouraging me to accept the forced pause and allow recovery to take its time. He offered, in short, attunement and containment. And receiving that gift opened a door in me to something else the machines will never be able to do: experience gratitude, and allow gratitude to lead into the still more spacious place of worship.
