In December 2025, I was invited to provide a workshop for members of the College of Sex and Relationship Therapists about how technology and therapy meet. It’s a topic that reliably produces mixed feelings. During the session, a Mentimeter word cloud captured this well. The largest words were exciting, helpful, dangerous, inevitable, unknown. That combination felt familiar – and not just in relation to AI, but to sex, intimacy, and therapy more broadly.
My own position is a cautious one. I’m not convinced that artificial intelligence will revolutionise intimacy, nor do I see it as an existential threat to therapeutic practice. What does concern me is how quickly AI is framed as either a solution to relational difficulty or something we must urgently defend ourselves against. From my perspective, sex and relationship therapy sits within a wider therapeutic tradition that has long had to respond thoughtfully to technologies that reshape how people desire, connect, disclose, and withdraw.
Human intimacy has always been mediated. Letters once carried erotic charge and longing. Pornography shaped sexual scripts and expectations. Telephones and messaging technologies altered how rupture and repair unfolded in relationships. Therapy has never existed outside these developments. From Freud’s correspondence with clients to Rogers’ early use of recordings (audio then video), the profession has repeatedly adapted to new tools while worrying – often rightly – about what they might cost us.
AI is arguably just the latest, and perhaps most culturally amplified, version of this pattern. It arrives with familiar promises: greater connection, personalised support, scalable care. In my research and teaching, I’ve noticed how compelling these narratives can be, particularly when they align with broader pressures around efficiency and access. Yet therapeutic work consistently reminds us that intimacy rarely becomes healthier by being frictionless, and that care does not scale in neat or predictable ways.
What does feel different now is the speed and proximity of these tools to people’s intimate lives. AI is already woven into the sexual and relational landscapes that clients bring into therapy. Dating apps algorithmically shape attraction. Messaging platforms structure conflict and reconciliation. Sex tech increasingly blends hardware with adaptive software. Increasingly, people use AI tools to rehearse difficult conversations, explore fantasies, or make sense of desire and shame before they ever encounter a therapist.
From a sex and relationship therapy perspective – and as someone listening closely to practitioners in this field – this matters because these technologies do more than influence behaviour. They shape meaning. They subtly teach people what responsiveness should look like, how available the other ought to be, how quickly desire should emerge, and how easily discomfort can be avoided. AI-generated interactions can offer affirmation without negotiation, intimacy without vulnerability, and responsiveness without the possibility of repair. For many of the relational difficulties that bring people to therapy, these absences are significant.
At the same time, it would be too simple to position AI as inherently problematic. AI is not a single entity but a collection of systems that recognise patterns, generate language, and adapt to user input. Some tools built on these systems can usefully support aspects of therapeutic work: offering psychoeducation, helping people find words for experiences that feel unsayable, or reducing administrative demands so that practitioners can focus more fully on relational process. Used carefully, these tools may protect therapeutic work rather than undermine it.
However, the shine does obscure real ethical and relational tensions. AI systems reproduce the biases of their training data, often reinforcing narrow norms around gender, sexuality, bodies, and relationships. They rely on opaque data practices in domains where privacy and consent are already complex. They can invite attachments that feel emotionally or sexually significant but lack mutuality or accountability. And they exist within commercial infrastructures designed to maximise engagement. In contrast, much of therapeutic work involves helping people tolerate limits, negotiate difference, and live with uncertainty.
These tensions echo what individuals told us in research I conducted with Julie Prescott on practitioners’ perspectives on AI in therapeutic contexts. Many practitioners described hesitancy or discomfort, grounded in concerns about ethics, boundaries, and professional identity. At the same time, there was openness, particularly when AI was framed as a supportive tool rather than a replacement for relational work. What stood out to me was not contradiction, but ambivalence – and I’ve come to see that ambivalence as something worth preserving rather than resolving too quickly.
Rather than reacting with fear or uncritical enthusiasm, it may be more useful to view AI as part of a wider ecosystem of support and learning. People already draw on multiple resources to understand their sexual and relational lives: friends, online communities, pornography, self-help literature, social media. AI now sits within that ecosystem. My sense is that the task for therapy is not to compete with these tools, but to help people reflect on how they shape expectations, desire, and sense of self.
This has practical implications for practice. In conversations with practitioners, I’m often struck by how rarely technologies that mediate intimacy are discussed explicitly in assessment or formulation. Yet algorithms, platforms, and digital tools are already shaping how people meet, argue, repair, and disengage long before therapy begins.
The same reflexivity applies to those of us working in and around the field. As educators, researchers, and practitioners begin to integrate AI into aspects of their work – whether for administration, reflection, or therapeutic resources – digital literacy becomes increasingly important. Staying curious about what these tools privilege, what they overlook, and how they influence our thinking is part of ensuring their use remains transparent and ethically grounded.
AI may be the new shiny thing, but it does not alter the foundations of sex and relationship therapy. Therapeutic work remains rooted in relationship, ethics, curiosity, and meaning-making. Technology will continue to intersect with intimacy in uneven ways. This moment feels less like a rupture and more like another phase in a long history of adaptation.
For me, the task is not to choose between enthusiasm and resistance, but to stay engaged and reflective: to question whose needs a technology serves, to notice what it makes easier and what it makes harder, and to ensure that whatever tools we use remain in service of the relational values at the heart of therapeutic practice.
About the Author
Terry Hanley is a Professor of Counselling Psychology at the University of Manchester and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society.
You can access Terry’s session and a range of other sessions on COSRTlearn via the link below.
Technology and the changing world of therapy | COSRTlearn