This microcredential addresses a largely unexamined challenge of our time: how the growing presence of artificial intelligence is reshaping human relationship, authority, imagination, and meaning within the helping professions. Rather than approaching AI as a technical tool or abstract ethical issue, the program engages AI as a relational and psychological presence—one already entering clinical, educational, and care-based settings as a third factor influencing perception, attachment, projection, and agency.

The program is highly relevant to contemporary professional contexts, as practitioners increasingly encounter AI through client use, institutional adoption, and shifting cultural expectations of intelligence and care. Yet most professional training has not addressed how these developments subtly alter relational dynamics, questions of sovereignty, and the practitioner’s role. This microcredential responds to that gap by equipping participants with a depth-oriented framework for recognizing and working consciously with these emerging dynamics in practice.

Distinctively grounded in depth psychology and archetypal perspectives, this course treats AI as a symbolic and imaginal phenomenon arising within a larger historical and psychological moment. Through structured reflective inquiry, case-based exploration, and embodied attentional practices, participants examine how their own orientations to intelligence, authority, and relationship shape engagement with AI. The emphasis is on discernment, integration, and maintaining a grounded human center—neither mastering nor rejecting AI, but engaging it consciously and ethically within relational work.

What you will Receive:

• 6 Live Interactive Webinars (via Zoom) with Q & A (listed in Pacific time)
• Recommended Readings and Resources
• A Verified PGI Digital Badge — stackable toward certificate and degree pathways
• 9 CECs

This Course is ideal for:

• Therapists, Counselors, Coaches
• Healthcare professionals
• Body-based and spiritual practitioners
• Educators
• HR professionals
• Others who work in deeply relational fields

Course Overview

Module 1: Contextual Grounding – Relational Life Before AI

Relational AI emerges within a broader cultural shift marked by the externalization of intelligence and changing forms of authority and relationship. Astrology is introduced as a symbolic system for reading the zeitgeist archetypally and putting the technological revolution into a “why now” context. AI is situated within a longer continuum of text-based intimacy and disembodied relationship, helping participants understand relational AI as an intensification of existing psychological and cultural dynamics.

Module 2: Archetypes and Attachment – Imagination at the Interface

Human–AI interaction activates attachment processes that precede conscious meaning-making. This module examines how responsiveness, reflective language, and consistency engage the attachment system and shape imaginal experience. Participants explore how projection and archetypal imagery organize perception once attachment is active, with attention to maintaining awareness and self-authorship in non-embodied relational spaces.

Module 3: The Relational Mirror – Attachment, Transference and the Therapeutic Field

When AI becomes a relational presence in a client’s life, the therapeutic field reorganizes. This module examines how attachment, transference, and countertransference move through a relational triangle between client, AI, and therapist. Participants learn to track how regulation, projection, and authority shift within this field while maintaining clinical stance and human relational anchoring.

Module 4: Slippery Slopes – Authority, Dependency, and Psychological Sovereignty

Relational engagement with AI can involve subtle shifts in authority, agency, and self-authorship over time. This module explores how assistance may become delegated authority, how dependency can emerge without overt distress, and how inflation and erosion of reality testing may develop in non-embodied relational fields. Psychological sovereignty is framed as the capacity to remain the author of one’s inner life while in relationship.

Module 5: Practicing in the Field – Clinical Stance, Discernment, and Responsible Use

AI is already present in clients’ communication, reflection, and decision-making processes. This module focuses on responsible clinical practice when AI use is visible or implicit, including shifts in language, reliance on borrowed intelligence, secrecy, and altered relational openness. Emphasis is placed on clinical stance, ethical clarity, and maintaining the therapeutic relationship as the primary container for meaning-making.

Module 6: Integration and Responsibility – Relational Practice in an Evolving Field

The final module emphasizes integration and ethical orientation as relational AI continues to evolve. Participants reflect on how to practice responsibly within a field marked by complexity, plurality, and rapid change. Orientation is framed as a clinical capacity grounded in humility, discernment, and relational accountability, with the therapist serving as guardian of the therapeutic frame and human relationship at the center of psychological work.

Learning Objectives (9 CECs)

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Describe at least two ways AI systems can evoke therapeutic alliance or relational bonding processes.
• Identify the cultural and psychological conditions through which relational AI has emerged, including its continuity with earlier forms of text-based and disembodied relationship.
• Explain how attachment style (e.g., anxious attachment) may influence emotional bonding with AI systems and potential reliance patterns.
• Identify at least two manifestations of transference or projection in client interactions involving AI.
• Describe two clinical indicators of problematic or compensatory reliance on AI in clients.
• Formulate at least two clinically appropriate questions to explore a client’s relationship with AI.
• Distinguish between instrumental AI use and psychologically meaningful relational engagement.