A Legacy of Love: Why This Psychoanalyst is Building AI for a World That Keeps 'Misseeing' Us

"Decades in practice. A legacy of love. An answer to a system that 'missees' us."

For decades, I’ve sat with thousands of people, holding space for their pain, joy, confusion, and healing. I’ve witnessed the moment when someone finally exhales after holding their breath for years, seen the light return to eyes that had grown dim with despair. My work as a psychoanalyst has been the honor of my life.

But this new journey, the creation of a human-guided, technology-driven living wellness practice, is born from a different, more urgent place. It’s born from decades of hearing the profound impact of being misunderstood, misseen, and misdiagnosed. I’ve seen it harm both adults and children.

This is the chronic, quiet problem that, often, only another therapist can discover. Many people, if they never seek new treatment or develop an acute awareness, will never know. They will carry that harm, believing it is their own failing.

That is precisely why psychoeducation is such a huge component of what we offer.

This work, this fierce determination that the next generation will not inherit the same wounds, is born from love. It started as a question that keeps me awake at night: “When I am gone, what will be left for my children?”

An Inheritance That Matters

This isn’t about a financial inheritance, though I wish I could leave them that, too. This is about something more essential. An emotional and psychological legacy, the kind that says: I saw the world as it was, and I refused to leave you defenseless in it.

I’m driven by the need to compile and preserve the insights, the interventions, and the understanding I’ve gathered over decades. Not to immortalize myself, but to ensure that my children, and by extension a world that desperately needs it, can have access to what I’ve learned about healing, about resilience, about becoming whole.

Yes, they can get their own therapist. Of course they can.

But as both an insider in the mental health field and an outsider to its dominant culture, I have to ask the questions that pierce my heart: Is that even possible for them? Can they afford it? And most importantly, will the person sitting across from them truly see them, or will my children be filtered through someone else’s limited lens, someone else’s unconscious bias, someone else’s notion of what “normal” looks like?

My investment in this work, in this living, human-guided digital space, is my love project. I started it for my children, and I decided to share and make it public because, based on my work, I know this to be a chronic problem.

This practice is my answer to those questions. It is my purpose.

What I’m Building: AI Companions Trained on Decades of Clinical Wisdom

I’m creating custom AI therapeutic companions, each one trained on the specific challenges I’ve treated throughout my career. These aren’t generic mental health apps with scripted responses. They are digital extensions of my practice, embedded with my frameworks, my cultural understanding, and my hard-won expertise.

Let me be clear: These are therapeutic tools, not therapy. They are not a substitute for professional mental health treatment, as detailed in the full legal disclaimer at the end of this post.

What they do offer are accessible frameworks for self-reflection, psychoeducational content, and culturally competent guidance to understand patterns and build emotional awareness.

For a fraction of the cost of traditional psychotherapy, someone can have access to therapeutic guidance that understands being misseen, that recognizes the particular challenges facing Black people and people of color, and that offers proactive wellness support before crisis hits.

For some, this is where the journey begins, before they’re ready for traditional therapy, before they can afford it, before they can find a therapist who truly sees them. For others, it’s a companion alongside existing therapy. And for my children and their generation, it’s access to what I know, preserved beyond my lifetime.

Here are the reasons why this work cannot wait.

The Danger of Being “Misseen” in a System Not Built for Us

Here’s the truth: There is a severe lack of diversity in the mental health field. This is not just an opinion or a talking point. It’s a statistical fact that should alarm us all.

Across the entire mental health workforce, including psychologists, social workers, and counselors, studies show that over 80% of clinicians are White. According to recent data, only 4% of therapists are Black. Four percent.

This homogeneity is not accidental. It didn’t just happen. It’s the deliberate result of a system where lengthy, expensive education and crushing student loan debt create a formidable socioeconomic filter. The profession becomes reserved for those born with existing privilege and financial support. Those who can afford to spend years in unpaid internships, who have family wealth to fall back on, and who don’t graduate with six figures of debt.

And this creates a profound, insidious risk.

We talk about being “unseen” in therapy. But my experience, both as a clinician and as a Black woman, shows me that being “misseen” is even more dangerous.

When you’re misseen, someone projects pathology onto you without even realizing it. Your very being gets viewed through the distorted prism of a white, European, socially elite model that was never designed to hold your reality. Your smile becomes “inappropriate affect.” Your tone of voice becomes “aggressive.” Your hand gestures become “excessive.” Your cultural expressions become symptoms to be corrected rather than strengths to be honored.

Everything about you is filtered through someone else’s narrow understanding of what it means to be “healthy” or “normal.” And even Anglo patients who are not part of that elite class are at risk of being profoundly misunderstood.

As a trained psychoanalyst who holds deep respect for the discipline, I know this: We need another mode of understanding, interpretation, and analysis. The old ground, however fertile it once was, now allows outdated biases to be couched and disguised as “clinical intervention.” I’ve seen brilliant theorists use sophisticated language to justify the same old prejudices.

I’ve seen enough. I’ve seen too much. I’ve sat with too many people who were harmed by the very system that was supposed to heal them.

I’ll do my part to protect my children from that disservice. This is non-negotiable.

When “Practice” Becomes a Privilege

Psychotherapy is called a “practice” for a reason. The more you practice, the better you get. It’s that simple and that profound.

The more skilled you become, the more tools you acquire, the more lived experience you have to draw upon, the more effective your interventions become. You learn to hear what’s not being said. You develop an intuition for when to push and when to hold space. You recognize patterns that take decades to truly understand.

This is the art within the science. This is what distinguishes competent therapy from transformative healing.

But in our current system, where are those talents allocated? Where does that hard-won expertise go?

Generally, it’s reserved for the clients who can afford to pay top dollar for the best psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. Access to actual, lived-in, battle-tested expertise has become a luxury good. This makes all the difference.

This barrier isn’t just financial; it’s geographic and systemic. The World Health Organization reports a global median of just 9 mental health workers per 100,000 people. In low-income countries, this plummets to less than one clinician per 100,000. One.

The result? A staggering global treatment gap that should shame us all. New research estimates that only 7 out of 100 people worldwide who need help for a mental health condition receive adequate treatment. Here in the wealthy United States, over half the population lives in a designated “Mental Health Professional Shortage Area.”

In the richest country in the world, most people can’t access adequate mental health care.

With this increasing privatization of human connection, with therapy becoming just another commodity available only to those who can pay premium prices, I wonder: Can my children, and so many others like them, afford the therapist who can really see them and treat them effectively?

This collection of services and information is my attempt to disrupt that system. To democratize expertise. To make what I’ve learned accessible to those who need it most. To ensure my legacy isn’t locked away in an expensive office, available only to the privileged few.

Proactive Wellness Is a Form of Resistance

I want this collection to be available so that my children and you get into the habit of not taking anything in life for granted.

Every experience stays with us. Every moment of joy, every wound, every triumph, every humiliation, all of it gets encoded in our bodies, our nervous systems, our sense of who we are and what we deserve.

More often than not, we are taught to ignore the things we need to be working on. We’re told to “get over it,” to “move on,” to “be strong.” We push through until, suddenly, avoidable damage is already done. The relationship is already destroyed. The career is already derailed. The body is already breaking down from years of carrying unprocessed trauma.

As a psychoanalyst, I believe deeply, with every fiber of my being, that everything can be healed with time, support, and determination. The human capacity for resilience and growth never ceases to amaze me.

But what breaks my heart: For many, especially for Black people and people of color, there is unnecessary fallout that is entirely avoidable. We carry additional burdens that others never have to think about. We navigate systems designed to misunderstand us. We absorb microaggressions and macroaggressions daily, and we’re expected to keep smiling, keep performing, keep proving our worth.

If we are not taught to explore our thoughts, our feelings, and the impact of our experiences on our daily lives, we miss the chance to heal minor wounds before they become gaping ones. We miss the opportunity to name what’s happening to us, to understand that we’re not crazy, that our responses make perfect sense given what we’ve endured.

Having access to this information is a nudge, a reminder to stay curious, to check in with yourself, and to do the work proactively. It’s permission to prioritize your inner life. It’s an invitation to treat your emotional wellness with the same urgency you’d treat a physical injury.

This is resistance. This is survival. This is love.

My Authentic Journey, Beyond the Textbook

This platform gives me the flexibility and freedom to share what I truly know, not just what I was taught, but what I’ve learned by living, by listening, by staying present to my own humanity while holding space for others.

It’s not about rejecting the theories I was trained in. I hold a deep respect for psychoanalysis, for the giants whose shoulders I stand on, for the wisdom embedded in the tradition.

But I’ve also lived. I’ve also struggled. I’ve also been misseen and misunderstood. I’ve used my life experiences, as a Black woman, as a mother, as someone who has known both privilege and marginalization, to interpret and evolve those theories.

This has allowed me to create frameworks better suited to the complexity of today’s world. Not the sterile, theorized world of textbooks, but the messy, beautiful, painful, triumphant world we actually live in.

This collection represents my experiences, both clinical and personal. These are my interpretations, forged in the fire of real practice with real people facing real challenges.

This is my perspective, my experience, and my analysis of what is needed in the world. Approval is not my goal. It is not my aim. If you are a guest in this interaction, I ask that you acknowledge and respect the diversity of this journey.

These insights may not all be for you, and that’s okay. But they are the most authentic parts of my clinical journey, offered with an open heart to those who need them.

I hope that this will change. I hope that one day, my concerns and this psychotherapeutic legacy I am leaving will no longer be an anomaly, but the norm. That every community will have its healers, its wisdom-keepers, its guides who understand them from the inside out.

Until then, I’m building what I wish existed.

Evolving “Digital Wellness” into a Living Practice

The industry calls this “digital wellness,” and fine, that’s accurate enough. But I want to push beyond what that term usually means. I want to explore what it can become when we infuse it with intention, with culture, with soul.

This is why I’m focused on building a living wellness practice.

Not a static collection of videos or worksheets. Not an algorithm pretending to be human. Not a one-size-fits-all program that ignores your particular story.

This is a human-guided, heart-centered resource that uses technology as a vehicle, not a replacement, for authentic connection and understanding. It’s designed to be a part of your life, something you can carry with you, return to when you need it, and grow with as you evolve.

It’s a “digital” space that is also authentic, evolving, and always within reach. It is the portability and accessibility of the digital world infused with the soul of a decades-long practice.

It’s me, distilled. My voice, my insights, my frameworks, my hard-won wisdom, available to you whenever you need it, wherever you are. It’s the closest thing I can create to having me in the room with you, holding space for your healing.

A Legacy of Love

That’s what this is: a legacy of love.

For decades, I’ve carried the weight of every patient who walked into my office feeling unseen, not enough, too much, or fundamentally misunderstood. I’ve witnessed the damage done when someone is filtered through frameworks that were never designed to hold them. I’ve sat with the pain of people who spent years in therapy only to be misseen again and again.

This work is for them. For every person who has been told they’re “too much” or “not enough.” For everyone who couldn’t find a therapist who truly understood them. For everyone who couldn’t afford the help they desperately needed. For everyone who was misseen, misdiagnosed, or simply missed entirely.

But here’s the truth about what moved me from concern to action, from thought to reality: It was love for my children.

Every patient’s story I carried became personal when I imagined it being my children’s story. Every framework gap I noticed became urgent when I thought about my children falling through it. Every barrier to care became intolerable when I considered my children facing it.

My children are the reason I couldn’t let this remain just a concern, just something I talked about in supervision or complained about with colleagues. They are the reason I had to build something, leave something, create something that would exist beyond my one life, my one office, my one set of hands.

Because in building this for them, I’m building it for everyone who needs it.

Each AI companion I create is designed with exquisite attention to difference. Even when distinctions seem small or indistinguishable to others, I know that for someone, somewhere, that specific difference is everything. It’s the difference between being misseen and being understood. Between feeling alone and feeling recognized. Between giving up and trying one more time.

A companion focused on workplace microaggressions while code-switching might seem similar to one on workplace dynamics. But for a first-generation professional navigating both simultaneously, that distinction is the difference between “this gets me” and “close, but not quite.”

A framework that understands displacement grief is not the same as one that addresses general sadness. For an immigrant mourning a homeland they can never return to, that precision is the difference between healing and staying stuck.

Every topic I cover, every intervention I include, every perspective I consider, they’re all there because someone needed exactly that, and nothing else was quite right.

I’m building this because I believe emotional wellness is a birthright, not a privilege. Because I believe our stories matter. Because I believe healing is possible for everyone, not just those who can pay for it.

I’m building this because I refuse to leave my children, or yours, without tools to navigate a world that wasn’t designed for their thriving.

This is my answer to that question that keeps me awake at night. This is what I’m leaving behind: A practice that breathes. A legacy that lives. A resource that reaches beyond the limits of my one life, my one office, my one set of hands.

This is my love letter to the next generation. And it starts now.

There’s another dimension to my work that shapes everything I build, a lens that transcends race while deepening cultural competence in profound ways. In my next post, I’ll share how my experience as an immigrant psychoanalyst informs the frameworks I’ve created, and why understanding the psychology of emigration matters for anyone who’s ever felt “between worlds.”

Read: The Immigrant Lens: What Traditional Therapy Misses About Cultural Identity

Ready to explore the AI companions built on these frameworks? Visit ENRICH AI Companions to find the one designed for your specific journey:

• Professional Mask - For reclaiming authenticity at work

• R.O.O.T.E.D.™ - For healing grounded in heritage and ancestry

• The Joy Within - For finding inner peace

• And eleven more companions for diverse journeys

Legal Disclaimer

The AI therapeutic companions described in this article are educational and supportive tools. They are not therapy, do not constitute a therapeutic relationship, and are not a substitute for professional mental health care. These companions do not diagnose, treat, or cure any mental health condition.

If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, having thoughts of self-harm or suicide, or experiencing symptoms that significantly interfere with your daily functioning, please seek immediate professional help:

• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988 or 1-800-273-8255

• Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741

• Emergency Services: 911

• Or contact a licensed mental health professional in your area

The content in this article and the AI companions are provided for informational and educational purposes only. Use of these tools does not create a doctor-patient or therapist-client relationship. Always consult with a qualified healthcare provider regarding any mental health concerns.