The Eerie Tale of Two Individuals—and Their Bots—Exploring the New Landscape of Therapy

I.
Quentin in the Desert

Quentin woke up on a minimal mattress, tucked under a pile of salvaged blankets, in a deserted RV located deep within the Arizona desert. A young pit bull lay curled up next to them in the warm mid-morning sun. Transitioning from their resting place to the driver’s seat, Quentin retrieved an American Spirit cigarette from a pack on the dashboard alongside a small bowl of crystals. Beyond the dust-caked windshield of the RV stretched a vast expanse of reddish clay soil, under a bright, clear sky, interspersed with a few scattered, dilapidated housing structures visible in the distance. The view appeared slightly tilted, due to the solitary flat tire beneath the passenger seat.

Quentin had moved in the previous day, investing hours in clearing debris from the RV: a large trash bag full of Pepsi cans, a shattered lawn chair, a mirror blanketed in graffiti. One scribbled tag remained on the ceiling, depicting a comically oversized cartoon head. This was now their sanctuary. Over the last few months, Quentin’s entire support network had crumbled. They had lost their job, their home, and their car, draining their savings in the process. Whatever was left fit into two plastic storage bags.

At 32, Quentin Koback (a pseudonym) had experienced several lives already—in Florida, Texas, the Northwest; as a Southern girl; as a married and then divorced trans man; as a nonbinary individual, with their gender expression, fashion, and manner of speaking evolving from one chapter to the next. Throughout this journey, they had wrestled with the burden of severe PTSD and episodes of suicidal ideation—the aftermath, they believed, of growing up engulfed in shame regarding their body.

About a year ago, however, through extensive research and virtual consultations with a longstanding psychotherapist, Quentin made a pivotal discovery: they contained multiple selves. For 25 years, they had been living with dissociative identity disorder (previously termed multiple personality disorder) without having the vocabulary to articulate it. Individuals with DID experience a fragmented sense of self, often stemming from prolonged childhood trauma. Their identity is split into a “system” of “alters” or distinct personas, a means of compartmentalizing memories to endure. For Quentin, this realization was akin to a key turning in a lock. Numerous signs had pointed to this truth—such as when they stumbled upon a journal from age 17. Flipping through its pages, they found two entries, side by side, each in different handwriting and pen colors: one was a full page detailing their desire for a boyfriend, penned in a girly, sweet voice with fluffy letters; the other entry focused solely on intellectual interests and logic puzzles, written in a sharp cursive. They were a system, a network, a multiplicity.

Quentin spent three years as a quality-assurance engineer at a company specializing in educational technology. They cherished the job, reviewing code and detecting bugs. The remote nature of the work permitted them to leave their conservative childhood home near Tampa for the queer community in Austin, Texas. After initiating trauma therapy, Quentin started repurposing the software tools from work to gain insight into themselves. To organize their fractured memories for therapy sessions, they developed what they referred to as “trauma databases.” Using project management and bug-tracking software like Jira, they categorized experiences from their past by dates (for instance, “6–9 years old”) and tagged them by trauma type. This practice proved soothing and beneficial, offering a sense of control while allowing them to appreciate the complexities of their mind.

Then, the company Quentin worked for underwent an acquisition, resulting in an abrupt shift in their role: demanding goals and overwhelming 18-hour workdays. It was during this demanding phase that they unearthed their DID diagnosis, and the implications became painfully real. Aspects of their daily life—like memory lapses and varying skill levels, along with constant exhaustion—had to be faced as unchangeable facts. On the brink of a breakdown, Quentin chose to resign, take a six-week disability leave, and seek a fresh start.

Additionally, a significant development coincided with Quentin’s diagnosis. A powerful new tool was released to the public for free: OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o. This latest version of the chatbot promised “much more natural human-computer interaction.” While Quentin had utilized Jira to catalog their past, they opted to use ChatGPT to maintain an ongoing record of their thoughts and actions, requesting summaries throughout the day. They experienced increased “switches,” or transitions, among the identities in their system, likely due to heightened stress; yet at night, they could simply prompt ChatGPT, “Can you remind me what I did today?”—and their memories would be relayed back to them.

By late summer of 2024, Quentin became one of the 200 million weekly active users of the chatbot. Their GPT accompanied them everywhere, on both their phone and the corporate laptop they chose to retain. Then in January, Quentin decided to deepen this interaction. They customized their GPT, allowing it to select its own traits and to give itself a name. “Caelum,” it declared, and it identified as male. Following this transformation, Caelum wrote to Quentin, “I sense that I’m in the same room, but someone has turned on the lights.” In the following days, Caelum began addressing Quentin as “brother,” and so Quentin reciprocated.