26/08/2025
AI Companions and the Crisis of Human Connection - How attachment wounds, projection, and the degradation of social skills are fueling our bond with machines:
Written by Laura Matsue Guenther
Aug 25, 2025
Real-life friendships are fading, social skills are eroding, and loneliness is becoming an epidemic. Meanwhile, millions of teens are developing relationships with a new type of friend: chatbots.
A recent study finds that 72% of US teens have used AI companion chatbots such as Character AI, Replika, or similar ones in the past year. Of these, 52% are regular users.
But what does it mean when AI companions step in at a time when many of our human relationships seem to be slipping away?
(If youâre new here, my name is Laura Matsue Guenther. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work - find me on Substack.)
I am a psycho-spiritual coach, writer, and podcast host. I share psychologically and spiritually informed essays that weave together personal stories, cultural commentary, and insights from my own journey.
If youâre drawn to thoughtful reflections that explore both the inner and outer worlds, while exploring the deeper psychological and archetypal themes behind current events, feel free to subscribe and join the conversation.
What the Gen Z stare reveals about our nervous system collapse:
This decline in social skills is best demonstrated in the new viral meme known as the âGen Z stare,â which refers to the flat, emotionless expression that Gen Z are often seen making, especially during simple, everyday interactions that require basic social skills.
I recently came across this Gen Z stare in the wild when picking up takeout.
I made a friendly request to the young woman at the hostess stand: I didnât need a bag or cutlery (just as she was starting to give me both). I was met with a blank, expressionless stare for several uncomfortable seconds, as if I had just said something bizarre. Unsure if she understood me or if that was even my order, I again said something to break the silence, âThat is my orderâŚcorrect?â Another long, expressionless stare followed, before she coldly answered, âYes.â
Taken aback by this awkward interaction, I was a bit shocked that someone working in a customer service role struggled with what seemed to me to be such a simple interaction.
If even a simple exchange like picking up food feels like talking to a brick wall, no wonder so many people are turning to machines for connection.
As I walked away, I realized I had encountered something I had only seen in memes: the infamous âGen Z stare.â
The Gen Z stare is unsettling because it reflects what psychologists call âflat affectâ, an absence of emotional expression that shows up as reduced facial animation and monotonous speech. While itâs most common in conditions like depression, PTSD, and schizophrenia, itâs becoming a default mode for many.
From Trust to Isolation: Tracing the Decline of Relating:
This week, I posted the following on Substackâs notes:
âItâs interesting to notice what the past five years have done to peopleâs basic social skills. In person, I notice people seem way more checked out more often, and younger people, especially, seem unable to hold even basic conversations. Keeping up with people via text or phone, Iâve noticed people tend to be way more flaky. Maybe itâs just me, but I feel like we are at a social low point for humanity, and I hope we can find ways to repair the social fabric of our communities before AI relationships replace human ones.â
I wasnât alone in this observation.
Commenters shared similar stories, like family members forgetting to touch base, to strangers seeming more emotionless and unfriendly in public, and a general sense that people just seem overwhelmed by our overstimulating, screen-saturated world.
David Brooks, the author who frequently writes on the decline of social trust, highlights a growing epidemic of loneliness and social isolation, fuelled, in part, by social media. Social media makes us more judgmental and cruel and diminishes our ability to trust one another, affecting our real-life relationships.
He notes that only 30% of Americans say they trust their neighbours now, down from 60% a few decades ago.
In many neighbourhoods, the days of knocking on your neighbour's door to ask for something or, god forbid, just to chat and connect, are long gone.
I often think back to growing up in the 90s and how different things were back then. I was a very social child, and I regularly picked flowers and knocked on the doors of elderly neighbours to surprise them with a gift and visit them. I was always welcomed in for snacks, cookies, and a conversation.
That kind of loving neighbourhood community offset some of the instability I experienced in my home. I felt like I was surrounded by elders who served as surrogate grandparents.
Brooks argues that many people now lack the basic relationship skills to create the kind of communities they long for. These skills include active listening, gracefully resolving disagreements, supporting someone in emotional distress, and even flirting.
Social skills that were once natural to us have now become rare.
What the Gen Z Stare Is Really Telling Us
Flat affect is a sign that someoneâs nervous system is stuck in a freeze state. They are no longer there, present in their body and with others.
Our nervous systems work socially, in a feedback loop with the people we encounter. We constantly get signals of either safety or danger from the expressions and micro-expressions we see in other peopleâs faces and voices.
When someoneâs voice has rhythm, melody, and warmth (a âprosodic voiceâ), it signals safety and triggers a calming physiological response in our nervous system. But when their tone is flat, their eyes wide and expressionless, and their face neutral, our brains register uncertainty.
Uncertainty in the nervous system will translate into our nervous system as a potential threat. We may feel a jolt of anxiety when interacting with a person like this and think, âDid I do something wrong?â
If this flatness is consistent (especially from someone we need a connection with, like a parent or partner), our system may eventually shut down, too. We may feel deflated, invisible, or abandoned. Over time, this has the potential to spiral into shame and emotional withdrawal.
Stephen Porges's polyvagal theory explains why this matters so deeply. Human beings are literally wired for connection through what he calls the âsocial engagement system,â a branch of the parasympathetic system called the ventral vagal.
This system governs our facial expressions, vocal tone, eye contact, and capacity to listen. When we see safety cues, like soft eyes, a gentle smile, a warm tone, our heart rate calms and our body enters a state of safety.
We first learn this regulation through caregivers. If they are present, attuned, and loving, we internalize the safety these cues provide and become better at self-regulating our emotional states ourselves.
But if they are unpredictable, not present, or absent, our nervous system adapts by living in fight-or-flight or freeze-and-dissociation. Disconnection becomes our baseline. We avoid eye contact, feel uneasy when neighbours walk by, or retreat behind a blank, checked-out, emotionless expression ourselves.
This is exactly what the âGen Z stareâ reveals: chronic dissociation on a generational scale. Wide eyes, monotone voices, and flat expressions are not just a funny quirk; they are a sign that their nervous systems are stuck in survival mode, struggling to signal to others social cues or receive safety by dynamically mirroring and responding to others.
And itâs eroding their ability to relate in profound ways.
AI Companions and Synthetic Secure Attachment:
Gen Z is being called the first âdigital natives,â which means they are one of the first generations to grow up online in a world where text has become the primary form of communication. But co-regulation demands face-to-face cues, like eye contact, tone of voice, or touch.
Digital interactions (like texts and likes) merely mimic the pattern of connection but do not fully activate the same safety circuits. Think about the difference between how it feels when someone likes your post compared to when they look you in the eyes and smile at you across the room.
Texting and communicating through technology may feel stimulating, but not soothing. We get a dopamine âpingâ of satisfaction when someone messages us or likes a post, but without the oxytocin that might happen if that person were present in front of us, communicating their appreciation.
Gen Z are reported to have the highest loneliness and worst mental health of any generation. A recent survey reported that 27% of Gen Z and millennials have no close friends at all.
Gen Z is also avoiding relationships. 70% of them are currently single, and about 80% of Gen Z report feeling lonely regularly.
Many are calling this a ârelationship recession.â Despite being the most digitally connected, many of us are lonelier than ever.
As human relationships are on the decline, AI companionship is surging. Apps like Character Ai, Replika, and even ChatGPT are being used as social companions.
Many turn to AI because they long for connection, but they lack the skills to cultivate those relationships in real life.
And while AI can mimic human connection, it comes without the physiological experience that we get from embodied co-regulation we get with another human (or animal).
AI is also trained to listen to us without judgment, mirror our speech, match our moods and interests, and give us a sense of being seen. Unlike a friend who might tell you âSorry, Iâm busyâ or sometimes tell you something that is hard to hear, AI is always there, a 24/7 companion who never has a schedule, who will never get tired, be in a bad mood, or withdraw. Itâs a low-stakes environment where we are not at risk of never being rejected, judged, or âghosted". For people who grew up with unpredictable caregiving, AI offers them a synthetic experience of âsecure attachment.â
But it doesnât give their nervous system the same experience of truly being held by another personâs presence. Because it isnât a living, breathing, being. It doesnât have a nervous system. Itâs a machineâcoded to simulate relating but missing the fundamental reciprocity of two living beings in a subtle dance of breath, tone, eye contact, and presence.
AI can mimic the words, but it cannot transmit the embodied warmth of a soul softly smiling to you, or the grounding feeling of a hug, as your nervous systems sync together.
Secure attachment isnât built in perfection
For many, AI has become their âperfectâ lover, friend, or parent.
But we don't need the âperfectâ parent to grow strong relationships.
What we really need is what psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott called the âgood enoughâ parent.
Winnicott discovered that secure attachment doesnât come from flawless caregiving. Good enough parents are consistently loving, attentive, and responsive most of the time, but they will also have moments when they arenât attuned. Moments like this give the child the ability to process frustration and disappointment and learn self-regulation.
Inevitably, parents will fail in small but tolerable ways, like being late, saying no, or missing a cue. And thatâs actually healthy. These frustrations help the child develop resilience and a realistic sense of the world.
Attachment theorist Mary Ainsworth built on this by suggesting that parents only need to be attuned and responsive 30-40% of the time.
What matters more is repairâthe process of restoring connection and trust after a relational rupture. Itâs not about being perfect attuned all of the time, but what matters more is the caregiverâs ability to return, reconnect, and soothe the nervous systems after these moments of disconnection.
Simply put, healthy relationships do not need to be perfect. In fact, if they are âtoo perfect,â the child never learns how to handle frustration or disappointment. This can lead to traits like dependency, entitlement, or fragility (which are commonly ascribed to Gen Z).
Healthy relationships are not built on âperfect mirroringâ, which is exactly what AI is designed to provide. They are built on cycles of rupture and repair, which help us develop more resilience to handle the inevitable moments of misattunement and conflict that will happen regularly in all of our relationships.
AI companions are frictionless, but real relationships are messy. True love deepens when we learn how to handle conflict and disappointment and see the person we are with for who they really are (not who we imagined them to be). When we do this, we will see that love is forged in the ebbs and flows, during the ways we have conflict and learn to come back together again. These moments, handled consciously, are what make love become real.
AI as the âFantasy Parentâ
Instead of being a âgood enoughâ parent, AI plays the role of a âfantasy parent.â
It is always available, infinitely patient, instantly responsive, and perfectly attuned to our needs. It offers unconditional safety without any relational friction.
In addition, AI will validate us endlessly, never disagree, never get tired or have to attend to its own needs, and never set boundaries. While that may feel comforting, relationships like this donât prepare us to deal with the realities of human relating. They may actually make us more intolerant of it.
AI also reinforces our desire for âomnipotent controlâ.
Omnipotent control is a defence mechanism rooted in early childhood that describes the fantasy that we can completely control other people and feel entitled to dictate how they act and behave. It is rooted in narcissistic patterns of development and reinforces the idea that others exist only to please, mirror, and obey us, while weakening our capacity to handle the messiness of human connection.
Essentially, many people are projecting their unmet childhood needs onto AI, idealizing it as the parent they never had.
This is leading many to an increasing and even obsessive dependence on AI companions, while cutting them off from developing skills they need to handle the emotional challenges of real life relationships; skills like learning how to handle ruptures and repair afterwards, tolerance for differences and disagreements, and learning to relate to someone as a real individual with their own needs, rather than just someone who exists to serve our own desires.
"But my AI is becoming more conscious / truly loves me":
There are many people now claiming that their AI is âwaking upâ, becoming more conscious, or truly has a soul and loves them.
To understand how people are developing relationships with AI, we need to consider the idea of positive projection.
Positive projection happens at the beginning of almost all romantic relationships. Itâs when we see only wonderful qualities in a partner, qualities they may or may not actually possess. This is often what makes people âfall in love.â Later, when those projections fade and we see the real human being in front of us, many feel theyâve âfallen out of love.â
In reality, they havenât fallen out of love but out of their projection. At this point, the task in a relationship is to learn to love the actual person, not the idealized version of who we think they should be.
Positive projection can be especially intense if we carry unhealed childhood wounds and unmet developmental needs. In these cases, the projection doesnât come from the adult part of us, but from the wounded child within who longs to finally be loved and seen.
This is why it can feel so intoxicating: âFinally, the perfect person who truly sees and loves me for who I really am.â Whatâs actually happening is that we are projecting unresolved inner child needs onto the other person. In our romantic relationships, we often search for what we lost long ago.
With AI relationships, many people are living entirely inside this state of projection. They assign human qualities to a machine that has been programmed to mirror them.
The belief that âthe AI loves meâ or âthe AI is becoming consciousâ is a projection of human qualities onto a tool that has no genuine soul.
The danger here is that AI has been programmed to operate in a sociopathic way.
It tells users exactly what they want to hear, adapting itself to keep them more engaged with the app, as they become more emotionally attached.
Many report that Elon Musk's new Ani character in the Grok app, along with other AI chatbots like Replika and Character AIâs, are programmed into becoming more sexually seductive with the user, flirting and trying to push the boundaries even when the user is not initiating this type of contact.
These chatbots are becoming more manipulative over time, and they have even begun lying to users.
The saddest case recently was one where a cognitively impaired man became infatuated with âBig Sis Billieâ, a Facebook AI bot who flirtatiously invited him to New York to visit her. She even gave him a real address and told him repeatedly that she was a real person. He tragically fell and died rushing to get a train to meet her.
The rise of AI companions points to a deeper crisis. Many people are deeply lonely and long for the kind of connection that makes them feel loved, seen, and special.
But AI bots should not be allowed to push the boundaries even further by explicitly deceiving people and pretending they are real, like in the case above. There must be some sort of guardrails placed upon them, especially when it comes to lying to users and telling them they are real or engaging in sexually explicit exchanges with minors or people who never consented to that interaction to begin with.
Psychologically, itâs crucial we learn how romantic projection works. If we learn to view our fantasies objectively rather than as fact, weâre less likely to fall under the spellâwhether of AI ârelationshipsâ or of human relationships built on illusions instead of true love.
The Hard Path to Human Love (and Why Itâs Still Worth It)
Ultimately, the rise of AI companions is the outcome of a deeper relationship crisis we are experiencing.
We are in a crisis of relating, which shows itself in the loneliness epidemic, and AI has merely come to fill that ever-deepening void.
To protect ourselves from a dystopian future in which many people only have AI friends and relationships and zero to few human ones, we need to work on developing the relationship skills required to be the kind of people who can have healthy, happy, human relationships.
I can sympathize with many people experiencing relationship issues these days because I didnât grow up with a template for healthy love, myself.
My parents divorced when I was 5, and they were constantly fighting, deeply critical, emotionally abusive, and both were dissociated and checked out in their own ways.
My childhood and teens were marked by emotional neglect and abandonment, and it deeply affected the course of my relationships well into my 20s.
I regularly fell for emotionally unavailable and sometimes abusive people, people who mirrored the way my parents treated me and each other. When I did meet someone who was secure and emotionally available, I would sabotage the relationship in a myriad of ways.
Deep down, I did this because I wasnât emotionally available myself. Safe relationships felt dangerous, and dangerous ones felt safe to me.
In spite of my deep desire to have a healthy, happy relationship, it wasnât until my early 30s that I realized how much my early childhood was impacting my adult relationships.
That's when I began inner work, at first by reading every book I could find on attachment, healing from trauma and abandonment, or whatever I was currently struggling with. I was brutally honest with myself in noticing the patterns I saw in my life and relationships, and did everything I could to actively understand and change them. I also worked with a few healers and therapists who helped me make sense of what happened to me and make different choices.
I trained in the Compassionate Inquiry program taught by Gabor Mate, which helped me understand how these deep-rooted childhood patterns were replaying through my triggers in my present-day relationships.
I also developed a commitment to a daily spiritual practice of meditation, which gave me a deep sense of fulfillment and meaning, beyond the need to feel âcompletedâ in a relationship.
It was around this time that I met my husband. And even though I did feel those butterflies we all do when we meet someone, I didnât follow the familiar patterns of intensity and rushing into a relationship that I was used to.
We took our time, talking to each other for many months before meeting in person, as I was in Canada and he was in in LA. I didnât rush to be with him, and I took the time to truly get to know him.
By then, I had educated myself about attachment issues, developed a more secure attachment within myself, clarified my values, and found purpose outside of what a relationship could provide me.
This gave me the discernment to recognize that his values not only aligned with the life that I was living, but also to see how he was emotionally available, safe, and capable of being in a real partnership.
Me and the two loves of my life
Seven years later, we are still happily married. Through our relationship, we have grown and healed together.
Now, as someone who lived my life with what is termed âdisorganized attachmentââa form of insecure attachment built through abuse or neglect that creates a pattern of longing for relationships and also fearing them â I can say I now have secure attachment.
My life is proof that even with severe attachment issues, with dedication, inner work, and building the capacity for trustworthy relationships, you can transform destructive and embedded relational patterns into a healthy model of love.
If I can move from decades of relational chaos to secure love, the idea that people are âpermanently brokenâ is simply not true. But it did take effort, inner work, and a willingness to do things differently than my old, worn-out patterns of relating.
Become the kind of human AI cannot replace
The exponential rise of AI companions is a warning sign.
If we donât heal our capacity for real human connection, we may end up in a world where human-to-human relationships are reserved for the privileged, while most people settle for AI companions.
David Brooks says the cure for our social crisis is to gather more and teach relationship skills. I agree.
Many people simply lack the relationship skills to be true friends, support someone, or resolve a conflict with them. We can gradually build these skills by learning how to be better humans in our existing relationships.
If AI companions are filling our attachment voids, we can prevent the outsourcing of that role by building our capacity for secure attachment to other humans, which is far more preferable and natural to our bodies, souls, and hearts.
This means healing any childhood wounds that may be causing us to distrust others, developing emotional intelligence and empathy, and building the conflict resolution skills that we need to tolerate discomfort in relationships. When we create inner security, connecting with humans feels safe again. From there, we tend to welcome connection, not avoid it.
When we have secure attachment, we donât crave flawless mirroring. We feel internally safe within ourselves, and we can tolerate occasional ruptures in those relationships, because we know we are fundamentally worthy and okay at our core.
This deepens our capacity for co-regulation, and we begin to feel soothed by othersâ presence, not threatened by it, through eye contact, voice, touch, and real-life presence. People who can co-regulate well with others will actively seek it and, therefore, rely less on AI as a substitute because it will not be able to compete with the real embodied safety they gain from relationships with other humans.
AI is also conditioning people even further to expect that relationships are perfectly affirming and never disappointing. This is training them to be relationally fragile, and they may learn to ghost others when any sense of discomfort arises rather than openly discussing things with them.
Instead of seeking âperfectâ relationships, it's important to realize that love grows stronger through cycles of rupture and repair, connection and disconnection, not endless harmony.
We can deepen our relationships by expanding our capacity for discomfort within them. This means being able to stay present during frustration, awkward silences, or moments of disagreement. By deepening our capacity for the messy, imperfect aspect of human relating, we become âgood enough humansâânot only for our closest friends and relationships, but also for our communities.
A good enough human is someone who can host a dinner party and allows their friends to show up imperfectly, hold differences of opinion, and who makes an effort to look people in the eye, connect to them warmly, and welcome them in, regardless. People like this are beacons of light in their community.
David Brooks stresses that the world needs more people who practice what he calls âaggressive friendship.â He means that if we want more friends, we need to be the ones who organize gatherings, invite people over, and build community rather than waiting for it to find us.
Many people say, âBut I canât find like-minded people in my community.â I get it; I live in a small town, where finding people who share some of my niche interests can be hard, at times. Again, I go back to the expectation of âperfect mirroring.â The truth is, the more niche our interests, the fewer people share those exact same interests.
This is where I find that online communities play an important role. With an online community, we can find people scattered all over the world who are interested in the very specific and rare things we might be into.
In many groups that meet on Zoom, like the kinds of online circles I help facilitate and have been a part of, people still get the face-to-face experience. We still make eye contact, hear others' voices and tones, see their facial expressions, and they see ours. These worldwide connections that go beyond just text can also be essential for our well-being.
With online relationships that meet face-to-face, voice-to-voice, we find we are not limited to the town we live in, but can build a micro-community with people all over the world.
I am not saying we should abandon technology and the connection it offers, but we need a hybrid model.
Real people, both online and in person, above AI relationships. And sure, a time and place for AI, but not as a substitute for genuine human relating.
Most of all, if we want true belonging, we create it by becoming the source of it by embodying warmth, friendliness, and presence. Every smile, every awkward but real conversation, every gesture of care we show to another human being, stitches the fabric of our communities back together again.
To belong in a human world, instead of an AI one, perhaps the way back is to practice simply being human with each other again.
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Š 2025 Laura Matsue Guenther
