Human Patterns in the Age of AI

The other day, during a session, a client looked at me and said quietly: “I keep changing jobs, but somehow I end up in the same situation. Same dynamic, different people.” That sentence — same story, different context — always makes me pause. Because that’s exactly how patterns work.

I told her about something we call the Kaplan drama triangle — a model describing how people unconsciously slip into one of three roles: the victim, the rescuer, or the persecutor. We move between them like dancers in an old choreography — familiar, automatic, and hard to stop once the music starts.

She thought for a moment, then said,

“I think I’m always the rescuer. I fix things that aren’t mine to fix.”

That awareness changed everything. Because the moment you see the pattern, you stop being trapped inside it.

In integrative psychology, we’d say that these roles come from early relational patterns — implicit memories built in childhood through attachment experiences. We learned, very early, what we had to do to be loved, safe, or seen. Some of us learned to please, others to take control, others to disappear. Those strategies once kept us safe; now, they silently shape how we lead, work, and relate.

From a Transactional Analysis point of view, we might call this a life script — an unconscious story that guides our choices. It whispers: “You’re only valuable when you help.” Or “You can’t trust others.”We don’t hear it directly, but we act it out — in our relationships, careers, and leadership styles.

And in the era of AI, those scripts are being challenged like never before. Technology evolves faster than our psychology, and while machines learn new codes, we keep repeating emotional ones written decades ago. We talk about upskilling and reskilling, but maybe the real revolution is inner reskilling — learning new ways of relating, leading, and being.

Integrative psychology reminds us that awareness is not enough. We need integration — bringing thought, emotion, and body back into dialogue. The nervous system, the emotional memory, the belief system — they all need to catch up with the mind’s insights. Otherwise, we “understand everything” but still repeat the same pattern.

In coaching, that often means slowing down — noticing what’s happening right now in the body when a pattern shows up. The tension before saying yes. The relief after pleasing someone.The guilt after setting a boundary.

That’s where transformation starts — not in analysis, but in embodied awareness.

So when my client said,

“Maybe it’s time to stop rescuing everyone and start rescuing myself,”I smiled. Because that’s the shift: from automatic reaction to conscious choice.

Maybe that’s what it means to be human in the age of AI. Machines are learning to think.

We are learning to feel, to integrate, to choose differently. And perhaps that’s the evolution that really matters.