The Digital Psyche:
Personality, Dysregulation, AI, Ethics, 
and Online Influence in Clinical Practice

Workshop Description

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Your clients’ online lives are changing what they bring into treatment, and it’s impacting the personality dynamics, relationships, and emotional patterns you’re working with in the therapy room.

Social media can intensify those patterns by supplying admiration on demand, making criticism public and lasting, and giving both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism a stage. Clients may also arrive having diagnosed themselves, a partner, or a parent through TikTok, online checklists, strangers, or conversations with an AI chatbot. AI-assisted support may provide comfort, structure, and perspective, but it may also reinforce certainty, avoidance, and one-sided interpretations.

Online communities can shape how clients understand themselves, relate to others, regulate emotion, and form beliefs. Some provide meaningful support, while others may deepen anger, mistrust, dysregulation, or rigid thinking.

Clinicians don’t often see this environment and may have no clear method for exploring it. This five-hour workshop provides a practical framework for understanding how digital experiences affect personality, emotional regulation, diagnostic beliefs, relationships, and treatment. 

During this workshop, you will learn what to ask, what to listen for, how to bring online experiences into the clinical formulation, and how to intervene when digital influences are helping, hurting, complicating, or disrupting the therapeutic work. The goal is not to position technology or social media as inherently harmful, but to help therapists understand the digital world their clients are living in, and bring that understanding into assessment, case conceptualization, and treatment.

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What Makes This Workshop Different
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• Brings multiple emerging concerns into one integrated clinical framework

• Focuses on assessment, formulation, and intervention, rather than simply describing social-media trends

• Examines both the benefits and risks of social media, AI, and online communities

• Connects digital behaviour with personality dynamics, attachment, regulation, identity, and relationships

• Includes the therapist’s ethical responsibilities and clinical boundaries

• Provides tools that can be applied immediately across a wide range of client presentations

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Dr. Fox will also cover: 
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• What questions to ask about clients’ social media, AI, and online-community use

• What digital patterns to listen for during assessment and treatment

• How to distinguish supportive online engagement from clinically disruptive engagement

• How to incorporate digital influences into case conceptualization

• How to challenge misinformation without shaming the client

• How to address online validation-seeking, comparison, conflict, and emotional escalation

• How to discuss AI-assisted support, including its benefits, limitations, and risks

• How to help clients develop more reflective and intentional digital habits

• How to respond ethically when online influences affect diagnosis, safety, relationships, or treatment

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Learning Objectives 

Participants will be able to:​

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• Differentiate grandiose and vulnerable narcissistic presentations in online behavior by identifying at least three distinguishing features and associated underlying dynamics, including shame, insecurity, rejection sensitivity, and unstable self-worth.

• Analyze a client’s online behavior using a structured clinical framework that examines what the client seeks, receives, avoids, and reinforces online, and identify at least two ways these patterns may affect emotional functioning, interpersonal relationships, or treatment.

• Evaluate client-reported online self-diagnoses by applying at least three components of sound diagnostic reasoning, including examination of supporting evidence, consideration of alternative explanations, and differential diagnosis.

• Differentiate between potentially adaptive and problematic uses of AI chatbots by identifying examples of AI use that may support reflection, coping, or skill practice versus use that may reinforce avoidance, overreliance, rigid certainty, or relational withdrawal, and determine an appropriate clinical response.

• Apply relevant APA (American Psychological Association) and CPA (Canadian Psychological Association) ethical principles to clinical scenarios involving technology and artificial intelligence in order to determine appropriate practices related to informed consent, documentation, confidentiality, professional boundaries, and scope of practice.

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Who should attend

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✔ Psychologists, Social Workers, Psychotherapists, MFTs, LPCs, graduate-level Counselors, other mental health professionals

✔ Therapists who want to learn practical interventions for addressing the impact of digital environments on clients’ mental health and relationships.

✔ Therapists who want to strengthen their ethical decision-making related to AI, technology, confidentiality, informed consent, documentation, boundaries, and scope of practice.