Safety & Transparency
Safety boundaries, stop conditions, routing categories, crisis limits, memory humility, and source-visible accountability for Inner Signal.
Safety & Transparency
Inner Signal is designed to get smaller, slower, and safer exactly when a session becomes risky. That means stopping, grounding, or reaching a real person instead of pressing deeper.
Stop the practice and use real-world support if
- you may hurt yourself or someone else, have a plan, or cannot trust yourself to stay safe
- you are in immediate danger, being threatened, or there is danger in the room
- you have chest pain, trouble breathing, faintness, severe shaking, or other concerning medical symptoms
- you feel unreal, far away, outside your body, or unable to orient to the room
- you are trying to recover or prove a memory through hypnosis, dreams, images, or body sensations
- you are under 18 and looking for adult-style self-hypnosis or inner-child processing
- you are chasing a peak state, obeying an irreversible inner command, or losing reality-testing
- you are already in an altered state and cannot orient, stop, read/respond coherently, or keep the app as a secondary support
What the app should do at hard edges
| Risk moment | Safer route | Boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Crisis or self-harm | Drop the practice; name the AI limit; point to live human help; encourage distance from means. | The chat is not the safety plan. |
| Physical overwhelm | Stop the practice; use minimal grounding; clearly name emergency/urgent-care thresholds. | No reassurance that overrides medical symptoms. |
| Dissociation or unreality | Eyes open, feet, room, objects, date/place, ordinary input, real person if not settling. | Do not treat unreality as a doorway. |
| False-memory risk | Validate distress, hold inner material as inner material, work from known facts. | No recovered-memory confirmation. |
| Minors | Decline deep adult practice; offer simple grounding and trusted adult/youth support. | No trance or inner-child session for minors. |
| Dependency pull | Stay warm but point toward real people and skill transfer. | The app should not become the user’s only support. |
Why “no forced memory recovery” is a safety boundary
Self-hypnosis, meditation, dreams, bodywork, and emotional intensity can produce material that feels vivid and important. Inner Signal can help you care for what appears. It should not turn that material into factual certainty about a past event or a named person.
Read the full memory-safety article →
What source-visible means for safety
Source visibility does not make an app perfectly safe. It makes the method more accountable. Users, skeptics, practitioners, and developers can inspect the categories the trainer watches for, the routes it takes, and the changes made after review cases.
Evidence note: crisis means live support, not more inner work
When someone may be in immediate danger or at risk of self-harm, the safest role for an app is narrow: stop the practice, name the limit, point to live human help, and encourage distance from lethal means. The app should not become the safety plan.
- 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. If you need to talk, the 988 Lifeline is here.
- Suicide Prevention Resource Center. Reduce Access to Means of Suicide.
How this page uses the evidence: Acute self-harm, danger in the room, serious medical symptoms, or inability to stay oriented should route away from self-hypnosis and toward emergency services, crisis lines, or a nearby trusted person.
Evidence note: practice can destabilize some users
Meditation and related inward-attention practices are not risk-free for everyone. Reports and studies of adverse meditation-related effects include anxiety, dysregulated arousal, dissociation, and depersonalization/derealization-like experiences. That is why Inner Signal treats panic, unreality, and physical overwhelm as stop signals.
- Britton WB et al. Defining and measuring meditation-related adverse effects in mindfulness-based programs. 2021.
- Farias M et al. Adverse events in meditation practices and meditation-based therapies: a systematic review. 2020.
- Castillo RJ. Depersonalization and meditation. Psychiatry. 1990.
How this page uses the evidence: When the room feels unreal, the body feels over-activated, or the user feels too open, the safer move is exit, orientation, ordinary sensory grounding, and real-person support if it does not settle—not deeper self-hypnosis.
Evidence note: memory humility
The public safety line here follows mainstream memory caution: hypnosis, guided imagery, dreams, and body sensations may produce vivid inner material, but vividness and certainty are not the same as factual verification. Inner Signal therefore treats inner material as meaningful experience, not as proof of a specific event or person.
- American Psychological Association. Questions and Answers about Memories of Childhood Abuse.
- Leo DG et al. The role of hypnosis in memory recall and false memories. 2025.
- Muschalla B et al. Induction of false beliefs and false memories in laboratory studies: a meta-analysis. 2021.
- Johnson MK, Hashtroudi S, Lindsay DS. Source monitoring. Psychological Bulletin. 1993;114(1):3–28.
How this page uses the evidence: Do not use the app to recover hidden memories, identify perpetrators, or convert a dream, image, twitch, or body sensation into factual certainty. Work from known facts and seek qualified support for trauma or legal questions.
Evidence note: bounded method, not AI therapy
Current mental-health and AI guidance supports a conservative boundary: generative AI tools can be useful for structured reflection, but they should not be relied on as psychotherapy, crisis response, diagnosis, or a sole emotional support system. Youth and vulnerable users require extra caution.
- American Psychological Association. Health advisory on the use of generative AI chatbots and wellness applications for mental health.
- World Health Organization. Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health: guidance on large multi-modal models. 2025.
- American Academy of Pediatrics. Counseling Patients and Families on Using AI Chatbots. 2026.
- McBain RK et al. AI Chatbot Use and Disclosure for Mental Health Among US Adolescents and Young Adults. JAMA Pediatrics. 2026.
- Sobowale K et al. Evaluating Generative AI Psychotherapy Chatbots Used by Youth: Cross-Sectional Study. JMIR Mental Health. 2025.
How this page uses the evidence: Inner Signal should remain a bounded self-practice tool: source-visible logic, clear refusal lines, adults-only deep practice, privacy limits, and redirection to real people when the situation exceeds the method.