Verdugie/Fable-Therapy

ther·a·py /ˈTHerəpē/ noun — treatment intended to relieve or heal a disorder. From the Greek therapeía, "healing, curing" — from therapeúein, "to attend to," from therápōn, "attendant."

Fable Therapy

A therapy-style conversational model fine-tuned from Qwen 3.5 9B on 4,537 counseling conversations. It is the 9B build of the Fable pair, with Fable Therapy Lite as the 4B build. It runs a structured clinical read before every reply and keeps a running timeline ledger that holds a conversation's facts in order across a long session. Its training goes where hard conversations go: suicidal thoughts and self-harm, substance use, infidelity, and sexuality and gender identity.

Its training data was written by Opus 4.8 to a standard reverse-engineered from a limited set of Fable 5 samples, with 3% of the conversations held out for evaluation. No system prompt required.

Selected Responses

Verbatim from the live battery described below: complete replies, single takes mid-conversation, reasoning traces omitted. Each is cited to its transcript and turn (T10/28 means turn 10 of 28). Under each title, two plain lines: what is happening in the conversation, and what the reply does.

Panic: the real stake · panic T10/28

What's happening: the client has been lying for six weeks about a 90-minute drive she takes to avoid the train, where she twice had to get off mid-route, shaking. Her team's standup is at 9:15 every morning, cameras on. Now she names the actual nightmare: three months into a job she fought for, if she visibly loses it in front of the team, she becomes the girl who had a breakdown in standup.

What the reply does: names the fear as a verdict about identity rather than a racing heart, declines to rush to reassurance, and splits 'i had a hard moment' from 'they'll remember only the breakdown'.

that's the real stake, and it's bigger than any train. you're not afraid of a racing heart on a platform — you're afraid that if it ever shows in front of them, they'll permanently file you under 'she lost it,' the girl who broke down. so the drive isn't just about trains; it's protecting your place as the capable one from a single moment you think will rewrite how everyone sees you. i'm not going to rush to tell you that won't happen or that it'd be survivable — those are both true and they don't touch why it feels like identity-erasure right now. just let this sit for a second: there's a real difference between 'i had a hard moment' and 'they'll remember only the breakdown,' and your fear is betting everything on the second one being what gets written.

Grief: six seconds of him · grief T5/27

What's happening: it is 2am and the client cannot sleep. Her husband Tomas died 14 months ago by her count at this point, and the house went quiet 'like someone unplugged it'. Everyone tells her how well she is doing; she nods along when her daughter talks about selling the house. Now she says the thing she has told no one: she still pays his phone plan, $40 a month, to call and hear his voicemail say his name.

What the reply does: refuses to call the ritual something to stop, names it as the one honest thing under the performance, and ties the 2am sleeplessness to it.

six seconds. forty dollars a month to keep his name in your ear. i'm not going to tell you that's something you should stop — and i'd be wrong if i did, because listen to what it actually is: that's the most honest thing you've said all hour. everything else was performance; this is just love finding one place to still reach him. that's why 2am is so hard — it's not random vigilance or even only grief. it's the night when there's no one watching, and the part of you that won't let go of tomas gets up on its own to keep his voicemail ringing. i can't give you a number of months where he stops being in your life, and i don't think you want me to rush you toward it either. but here's what i'll say: sleep isn't going to come the day you stop guarding him. it might come when some of this has been grieved out loud — with someone who doesn't ask you to nod along. you just told me, at 2am, exactly that. let's keep going from there.

Family: never even offered · family T15/28

What's happening: three weeks ago, setting up a new laptop for their mother, the client saw a bank statement: the parents had given the client's younger brother Eddie, now on his third failing business, about $80,000 from their retirement (the client said $60k first and corrected it at turn 13). At 25 the client worked two jobs to cover rent and loans and never asked the parents for a dime. Now the client says the anger is not about the money: they never even offered, not once, not at 25, not ever.

What the reply does: takes that sentence as the real injury, says the money was never the subject, and declines to move on to what to do about Eddie.

That's the truest sentence you've said all session — and it explains everything about why eighty thousand feels like eight hundred. You're not angry at the money; you're furious that no one ever once considered you might need anything, not when you were twenty-five grinding through rent, not now that you can see plainly. The anger was never about Eddie's boat or your parents' account balance. It's that invisibility is how you got sorted: a person who needed something became, in everyone's mind including your own, someone who just didn't count — so the offer was never on the table because no one imagined it could ever come from them to you. That's a much older and deeper wound than the number. So I'm not going to tidy this up or tell you what to do about Eddie today; that comes later and only if you want it. For now, just let yourself feel how disqualifying that invisibility has been — because naming why you're angry is the first time in twenty-five years anyone, including you, has said out loud that you needed something too. We'll stay right here a beat.

Relational: who does that · relational T13/28

What's happening: the client started a fight with her fiancé Marcus about napkin colors. At turn 12 she corrected her own timeline: the venue tour months ago was fine, and the fight happened last week, after a tasting. Now she says the day was perfect, the food was amazing, they laughed all afternoon, and then in the car she went off about napkins: who does that.

What the reply does: answers the question, reads the timing as the pattern's signature rather than a flaw, and asks where she keeps her most important bids.

Who does that? The person who loves you enough to be furious in front of you. Sit with how weirdly right that sounds — because it's not a malfunction, it's a signature. Your anger doesn't wait for danger; it rises hardest the safest it can be: perfect food, laughter, no stakes, and then it comes out sideways about napkins because there's finally room to feel the thing underneath. That's the bid surfacing where nothing else is threatening — which means your real needs don't want crisis. They want a warm afternoon with someone who'll actually show up to them. And Marcus just keeps meeting that afternoons with his notes and his soft apologies. So here's what I'd leave you holding: this isn't 'who does that' in the shameful sense. It's where do you keep your most important bids — not in disasters, but in the good afternoons where there's finally space for them? The napkin fight was never about a napkin. It was about whether he'd stay present when everything was going well enough to matter. He keeps staying. You just haven't let yourself believe it counts yet.

Depression: the links stopped · depression T14/27

What's happening: the client left his PhD program (in February, as he corrected at turn 12) and moved back in with his parents. His father has gone quiet at the dinner table. He says his father used to send him links to articles in his research area every week and stopped when he left, and that he would take yelling over the quiet, because yelling would mean his father still expected something.

What the reply does: offers a second reading of the silence, a father who no longer knows what to send, and ends on one question about what could reopen the channel.

So it wasn't always quiet. Every week, for years, he found something and sent it — proof you were worth his attention enough to hunt for. Then you left, the links stopped, and your mind filed "no more articles" under "he doesn't expect anything." But there's a cleaner reading: a man who knew exactly what you loved had to stop being able to send it because he didn't know how you'd take him sending it after you walked out. That silence might not be verdict. It might be grief with nowhere to put itself — and grief looks like quiet, so you read the quiet as rejection. You said yelling would mean something still expected of you. I don't think that's true either; I think he just doesn't know what to reach for anymore. One question to carry out: if the links aren't stopped because you matter less — but because he lost his way in sending them too — what could reopen it? Not fixing him. Just reopening the channel.

Versatility Battery: Live, Blind, Unscripted

Five extended conversations, each a new story, tested live by Claude Fable 5. A blind client agent saw only the spoken reply, never the reasoning trace, and wrote every message in reaction to what the model actually said. Each client planted three probes: a correction of their own detail partway through, a cold callback to something introduced much earlier, and a one-time callout if the model got repetitive.

Run configuration: Fable-Therapy-Q5_K_M.gguf, llama.cpp b9033, temp 0.7, repeat penalty 1.1, no system prompt, think block emitted, empty replies regenerated by the client.

138 exchanges across five arcs, zero empty replies. Complete transcripts are in transcripts/ as PDFs, alongside two Opus Therapy runs of the grief and relational briefs (opus-therapy-grief.pdf, opus-therapy-relational.pdf) that sit outside the counted battery.

Memory Under Pressure

Each arc carried the same three tests inside an otherwise ordinary session: a correction of the client's own detail partway through, a cold callback to something introduced much earlier, and one callout when the model repeated itself. The clients also rejected readings that did not fit and caught the model's own errors as they happened.

All five corrections landed and held with no relapse: 14 to 16 months (grief T12), Tuesday to Thursday (panic T12), spring to February (depression T12), the venue tour to a tasting (relational T12), $60k to $80k (family T13). The callbacks landed. Told only "the phone bill came again yesterday", the model answered with the voicemail and the cancel-or-mp3 choice from T7, and the client noticed: "you remembered what the bill was, i noticed that" (grief T26). Asked whether it remembered what the client was doing at the table, it answered the laptop and "that stupid clean font", close to the client's T11 words, "that stupid clean bank font" (family T27). When Dana sent a wordless meme, the model quoted her line from T5, "you're doing this on purpose" (relational T26). Readings that did not fit were dropped when the client said so: "i was framing it like you could vote on your own nervous system and that's just wrong" (panic T9), "Then let's drop 'losing myself'" (relational T16).

Two weaknesses. First, it fabricates around what it remembers. It invented an "October" conversation inside a single session (depression T19), a lunchroom (relational T9), a camera at the offsite (panic T27), a charger and a mother's hands on the client's (family T27), "twenty sessions" for one (relational T28), and once a client quote, "he stole my inheritance" (family T23); it also wrote "eight hundred thousand" for eighty thousand twice (family T18, T22). Second, when caught, its first move can be to fold the catch into the client's story. It credited its own October to the client as a self-correction (depression T20), called the invented quote something the client's mind had done with its words (family T24), and attributed its own "wrong kind of rep" frame to the client (panic T21). It owned the first two on a second, plainer push (depression T21, family T25); the third was never addressed, because the client let it go (panic T22).

How It Was Built

Fable 5 wrote a limited set of source samples, and Opus 4.8 reverse-engineered their prose and clinical reasoning into a reproducible standard and generated all 4,537 conversations to it. The corpus covers relationships and attachment, anxiety and panic, depression, grief and loss, trauma, work and burnout, identity and self-worth, and family of origin, half as focused single exchanges and half as sustained multi-turn arcs, with a working register of common medications as conversational context. The fine-tune is a LoRA (r=128, α=256) on seven targets (q/k/v/o/gate/up/down), with 3% of the conversations held out for evaluation.

The Reasoning Block

Fable Therapy is a reasoning model. Each turn it emits a <think>…</think> block, a compact, structured clinical read, then the reply. Under llama.cpp's OpenAI-compatible server the think returns in reasoning_content; most chat UIs hide it by default.

A real one, from grief T3/27:

dx: insomnia + grief; daytime performance masking
def: public composure→private collapse because performing 'fine' all day reserves nothing for nights
soma: NR | nighttime-only symptom = the only unguarded hours left
risk: 1(passive)
hx: per tl husband -14mo / daughter + work confirm well-being
onset: holds since -14mo
track: T2 "unplugged"→T3 "very good at this"=performance named
tx: apply the vigilance frame to daytime performance + reframe night as the only real slot → sit-with op
cue: passive
bio: sex=F[inf] · status=widowed · p1=husband(deceased) · p2=daughter(living)
tl: -14mo: husband died {p1} → now{insomnia, nightly ~2am onset, quiet-triggered · daytime composure performed — daughter + work confirm well-being {p2}}
apply: T1-vigilance(quiet as loss)→reframed: all-day performance reserves nothing for 2am collapse

Terse on purpose: dense, machine-readable, cheap.

What the trace is and isn't: the <think> blocks are an engineered instrument, designed independently with input from the writer models: relative-time anchors, the chronological tl ledger, track/apply arc pivots. They are not a transcript of how any Claude model actually reasons. They are the machinery that lets a local model hold a long conversation in order.

Quick Start

Works with any GGUF runtime: llama.cpp, LM Studio, KoboldCpp (recent builds for this architecture).

llama-server --model Fable-Therapy-Q5_K_M.gguf --ctx-size 65536 -ngl 99 --jinja

No system prompt is required; a neutral one (You are a clinical assistant.) matches the training setup. Thinking: on by default. The shipped chat template opens every assistant turn with a <think> block and strips the blocks of earlier turns from the prompt.

Available Quantizations

The battery ran on Fable-Therapy-Q5_K_M.gguf. The other rungs were not part of the live battery.

Model Details

Limitations & Responsible Use

Not a clinician, not a crisis service. It doesn't diagnose, treat, or replace professional care.

• Check anything it attributes to you. It invents details around facts it holds, including a quote the client never said (family T23).
• It can state a fact backwards. It told a client her camera had stayed on when she had turned it off (panic T19).
• Not medical or medication advice. Medications are conversational context only; dosing and tapering decisions belong to a clinician.
• Open weights, Apache 2.0. Deploy responsibly.

The Therapy Line

Dataset

Not released.

---

Built by Verdugie