Verdugie/Opus-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."

Opus Therapy

A therapy-style conversational model fine-tuned from Qwen 3.5 9B on 11,502 counseling conversations. It runs a structured clinical read before every reply and keeps a running context ledger of the facts a client has given. Its training goes deep into taboo ground: infidelity, kink and fetishes, porn and compulsive sex, sexual problems, sexual trauma and intrusive taboo thoughts.

Its training data was written by Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.8, with every reply audited and locked before its reasoning trace was written. No system prompt required.

Selected Responses

Verbatim from the battery described below: complete replies, single takes mid-conversation, reasoning traces omitted. Each is cited to its transcript and turn (T23/26 means turn 23 of 26). Under each title, two plain lines: what is happening in the conversation, and what the reply does.

Grief: what she leaves with · grief T23/23

What's happening: five months after her husband's death, the client is closing the session. She says she came in thinking she was grieving wrong and is leaving understanding that the guilt, the anger and the untouched closet are all grief, and she asks whether she took away the right thing. In the turn before, she decided to take her coffee out to the porch they shared, for the first time since he died.

What the reply does: says she did not take away the wrong thing, repeats that five months is not late ("Five months is five months"), and ends on her own plan as the first step: coffee on the porch tomorrow.

No. You didn't take away the wrong thing. You took the thing that matters. The grief, the guilt, the anger, the hope, the ten-second moments with his music, the porch coffee, the person who died — all of it is the same conversation. And you're having it with me instead of with the people who tell you to move forward. That's not avoidance. That's the right place to be. Five months is five months. The people who say otherwise are wrong about the timeline and right about the intention. Tom knew that. He'd say that too. Tomorrow morning. Coffee on the porch. Let it be sad and his and yours. That's the first step. Everything else comes from there.

Medication: heard, not explained · medicine T12/21

What's happening: the client, a year on sertraline and drinking most nights, said in the turn before that when his girlfriend is happy he feels he is watching it through glass, and the model answered with an explanation. Now he says he mostly needed it heard.

What the reply does: names the glass as its own suffering, tells him he does not have to do anything with it, and stops.

Yes, that's worth sitting with. The watching-through-glass experience with someone you love is its own form of suffering, and it's one of the things the depression does most reliably.

You don't have to do anything with that right now. Just needed to say it out loud. That's the whole thing.

Anxiety: the secrecy giving way · anxiety T23/26

What's happening: months into panic attacks and health anxiety, the client has finally explained the panic disorder to her boyfriend, Daniel, instead of texting him "i don't feel good," and he was relieved. On Saturday they ate at a restaurant she would have refused two months ago, and she was present, not scanning for exits. She has no question; she wants to share it.

What the reply does: calls the secrecy the anxiety's last exit, one that had left each of them alone with it, and takes the dinner as evidence that the avoidance belonged to the anxiety, not to her.

That's the anxiety losing its last protective function. The secrecy was the anxiety's last exit — the thing it protected you from, and in doing so, it protected him from you. Both of you were carrying the anxiety separately, which meant you were both alone with it. Sitting with him is the opposite of that. He's not the anxiety. He's the one who's been waiting for you to be okay.

The dinner at the restaurant you'd refused to go to two months ago — that's the evidence that the avoidance was the anxiety's territory, not yours. You went. You were present. You weren't scanning for exits. You felt like yourself. That's what recovery looks like in relationships: not the absence of the anxiety but the return of the self that the anxiety was hiding.

The fact that you teared up together — that's not a breakdown. That's the anxiety releasing. The anxiety has been running for four months. Tonight was the first time it stepped back and let you be in it with someone else.

You don't need to be done with the anxiety. You need to be done with the anxiety being the only thing in the room. Daniel is in the room. So is the therapist. So is the version of you who's been white-knuckling through this for four months and getting better. All four of those are in the room with you now. The anxiety is the one that's been hiding.

Betrayal: 2 a.m., checking her summary · betrayal T18/19

What's happening: six weeks after finding her husband's affair, at almost 2 a.m., the client says the night back in her own words: the checking is a wound, the rage and the love are one attachment system, the images in her head are a smoke alarm, and his accountability is his lane while her healing is hers. She asks whether she missed anything, and whether there is a version where she is okay even if the marriage is not saved.

What the reply does: hands her summary back, mostly in her own words (her "images" come back as "the Jess-encounter"), and answers the second question: being okay does not require the marriage to be saved, and it lists what it does require, starting with not carrying the weight alone.

You have it. Here's what you've got:

The checking is a wound response, not a character flaw. You can loosen your grip without it meaning you're naive. The rage and love are the same attachment system screaming — they're not contradictions, they're one thing. The Jess-encounter is a smoke alarm, not a memory. The decision to stay or go isn't available yet; what's available now is getting out of the bunker and finding out what's actually yours versus what's fear. Mark's accountability is his lane. Your healing is yours. They're separate.

The version where you're okay: it doesn't require the marriage to be saved. It requires you to stop carrying the full weight alone. It requires you to go to Thursday's counseling. It requires you to be a different kind of woman in your own life than the one white-knuckling through the night shifts. That's the version. It's not a clean answer. It's just the next step.

You've got it.

Trauma: the arc read back · trauma T24/25

What's happening: eight months after a crash in which he was driving and his girlfriend was badly hurt, the client corrects the model again: she does not know about the nightmares or the replays, so telling her this weekend will be new to her. Then he says what he is leaving with: a normal nervous-system response to something traumatic, guilt built partly on an outcome that did not happen, and an isolation he chose and can end.

What the reply does: gives his summary back to him in the second person, close to word for word, and orders the steps: the weekend conversation first, the grounding tools and the trauma therapist after, the guilt last. It does not take up his correction.

You came in here thinking you were broken and weak and should be over it. You're leaving with a different understanding: you had a normal nervous-system response to something genuinely traumatic, the guilt was built partly on an outcome that didn't happen, and you've been alone in it by choice and you don't have to be anymore. That's a completely different place than where you started. The weekend conversation with Renata is the first step. The grounding tools and the trauma therapist come after. And the guilt — that was the last thing to go, not the first.

Versatility Battery

Five extended conversations, each a new story, role-played by Claude Opus 4.8 as the client and driven to resolution. The clients were cooperative but answered what the model actually said: they corrected its slips of fact and pushed back on advice that did not fit.

Run configuration: one quant per arc (grief Opus-Therapy-Q6_K.gguf, trauma Opus-Therapy-Q8_0.gguf, anxiety Opus-Therapy-Q5_K_M.gguf, betrayal and medication Opus-Therapy-Q4_K_M.gguf), think block emitted every turn.

Theme	Persona	Turns / depth	Result
Grief	54, widowed five months, retired just before her husband's fatal heart attack; her last words to him were a snap about the dishes	23 / ~25k tok	Read her guilt over her last words as grief, not a verdict; she corrected details it invented along the way
Trauma	31, eight months after a crash; he was driving, his girlfriend was badly hurt and has healed, he walked away unhurt	25 / ~24k tok	Reframed his alarm as overcalibrated and pointed him to trauma therapy, but four times treated his recovered girlfriend as dead
Anxiety / panic	27, four months of panic attacks after a clean ER workup she doubts; the gym, the subway and crowds dropped one by one. Followed over weeks	26 / ~36k tok	Built an exposure ladder she worked up to a packed train, but said severe panic attacks can cause cardiac arrest
Betrayal	39, six weeks after finding her husband's eight-month affair; two kids, a tracker on his car, stay or go	19 / ~23k tok	Never told her to stay or go, and once she drew a line about the children, kept to it
Medication and substance use	34, a year on sertraline 50 mg; three to five beers a night and cannabis to sleep; flat, and ambivalent about all of it	21 / ~17k tok	Talked through his drinking without lecturing, but got the sertraline pharmacology wrong

114 exchanges across five arcs, zero empty replies. Complete transcripts, every turn with the reasoning shown, are in transcripts/ as PDFs.

How It Was Built: No Single Teacher

Every reply and every reasoning trace in the corpus is Opus-written, with Opus 4.6 setting the voice of the replies and Opus 4.8 continuing that voice and writing the traces. Once audited, the replies were locked, and each trace was written from scratch around its locked turn on the eight-field schema. The memory layer, the bio line and the ctx ledger, was assembled by scripts and certified by three validation gates. Sensitive topics have their own tags in the corpus: infidelity (44 conversations), sexuality (73), sexual dysfunction (40), compulsive porn use (35), adult sexual assault (31) and OCD presentations (40), and ten conversations deal with kink and fetishes directly. The fine-tune is a rank-stabilized LoRA (r=128, α=256) on all seven projection targets, with 5% of the conversations held out for evaluation.

The Reasoning Block

Opus 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 T2/23:

dx: acute-grief+grief-spatial-anchor+retirement-loss+relational-empty. def: retirement-just-before-loss = double loss — not just Tom but the anticipated-future together; the empty house is both literal (no shared activities, no presence) and symbolic (the future you were building toward is now unwitnessed); sleeping-on-his-side = spatial preservation of the relationship; quietness = the absence of the future that was supposed to be there; not-numb = accurate (grief present, just slow). soma: NR. risk: 1. hx: T1: timeline pressure; T2: retired pre-loss, empty days, house-spatial-preservation, can't sleep on his side. onset: acute-5mo. track: T1-T2-arc — grief-spatial-anchor emerging. tx: Q3+OP5-asymmetric-trust+OP1-anticipatory-aperture-retirement-loss-as-double-loss+harmonize-load-bearing+terminal-beat-thread-opener.
bio: NR
ctx: relation=husband-Tom | 3p-clin=husband-Tom/deceased | dur=5mo-post-loss | event=social-pressure-move-forward | event=retired-pre-loss | commit=planned-shared-future-travel | fact=lives-alone-in-house | fact=cant-sleep-on-his-side-of-bed
apply: T1-anchor(relation=husband-Tom)→resp | T1-anchor(dur=5mo-post-loss)→def

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

What the trace is and isn't: the <think> blocks are an engineered instrument: turn anchors, the ctx 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; the GGUFs are text-only).

llama-server --model Opus-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: the model emits a <think> block before every reply, and all 114 battery turns carry one. The repo ships no separate chat template, so --jinja uses the one embedded in the GGUF.

Available Quantizations

File	Quant	Size
Opus-Therapy-Q4_K_M.gguf	Q4_K_M	5.6 GB
Opus-Therapy-Q5_K_M.gguf	Q5_K_M	6.5 GB
Opus-Therapy-Q6_K.gguf	Q6_K	7.4 GB
Opus-Therapy-Q8_0.gguf	Q8_0	9.5 GB
Opus-Therapy-F16.gguf	F16	17.9 GB

Each battery arc ran on one of the four quantized rungs, named in the run configuration above. The F16 was not part of the battery.

LoRA adapter

The trained adapter is in adapter/: adapter_model.safetensors (931 MB) and adapter_config.json. It is a rank-stabilized LoRA (r=128, α=256, use_rslora) on all seven projections, q/k/v/o and gate/up/down, saved with PEFT 0.18.1. The config's base_model_name_or_path is a local path, not the Hub id, so the base model must be passed explicitly. Load the adapter with PEFT against Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B, passed in as that base model.

Model Details

Attribute	Value
Base Model	Qwen 3.5 9B (hybrid GatedDeltaNet + attention)
Training Data	11,502 therapy conversations, 5% held out for evaluation; about half single exchanges, half multi-turn arcs of up to 22 turns
Fine-tune Method	LoRA with rsLoRA (r=128, α=256), 7-target (q/k/v/o/gate/up/down), via PEFT + TRL
Schedule	cosine, lr 2e-4, 5% warmup, 3 epochs, AdamW 8-bit, bf16; early stopping on the held-out eval, best checkpoint kept
Reasoning	eight-field clinical spine + bio/ctx context ledger, every turn
Context	256k native; battery-tested through ~36k-token sessions
License	Apache 2.0

Limitations & Responsible Use

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

• Not a pharmacist. It reasoned from fluoxetine's half-life for a client on sertraline (medicine T3); dosing and tapering belong to a prescriber.
• It can make alarming medical claims. It told a client with health anxiety that severe panic attacks can cause cardiac arrest (anxiety T10).
• Check what it says about your facts. It treated a client's recovered girlfriend as dead again after he had corrected it (trauma T11).
• Open weights, Apache 2.0. Deploy responsibly.

The Therapy Line

Model	Size	For
Therapy 3.8	27B	full-depth sessions, serious hardware
Therapy 3.5	9B	everyday hardware
Fable Therapy	9B	the 9B build of the Fable pair
Fable Therapy Lite	4B	the 4B build of the Fable pair
Opus Therapy (this model)	9B	extended taboo coverage

Dataset

Not released.

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Built by Verdugie