#18: Chuuni Behavioral Therapy

This is how your life restarts: in a bright bland anodyne conference room, halfway down a long bland liminal corridor, at a large bland table covered with toys, art supplies, and binders full of acronyms and colourful diagrams.

A partial hospitalisation program is a form of intensive mental health treatment that sits halfway between inpatient and outpatient care. It's for those of us who are currently too crazy to function in normal life, but not so crazy that they lock us up in grippy sock jail.

I kind of hoped the "partial" would mean they only check my brain into the psych ward while the rest of me gambols around. In reality it's more like Coping Skills School, with detention only an elevator away. You come to the hospital at 09:00 every day, participate in workshops and group discussions, then go home to sleep in your own bed.

And it's nice. I am learning a lot about Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and the Distress Thermometer; about Interpersonal Effectiveness and Radical Acceptance and strange jargon such as "half-smiling" and "TIPP". I am enjoying the weird little temporary community that forms around the conference table, between different people living very different lives who all share that basic drive to get well. Iota by iota, I feel as if I am waking from a long nightmare.

It's a bit cringe, of course. Recovery always is. You know exactly what I mean: the acronyms, the diagrams, the therapy speak, the "thank you for sharing" of it all. At 37 years old I like to think I'm past the point of caring. I already know that healing is bathetic; that after the crisis, the wacky religious epiphanies, the dramatic decision to reject suicide and live, damn it, live, there always comes, like a hangover after a wedding, the long, hard, boring grind of actually living. That is beautiful too, in its way.

Yes, and.

We do still need the drama sometimes, don't we? We need a little spice, a little pizzazz. We need, dare I say it, to feel cool.

Just look at how I write about my own mental health and spirituality. Do you see it? That aura of derangement, that hint of the unhinged? Perhaps you fancy it merely a joke, a 'bit'? Ha. Human beings are such simple creatures, as in thrall to their fragile delusions of normality as pigs to their feeding trough.

For what meagre mind could perceive boredom in the ultimate ordeal? In the struggle not for mere existence but for ascension into the light of the Divine? You stand — though in truth you should kneel — before a self-made woman forged in the furnace of her own agency, who has been shattered to pieces upon the anvil of the world and is now putting herself back together by sheer force of will. Do you imagine that I fear death? I have died and clawed my way up out of Hell a hundred times, and this isn't even my final form.

Chuuni (short for chūnibyō) is a Japanese term sometimes translated into English as "middle school syndrome". In popular usage it refers to a very specific type of edgelordism. Acting like a try-hard anime character, or pretending to have tortured secret terrible mystical powers, or monologuing about your magnificent schemes like Katherine (aka "Boymoder Sephiroth") in the delectably stupid web serial Ranked Competitive Breast Growth.

Increasingly, that is the energy I want to bring to my ~*healing journey*~. I am learning to be a practitioner of the emotional arts. I am learning to master my deepest emotions so I can wield them, like a katana, to accomplish my goals. I am learning to practice Chuuni Behavioral Therapy (also known as CBT).

Because I'm a big believer in making people feel cool for doing good things. If you rally your circles to help prevent a friend's suicide? Congrats, you're the mental health Avengers. If you get off your ass to campaign for a political issue that you strongly believe in? Congrats, you're saving the republic. You don't want to overuse this tactic; it has to feel earned, not empty. But it is cool, actually, what we do in that conference room. I'm proud of all of us for doing it.

I think this also helps with the problem one of our group leaders flagged: that DBT has so many skills and concepts you need to remember and keep track of. Well, what if they're spells? One day in group, without really thinking about it, I started calling the first part of DBT's 'TIPP' technique — which involves dunking your face in a bowl of ice water to trigger your mammalian diving reflex — "DBT Ice Magick" (I was out of the room when they told us the actual name). It caught on, and every time someone uses those words it makes me feel more excited to use the technique in battle, as it were.

One friend even suggested I make little Pokémon-style cards for each DBT skill (à la Yu-Gi-Oh!) and whip them out dramatically whenever I use one, which is extremely blursed. I'm seriously considering making a rule for myself that I must yell the name of a skill out loud before I can deploy it.

There's a wonderful example of this energy in the 2024 movie Freaky Tales, which we watched at my housing co-op last week. Aside from the surreality of watching dramatic scenes set literally a block away from my old house — the whole movie is set in Oakland, CA — I loved the film's depiction of 'Psytopics'. It's a wellness-infused, new-agey, ambiguously cultish movement slash self-help community that promises to help you find inner balance by mastering your thoughts and emotions. Late in the movie it turns out that this literally lets you kill people with your mind. Weaponised tranquility!

So don't fucking cross me. I have the power of the Goddess and CBT on my side.

Thanks for reading! As always, you can find me on Bluesky here.

AI disclosure: this newsletter was proofread by my open-weights AI assistant bipp. All resulting edits were made by me, and all the ideas and words are my own.