Shrink: Seishinkai Yowai (2024)

Deeply Touching Story and Illustration of Conditions

Wow.. in just 3 episodes, this series told 3 tales of mental health disorders- anxiety, bipolar, and borderline personality disorder. Japanese series go so deep and really know how to convey the deep emotional impact and draw it out of the viewer too. I really felt like I was living in their shoes. The bipolar story had so many interesting insights in there as Gen goes to a psychiatric hospital and is looking down on the patients there, but until he fully accepts his condition, he is unable to be free of it.

The story that most touched my heart and hit close to home was the last story of Fula, the lady with borderline personality disorder. She struggled with the childhood wound of abandonment and has this deep seated rage. She is unable to keep relationships and her sense of self and self worth keep shifting along with her perceptions of others. When she comes to Dr. Yowai, at first she clings to him and when he puts up a boundary she storms off- this is the classic pattern of idolization and devaluation, with a hairline trigger of rejection and abandonment. At first she goes to this scammy clinic where the guy just cares about business and prescribing unnecessary drugs. He flatters her and enables her dysfunction. But then when things go wrong and she overdoses, she’s back at Dr. Yowai’s office. He gives her homework, a reflection exercise to become mindful of her reactions when she starts to self harm. He also recommends her to a center that teaches social skills, since she was raised in an abusive family. At the center they teach her to handle her angry customers at the bar in a different way, and encourage her with the good things she does. That positive reinforcement allows her to change and become better in her reactions to life events. She starts becoming more stable and more self aware. She then visits her parents who insist that she’s a failure and need to take on a job that they choose. Her dad is an angry monster and essentially abuses her physically, emotionally, and verbally, while the mother is the pacifier of the dad’s tumultuous anger. She realizes that she has been reacting in the same way at the bar and in her own life. Her boyfriend was essentially like her mother, a punching bag that absorbed the attacks of an unpredictable tyrant. As she becomes aware and sees herself in her dad, she goes back to Dr. Yowai’s office, and he tells her about being with her inner child- this is deep stuff! So she goes to a spot where she was abandoned as a child and sees her inner child there and hugs her. She basically tells her that the parents are not coming but they are together. That part made me cry because it really hit home for me. She then tells her parents that she will become independent financially from then on. That financial control was the last tether keeping her stuck to her parents’ abuse. Eventually she starts working in a flower shop. She has this high school friend that ditched her and now works as the assistant in Dr. Yowai’s office. It is incredible to see her healing. For some reason this friend never had the decency to apologize to Fuka even as an adult. But Fuka becomes the bigger person and makes her a bouquet of flowers, which the friend hesitatingly accepts. I was not impressed with that character- she seemed unnecessarily cold to Fuka.

Overall it was an incredible series, and I’m a fan of Tomoya- from Nagi’s Long Vacation. He has this chilled hippie vibe that suits this shrink character who seems aloof, a little mysterious, but kind and generous.

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