Shinobi therapists
A/N: Just a lil' bit of world building, how the Narutoverse would look if Shinobi had therapists. Feel free to use.
Ramen shops, hot springs, hair salons, anywhere gossip travels and is frequented by shinobi, faceless civilians are more than they seem. they are part of an inter familial organization called 'secret keepers' as old as the village itself, and their job is to know everything about every ninja in the village. It didn't used to be this way. It used to be that every ninja had a secret keeper, and every secret keeper had a group of shinobi. No information would pass between secret keepers on each other's clients. Yet as the time passed, the organization came under scrutiny. To keep themselves hidden from the very ninja they swore to protect, the secret keepers found it necessary to pool their information to keep an eye on the political picture as it skewed against them.
A shinobi's therapist is his greatest weakness. They hold all his secrets, pent up emotions and is the pillar on which he stands. They hide their identity so as to not be used as weapons against the very ninja they are trying to help. But the village council no longer thought it fit that the secret keepers remain anonymous and independent from the political structure. The council offered them protection in return for allowing the government a closer hand in their workings. Mistrust began to build as the organization refused to come out into the open. So though all of the shinobi relied on them to keep their mental health, some began to posed a threat as they pried into finding the therapists' true identities. Anonymity is the best protection, and the organization had good reason to stay separate from politics. They were the guardians of ninja privacy. They were the secret keepers. Success in their job required implicit trust between them and their patient without fear that anything they say would be leaked or held against them.
maintaining the independence of the organization allowed trust to breed between individuals and their therapist, but mistrust to grow between the village as a whole and the organization of secret keepers. They were an unmonitored organization that had access to more information than the Hokage. They held emotional power over every single shinobi. The council believed It was only time before the therapists started meddling and all of Konoha would turn into a bunch of puppets on strings.
The therapist are known to have enough shinobi skill to remain anonymous for over a century. All children in the village go to the academy to learn basic self defense. most civilian born children drop out, though few go on to become shinobi. The organization makes sure to have a select few members advance their shinobi career to draw suspicion away from their families. Each decoy is told how much attention they can attract. After all, in a ninja village being too un-noteworthy can be seen as very suspicious. The shinobi in the organization then go on to teach their relatives techniques out of the public eye and off the record. To the village, a civilian could have had barely passable grades at the academy and no ninja skills to go along with their normal profession, when in reality they could be highly skilled in the ninja arts due to secret and illegal training from within the organization of secret keepers. That was another reason why the village was wary of them; they were a significant part of the konoha population who's skills were unknown, unaccounted for, and not under the village's control. Their talents could be put to use defending the village, going on missions and bringing money into the economy rather than used to hide their identities.
The organization is mostly familial, though some members join by invitation from their own therapist. That way none of the ninja-turned-therapists know who else is in the organization, and they are not allowed to invite any of their clients. This guards against ninja being invited to join, only to take them down from the inside. Other members are recruited as children if a child from a therapist family deems that a classmate has potential. This makes up for children born to therapist families who are not suited for the profession, who end up becoming ninja in order to teach their relatives.
Precautions are made to keep secrecy, such as communicating by code. Anonymous messages are left in public places for other born-therapists or civilian recruited therapists to decipher. (Ninja recruited therapists are not taught the code.) For example if a therapist is not working well with a client they can post the person's name to be taken on by another who will leave a message saying it will be taken care of. The place where the messages are left would have to move often so that the code is not cracked.