From the Chair... MULTIFACETED I’m a big fan of the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. I actually started binging the entire series from start to finish a few months ago. It came out in 1997 when I was in my mid-twenties and I quickly became a fan. If you’ve never watched the show, really anything you need to know about it is in the title, so I’ll spare you my description. Google it and get back to my article. For those of you who are already familiar with it, I have either just scored 100 cool points with you, or you may avoid me once we’re meeting in person again.
John Nichols, MS, LPC/MHSP
Anyway, I love the show. It’s a great escape from the day to day. I love the characters, and I’m totally bummed that I am about six episodes away from the series finale. I am also totally bummed about what has recently been made public about the series creator, Joss Whedon. Many actors who worked with Whedon on “Buffy” are coming out publicly denouncing his treatment of the women who starred in the show. Apparently the creator of this show whose heroes were predominantly strong, powerful women, and whom the media and fans at the time lauded as a true feminist and champion for women’s rights, was in fact a misogynistic bully replete with his own little “casting couch”. The creator of the show I absolutely adore is a sleazy Hollywood cliché. Wonderful. As a fan of the show and the actors that made it, I’m bewildered as to how someone whose behavior I find so despicable could create a show that myself and millions of other viewers absolutely adore. However when I put my therapist hat on, I am reminded that dualities and pluralities can coexist. The school bully can also be a talented poet. That jerk of a boss can also be a loving, doting mother. The waiter at your favorite restaurant is also an inventor, a mentor, and has a wicked green thumb. The doctor with the gentle bedside manner can also be an abusive partner who carries on multiple affairs. When I was a fledgling therapist working at a non-profit in East Tennessee, one of my first clients was an adolescent who had done some things to a much younger neighborhood child that made my stomach turn. He lacked remorse, he blamed the victim, and I begged my supervisor to let me punt. She refused. I was pissed. Sessions were going nowhere. My client and I were equally frustrated and resentful for having to spend an hour a week with each other. He passed our hour together each week by drawing in his sketch book and ignoring me. I once started talking about the aliens who fed off my brain to see if he was paying attention. His occasional “uh huh’s” led me to believe he was not.
During one of our usual fruitless sessions he asked me if I had a pencil he could have (not borrow, have). He explained he had drawn his down to the very nub and he didn’t have any at home. He said, “I haven’t finished the barn yet” as he showed me what he was drawing. When he turned around his sketchpad my eyes fell on his drawing of a snow-covered country house next to what appeared to be a horse barn surrounded by a wooden fence. The kid was twelve years old. If you had told me that an art school student had drawn it, I would have readily believed you. “Sure man,” I replied. I had a pack of five pencils that I handed to him. “Keep it. Do you have a sharpener?” He told me he was “cool," and then therapy finally began. (Continued on page 3)
2
