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kkf · 7 months

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I’ve woken up with Ava Max’s “Sweet But Psycho” chorus in my head the last few days. My subconscious is definitely not trying to tell me something.

To be specific, it was the chorus:

Oh, she's sweet but a psycho

A little bit psycho

At night, she's screamin'

"I'm-ma-ma-ma out my mind"

Not the most comforting lyrics to wake up to. While contemplating my current mental health, I considered how my therapist would ask me to deconstruct that particular thought.

Which, because of my recent Buffy rewatch brain, eventually led me to think about how badly Buffy needed a therapist. In 144 episodes, she had only three brushes with mental health professionals. I’m going to set aside 6.14 “Normal Again,” because that not only does that episode merit its own post, but I also don’t have enough chocolate on hand to grapple with the mind fuck that is that episode. I’m just looking at 3.04 “Beauty and the Beast” and 7.07 “Conversations with Dead People.”

In season 3, Buffy is recovering from the implosion of her relationship with Angel. As a Bangel fan, it hurts me to write this, but the relationship from the point where Angel loses his soul is a metaphor for an abusive relationship (dude tries to kill her, her friends, her classmates, end the world…not a healthy route to take a relationship).

So as the season starts Buffy is traumatized from losing Angel and Jenny, as well as being the one who had to sacrifice the person she loved to save the world. After her three month sabbatical to LA, our girl CLEARLY needed some professional help to sort through everything. And for once, Buffy gets some of this help in the form of Mr. Platt, the school guidance counselor.

Buffy’s conversation with Platt is impressive when one considers how much ground he covers in such a short amount of time.

Of course, in true Buffyverse fashion, this help from a qualified professional only lasts about the 15 minutes it takes for him to become a victim of our latest monster of the week, a Jekyll-Hyde classmate whose own abusive relationship is meant to serve as a foil for that of Buffy and Angel. Buffy never gets professional help again. Until Holden, Buffy’s former classmate-turned therapist-turned newly risen vampire.

(Confession: I have a soft spot for Holden, because the actor who plays him was also in one of my favorite episodes of Firefly.)

Now Holden’s therapy session is an interesting blend of analysis and fisticuffs, as he IS a newly turned vampire and is, thus, evil. As he reminds us.

For this reason, Holden has a slightly more confrontational style when getting Buffy to open up. He challenges her, pushes her not to hold back. And as a result Buffy is open about her inferiority-superiority complex, which really, he says, is the root of the loneliness that Buffy feels. Being the Slayer makes her feel superior to her friends, however her performance as the Slayer makes her feel isolated and inferior. As Holden states, “it all adds up to you being alone.” But then goes on to argue that “everybody is until you die.”

Thinking about loneliness and isolation as recurring themes for Buffy, both of which are experiences trauma survivors tend to experience, I’m reminded about a recent YouTube short (which was originally a TikTok) that I saw which stated two pieces of food for thought. The first was that “the reason why we self sabotage is because it allows us to predict what is going to happen which gives us the illusion of control over our own pain” and the second was that “they’re not your type, they’re your pattern.”

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fx12Lxxojvo

Buffy’s sabotaging patterns of behavior (choosing men who are centuries older than her for example, or men who she is in no danger of falling in love with) offer her the illusion of control over what kind of pain she is inviting into her life.

Additionally, Buffy’s patterns of behavior - the self isolation, the relationships she chooses, all of them work as ways of protecting herself. She chooses emotional isolation from her friends as a method of protecting herself from the possibility that they won’t understand the choices that she’s making or that they will call her out on repeating sabotaging patterns of behavior.

It’s not a coincidence that it’s someone outside her immediate social circle who calls her out on her pattern of choosing relationships where she doesn’t have to completely open up. As Holden is someone to whom she has weak social ties, Buffy is more likely to be receptive to new ideas coming from him than from someone within her close social circle.

Often, especially when starting therapy, the fact that the person you’re speaking with is someone who has no “horse in the race” enables a patient to be more open, not just to being completely honest with the therapist, but also to receiving feedback. With my own therapy experience, having a complete stranger validate that while my reactions to certain triggers were not disproportionate, they didn’t make me crazy. They didn’t make me broken.

I wish, looking back, that Buffy had more of an opportunity to interact with mental health professionals. The metaphor of the show is “growing up.” How much more interesting and helpful would it have been for young viewers to have seen that the patterns we can find ourselves in can be challenged. That we can change. That with a little help, we can stop feeling so “psycho.”

#buffy the vampire slayer #btvs #mental health #random #ramblings #therapy

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kkf · 7 months

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During a rewatch of Buffy over the summer, it hit me that 2x01 is such an interesting take on PTSD. Throughout the episode, Buffy ticks so many symptom boxes.

Involuntary Flashbacks & Hypervigilance

Difficulty Trusting Others

Self Destructive Behavior

(I mean that, within the context of the show, Buffy dancing with Xander when she didn’t have stronger feelings for him sabotaged her friendships with Willow and Xander, as well as her romantic relationship with Angel - not that dancing with a person is in itself a destructive behavior, just to clarify)

Irritability

(When Cordelia calls you out on being unpleasant, you know it’s bad.)

The episode did a pretty good job challenging the social norms and stigmas around mental health that were still prevalent in the 90s. When Willow and Xander suggest her recent attitude change is the result of possession, a nice throw back to ancient times when mental health was understood to be caused by the supernatural.

It’s a conscious choice to have Giles, the show’s resident supernatural expert, be the one to suggest a more scientific reason for Buffy’s behavior.

Showing Giles, Willow, Xander and Angel watch as she wails away at the source of her trauma adds another layer of reality to the recovery process. So many family and friends of trauma survivors can feel helpless as they watch their person wrestled with their “inner demons.”

The end, however, is bittersweet for me. It’s the one place where I feel the show really reproduces and perpetuates the 90s mental health sensibilities. I love the last scene between Buffy, Willow, and Xander, where the latter two welcome back their friend.

That visual of Buffy’s support system still making space for her, saying “we’re here when you’re ready” is a powerful one. But it’s marred by the fact that the show ultimately never revisits this particular trauma nor does Buffy ever seek help from a mental health professional. Throughout the run of Buffy, there are a few occasions where therapists make an appearance. But after her first experience with actually dying, Buffy and company just continue on as though her mental health just “fixed” itself with one good crying jag.

Given the popularity of the show at the time, I have to ask how much societal good it could have done to have depicted its heroine getting treatment for her mental health. With the reach of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at the time, I think it could have made a serious dent in the stigmas surrounding not just those suffering from mental illnesses but the treatments for the illnesses themselves.

#Buffy #mental health #ptsd #just reflecting #btvs

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