Hey, Vampire Slayer -- Who's Your "Watcher"?

I was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer* one day, like you do, and I thought, "Wow. I wish I had a Watcher."

According to the Buffy Wiki, a Watcher is:

a member of the Watchers Council, devoted to tracking and combating malevolent supernatural entities (and particularly vampires), primarily by locating individuals with the talents required to fight such beings and win. More specifically, Watchers were assigned to train and guide Slayers, girls that were part of a succession of mystically powered young women who were destined to face the forces of darkness.

And then, quick as a vampire turns to dust when stabbed with a wooden stake, I realized, "Ohmygosh, I TOTALLY have a Watcher."

My Watcher is named Ken, and he's an expert in Bowen Systems Theory, and he coaches me, teaching me about the vampires I encounter, and drilling me in how to slay them.

No, the Vampires aren't people around me!

Far from it. The Vampires are my own responses to anxiety. How do I show up as the person I want to be, rather than reacting to events around me? How do I identify my guiding principles and practice being led by them? How do I identify the forces of anxiety that emerge in systems and help others to slay their own vampires?

I am a huge proponent of having a Watcher. Maybe yours is a systems coach, or a spiritual director, or a therapist. But it's a person with some expertise who partners with you to help you become the best You you can be. And holds you accountable for doing your own work.

It's kind of funny. At the beginning of every Buffy episode, a voice intones, In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer. But the whole show is a refutation of that. Buffy has friends and a Watcher to make sure she doesn't stand alone.

We've all got big things to do, slaying monsters and building Beloved Community.

Don't try to go it alone.

*The tv show, not the movie. But you really shouldn't have to ask.

Comments

Me and My Collar

You may run into me on a Friday, in my neighborhood, so it's time I let you know what you might see. When I was doing my required unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), my supervisor suggested that any of us who came from traditions where a clerical collar was an option, take one "collar week," to see how we were treated, as opposed to wearing regular professional clothes. After a couple of days, I joked to the Catholic priest, "How do you manage the power?" In regular clothes, I would walk into a patient's room, and it would take about 5 or so minutes of introductions and pleasantries before we could really get down to talking about their feelings, their fears, the deep stuff. With most people, as soon as that clerical collar walked in the room, with me attached, they began pouring out all the heavy stuff they were carrying. I was riding the bus back and forth every day, and though not quite so dramatic, the collar effect was alive there, to

Too Many Reasons to Kill

Along with discussing racism and common sense gun regulation, perhaps we should consider Cain Killing Abel, Daniele Crespi, Wikimedia something more basic - why, in the United States, do we have so many legal reasons to kill another person? My dad and I were talking about this whole Zimmerman thing, and some other cases that have come up. He recalled a conversation with a colleague from Germany. His colleague was an engineering contractor, here in Houston for a few weeks. They were at Guido's, enjoying seafood and beer, and his colleague was astounded at the long list of killings in the newspaper. He said that Houston alone had more killings than all of Germany. Yes, they have regulations about weapons in his country, he said, but more than that, "we do not have all those legal reasons for a person to kill another." Around the U.S., it's hard to make the case that we value human life, we have so many reasons to kill. If you feel threatened , if you're p

We've Reached the "Tom Hanks Eating Raw Fish" Phase of the Pandemic

Last May, as it became apparent the covid-19 pandemic was not going to be a temporary affair, I wrote about the benefits of imagining you were shipwrecked on a deserted island. Now, a year after we began hearing about the "novel coronovirus," I suspect that many of us have now entered the "Tom Hanks Eating Raw Fish" stage of the pandemic. We've made the best of things. Rearranged home offices and homeschool desks. Got through the holidays, mustering as much joy as we could. There's a permanent hook or basket at the front door for our masks. Most of us by now either know someone who died of covid, or are, at most, 2 degrees away. Our co-worker's husband's mother. Our friend's aunt. Or closer. We've grieved. And now...we're just numb. We keep putting one foot in front of the other, because that's what we have to do. We eat, we drink, we sleep. We get our work done. We nag our kids to do school work. But our affect is flat. Like Ha

Boots and Blessings

Search This Blog