Spider-Man 3 & The Courage to Let Go

This is the eleventh part of a series examining the 12 Steps of Recovery through the lens of nerd culture, all of which will be collected as part of our Mental Health resource.

Step 6 of Recovery | We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

It’s strange how hard it can be to let go of something that’s hurting us. We know it’s bad for us. We can see what it’s doing to our relationships and our choices, and by this point in recovery we’ve probably said as much out loud. But knowing something has to change and actually being willing to change it are not the same thing, mostly because the things wrecking our lives are often the same things that make us feel safe.

Anger makes us feel powerful. Pride keeps us from being embarrassed. A well-placed lie gets us out of consequences, resentment hands us someone to blame, and control makes an unpredictable world feel a little more manageable. We may not like any of this about ourselves, but we’ve gotten comfortable with it.

That’s why Step 6 is so hard. Having admitted our wrongs in Step 5, we’re now asked to become entirely ready for God to remove our defects of character. All of them, including the ones we’ve made peace with.

Which brings us to the most infamous wardrobe change in superhero movie history: Peter Parker’s black suit in Spider-Man 3.

At first the suit looks like an upgrade. The alien symbiote makes Peter stronger, faster, and more aggressive, and he enjoys the edge it gives him. But it doesn’t stop at his powers. It gets into his personality. He turns arrogant and petty, then cruel. He lashes out at the people who love him, and revenge starts to matter more to him than responsibility. Peter can see some of what’s happening. He keeps wearing the suit anyway, because he likes how it makes him feel.

That’s the part of Step 6 most of us would rather skip. We can be more attached to our character defects than we’d ever admit.

Recovery spends a lot of time helping us name our destructive patterns and the fears underneath them. But naming a defect isn’t the same as being ready to give it up. A man can see that his anger is wrecking his marriage and still believe it’s the only reason anyone takes him seriously. A woman can admit her need for control is exhausting her family and still be terrified of what happens if she stops managing everything. These patterns get so familiar that we can’t picture life without them.

It’s worth noticing that the symbiote doesn’t invent Peter’s flaws. The pride, jealousy, and anger were already there. The suit just amplifies them and gives him permission to indulge them, so the worst parts of him start to feel like strengths. We manage the same trick on our own, no alien goo required. Stubbornness becomes determination. Control becomes responsibility. Resentment gets to call itself a sense of justice, and pride passes for self-respect.

Eventually Peter can’t ignore it. After he knocks Mary Jane to the floor during the fight at the jazz club, he sees what he’s become. He ends up in a church bell tower, clawing at the symbiote, and the clang of the bell weakens its grip enough for him to tear it off. It’s a painful, violent separation.

And the suit doesn’t just go away. It drops onto Eddie Brock, who happens to be in that same church praying for Peter’s death. Eddie has his own anger and wounded pride, and where Peter fought the thing off, Eddie welcomes it. Both men ran into something that fed their worst impulses. Only one was willing to let it go.

Step 6 doesn’t ask us to pretend our defects never did anything for us. A lot of them started as ways to cope. Anger kept us from feeling vulnerable, lying kept us out of trouble, isolating kept us from being rejected, and control made us feel safe when everything else was falling apart. The problem is that what once protected us can turn into a prison, and you can’t walk free while you’re still hanging onto the chains.

There’s one big difference between Peter’s story and ours, though. Peter rips the suit off himself. Step 6 doesn’t ask us to remove our defects through sheer determination. It asks us to become ready for God to remove them.

That matters, because for a lot of us, “try harder” has been the plan for years. We swear we’ll never lose our temper again, or that this is the last lie, and for a while it works. Then the old patterns creep back, because changing a behavior isn’t the same as dealing with what drives it. You can stop yelling without ever touching the fear under your anger. You can stop lying and still be desperate for everyone’s approval. It’s like mowing weeds instead of pulling them. The yard looks great for about a week.

God isn’t interested in just making us look better on the outside. Romans 12:2 talks about being transformed by the renewing of our minds, a change that goes past our behavior into how we think, what we value, and where we put our trust.

That kind of change requires surrender, and surrender is scary. What if God asks us to give up something we still enjoy? What if He asks us to forgive someone we’d rather keep hating, or loosen our grip on something we’re terrified to lose? Step 6 asks us to be willing anyway, even when we can’t see what life looks like on the other side.

That doesn’t mean the struggle ends. Our patterns won’t vanish overnight, and one bad day doesn’t prove we were never ready. Some days surrender comes easily, and other days we catch ourselves reaching for the same old defenses. What matters is that we keep coming back to God with open hands, and that we start building something in place of what we’re giving up: community instead of isolation, honesty instead of hiding, forgiveness instead of resentment, and a willingness to lean on God and on other people.

Peter doesn’t walk out of that bell tower a perfect person, either. Taking off the suit doesn’t undo what he did or fix every relationship he damaged. But it’s a turning point. He finally understands that the power he enjoyed was costing him something worth far more, and he decides he can live without it.

That’s the invitation of Step 6. We don’t have to be perfect, and we don’t have to white-knuckle our way into change or know exactly how God will do the work. We just have to get to the point where we can look honestly at what we’ve been clinging to and say, “God, I’m ready for You to take this too.” That includes the anger that makes us feel strong, the pride that makes us feel important, and the control that makes us feel safe.

Peter thought the black suit made him a better Spider-Man. It was actually keeping him from being the hero he was meant to be. Our defects make the same kind of promises, offering protection and strength and control, and sooner or later we find out they take far more than they give. The transformation God offers may be slow and uncomfortable, but the One doing the work knows what He’s doing. Sometimes the first step toward becoming who He made us to be is being ready to let go of who we’ve been.

“Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.”
James 4:10 ESV