​If Peter Parker was sat opposite me in the therapy room…

 

Peter (aka Spidey) can, and does, make himself incredibly useful in life. He literally protects and rescues people, devoting himself to being ‘SpiderMan’. But none of that gives him, Peter Parker, what he actually needs: to be known and connected to other people.

 

Sometimes being ‘useful’ becomes a safer landscape. It can act as a substitute for being authentically human, with all our flaws, needs and wants. If I’m useful, I know why you value me. Being loved simply for being me requires something much more vulnerable.

 

Consider this: If people didn’t need anything from you, how confident are you that they’d still want you? 

 

Avoiding emotional pain can shrink the richness of life, without giving too much of the plot away (I hope), we see how avoiding emotional pain and vulnerability slowly shrinks Peter’s life.

 

Peter has a very understandable reason for keeping himself apart: people he loves have previously been hurt because of him. But we see a transition from ‘I’m protecting them’ towards  ‘I’m protecting myself from losing them again.’

 

Art imitating life:

 

I don’t need a relationship.

I’m happier on my own.

I don’t trust people.

I’m just independent.

 

Sometimes those things are genuinely true. Sometimes underneath them is something more like: ‘Getting attached gives someone the power to hurt me.’ There’s nothing weak about protecting ourselves from something we’ve learnt can hurt. But perhaps the question becomes whether that protection is allowing us to live the life we want, or quietly making our world smaller.

 

Grief is not just death

We see grief illustrated in the film not only through death, we see Peter repeatedly grieving people who are still alive but now outside his orbit. He’s grieving lost relationships, his place in people’s lives and a version of his future that he was emotionally invested in.  It’s an ambiguous kind of loss, and it reflects back at us the multitude of experiences that can evoke grief:

 

A lost friendship.

A divorce.

Infertility.

Children leaving home.

The parent we wished we’d had.

Who we were before something happened.

A career we thought we’d have.

A relationship with someone who is still very much alive.

 

You don’t have to lose a person to death to experience grief.

 

And moving on doesn’t have to mean forgetting. The movie synopsis tells us that ‘the world has forgotten Peter, but Peter hasn’t forgotten them.’

 

Other people moving away from us, emotionally or physically, doesn’t erase what something meant to us. Perhaps rather than trying to minimise or rewrite our history to read ‘It doesn’t matter anymore’, a more honest version might be:

‘It mattered. It still matters and im building new life alongside that truth.’ 

Whether that’s bereavement, divorce, friendship or another kind of ending, perhaps we don’t always have to ‘get over’ something in order to continue living beyond it.

 

Identity and ‘who I am’

 

Peter effectively loses Peter Parker, while Spiderman not only remains, he thrives and dominates.

 

What happens to us when one part of our identity becomes so dominant that it begins to eclipse everything else?

 

The Job.

The Mother.

The Fixer.

The Provider.

The Strong One.

The Person Everyone Can Rely On.

 

These identities aren’t false, they are real and often very important parts of us, but like a plant that has completely taken root, eventually there can be very little earth, space or daylight available for anything else to grow.

 

So I might wonder with Peter:

 

‘Who am I when Im not being useful to anyone?’

Protection can easily masquerade as strength

Peter’s withdrawal isn’t weakness. It makes sense.

 

If I were sitting opposite him, I don’t think I’d particularly want to ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I think I’d be more interested in:

 

‘What is this protecting you from and what is that protection costing you now?’

 

Because Peter can love people and stay away from them. 

He can believe he’s protecting someone and be protecting himself.

He can miss his old life and need to build another one.

He can be enormously capable and profoundly lonely.

 

Two apparently contradictory things can both be true. The therapeutic ‘yes, and…’

 

We don’t always need to work out which is the ‘correct’ feeling. Both feelings may be true, and perhaps understanding ourselves means becoming more able to hold that complexity rather than forcing ourselves to pick a side.

 

And ...what happens when everything goes quiet?

 

Peter/Spiderman is enormously action-orientated, there is literally always something to do, we mere mortals aren’t so different.

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Scrolling.

Cleaning

Exercising

Working

Drinking

Organising

Looking after everyone else

 

Keeping busy!

 

Sometimes when therapists talk about ‘giving feelings space’ or ‘feeling our feelings’, what we’re actually talking about is something much simpler: noticing what happens inside us when everything else goes quiet.

 

What shows up when we stop ‘doing’ and let ourselves ‘be’

 

And perhaps that is the thread running through Peter’s story for me, sometimes a behaviour that once protected a part of us becomes the very thing that restricts our growth later. We don’t need to shame it or force ourselves to change it, after all, it probably developed for a very good reason.

 

We can understand where it came from, appreciate what it once did for us, and then ask ourselves:

 

‘Does this still serve me now?

 

Maybe that’s one of the messages underneath all the superhero stuff...we don’t always need to defeat the parts of ourselves that protect us, sometimes we just need to understand them well enough that they no longer have to run the show.

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