Kill the Spider Read online

  Proud of me? Go with her? Where? What in the world is she proud of? What’s going on?

  I followed Ms. Platt to one of the pews in the front row, and she told me to close my eyes and repeat after her.

  Okay.

  So I repeated a prayer something like this:

  “Dear Jesus, I invite You into my heart. Thank You for forgiving me of my sins. Thank You for dying on the cross for me. Amen.”

  What is going on?

  She was overjoyed and led me to a back room where my mom was waiting. My mom hugged me so long and hard that I knew in that moment I had messed up. Big time. Even at seven years old, I realized that these people were convinced I had done something I had not actually done. Everyone was so happy for me.

  Everyone except me, because I knew the truth. I had gone to the front to learn a magic trick, and I had performed the biggest trick of them all. I had convinced a room full of people that I wanted to become a Christian. And I did want that, but not right then. Everyone was telling me that I was a Christian, and I knew I was not. Everyone was so excited, and I was so terrified.

  What did I just do?

  The next day my parents took me back to church. I remember walking into the office part of the church that had big oak doors and really fancy carpet.

  “You get to meet with Pastor Harris today, Carlos,” my mom told me.

  What? No. Please, God, no. It was hard enough to keep up the charade around my mom and dad and Sunday school teacher. But now I was gonna have to lie to the pastor?

  “Good afternoon, Carlos.”

  Wow. There he was. Pastor Harris. He was even kinder and more mythical looking than I imagined. I remember him asking me a few questions. These were questions filled with Bible verses mixed with common sense. And I realized something at seven years old. This was my way out. This was the place I felt safe enough to get out of this lie.

  I kept yelling at myself, Just tell him the truth! Just tell him you went down the aisle to learn a magic trick! Just tell him the truth.

  But I didn’t. And he handed me a Bible with my name engraved on the front. And with that Bible under my arm and a lump in my throat, I walked out of Pastor Harris’s study and into the biggest lie of my life.

  There I was, swept up in the massive emotions of everyone around me, and in order to please the people who were so proud of me, I kept playing the part. I kept acting in this story I stumbled into.

  You see, the stories we find ourselves pushed into are not always stories with sinister roots. All too often, we say yes to a relationship with no clue that it will take us down a road of embarrassment and gut-wrenching pain that we couldn’t possibly foresee. But nobody can know about the mistake we made, so we don’t tell anyone and keep up the façade. One lie leads to another, and then we find ourselves trapped in good intentions. We are scared of everyone else getting hurt, so we stay in the story.

  You don’t have to be seven years old and confused. You can be fifty-seven years old and confused. What starts off as good intentions can turn quickly into cobwebs that trap you for years. Little did I know that the simple, untold truths I found myself spinning those few days at OnSite would ultimately lead to more spiritual pain in my life than I knew was possible.

  How many of our good intentions end up turning into the biggest cobwebs ever?

  How many times have you had right reasons in mind that ended up destroying you?

  It’s not enough just to have good intentions. It’s not enough to have strong conviction. When things begin to unravel—when cobwebs show up—you have a shot to stop it early. You have an opportunity to get to the root before it becomes life-consuming.

  It’s really true of all spiders. They don’t start off that strong. They don’t start off with that much reach. But the more we ignore them, the longer we allow them to feed on our mistakes and fears and spin their cobwebs of sin. Then it becomes so much harder to kill them.

  Although the next few years of my church life were still some of the fondest memories I have of church, when someone would ask me if I was a Christian, I would suddenly freeze. And I would lie. I soon realized that with this lie, I was treated differently. People were proud of me. People were telling me how incredible I was. And it felt good.

  At a young age, I was becoming a master of lies. It then became easier not only to lie about being a Christian, but about all sorts of things—especially the things I could say to make someone think I was better than I really was. One lie after another. It became a part of who I was. I had become a liar. I was a liar. I believed this with all my heart. And if I had lied about the greatest thing I could ever lie about, well, every lie from that point on was a lesser evil.

  Church services were especially brutal. Every time the pastor came to the end of his message, he would ask for people to pray in their hearts to receive Jesus, and I would pray all over again, hoping that one of those prayers would work. I hoped that one of those prayers would change the years of deceit I had spun around my faith. From my grownup perspective, I know I was absolutely following Jesus. I was a child of God living in His goodness, but somehow I was still racked by guilt. I felt like a fraud. It was exhausting.

  Ask yourself these simple questions: What spiders are being given birth in my life, and what cobwebs are they spinning? What lies about myself am I turning into truths?

  Is it the incredible feeling you got when you walked past that coworker and you felt them looking at you a little longer than your married self has experienced in a long time?

  Spider born.

  Maybe you walk past their desk an extra three times to keep that feeling alive.

  Cobweb spun.

  Could it be the little voice in your head that compares your social media following to others and tells you that you will never be successful or popular?

  Spider born.

  Maybe you end up spending a hundred dollars to buy a thousand fake followers on Instagram to give yourself a boost.

  Cobweb spun.

  Are you telling yourself after two beers that this light and free sensation is how you are supposed to feel?

  Spider born.

  Maybe you end up going for the fourth and fifth beer every night to numb you to whatever pain you are feeling.

  Cobweb spun.

  Spiders can start small. But the good news is that when they are small, all it takes is keeping your gaze on God to kill them.

  You know what you need to do. You need to trust the process God has laid in front of you. Go to God and acknowledge your sin. Give it to Him, and let Him be the strength in you to defeat the baby spiders.

  Are You Ready to Search It Out?

  Dealing with spiders is not fun, but if you go after the small spiders in your life as they come up, they don’t have the opportunity to get big and strong. That makes them much easier to exterminate. To be clear: a spider is an agreement with a lie you believe. A cobweb is any medicator that brings false comfort to that lie. List them out, and deal with them here and now.

  •Do you recognize a small spider that has recently started spinning cobwebs in your life?

  •Where did it originate and what can you do to eradicate its influence?

  CHAPTER 5

  I BELONGED TO THE CRAZIES

  I woke up with a lump in my throat—actually, lump is putting the mountain in my esophagus lightly. There I was. Lying in a double bed seven feet from one stranger and fifteen feet from another. I wondered if they were awake and staring at the ceiling as well. At least I was within shouting distance of my family if these two roomies were more unstable than I currently was. My roommates were from Texas and California. There we were, together in our separate issues.

  My bed was against the wall next to the door leading out of our room and into the Narnia of therapeutic retreat centers. It was the dark corner of the room. The bed on the opposite side was next to a massive window and the sun was pouring into the bedroom. I peeked to my left and saw both roommates still sound asleep. I leaned
over in my bed to check my phone for Twitter updates and text messages I may have missed in the night. Oops. No phone.

  I got up and prepared myself for this new normal. My ritual for the week went like this:

  Wake up around 7:00 a.m.

  Breakfast 7:30–8:00 a.m.

  Large-Group Meditation Time 8–9:00 a.m.

  Large-Group Class 9:15–11:00 a.m.

  Small-Group Experiential Therapy 11–12:30 p.m.

  Lunch 12:30–1:15 p.m.

  Small Group 2–5:00 p.m.

  Dinner 5:30–6:30 p.m.

  Large-Group Activity 7–9:00 p.m.

  Sleep

  Repeat

  I may not have been clear on this point, but this was like going through seven years of therapy in seven days. Yeah. Now you get it. The morning large-group times were almost like classroom experiences. We sat through a lecture from Bill, and then we had some class participation. We mostly went over the major medicators in our lives. What the program called medicators, I call cobwebs: alcohol, relational addictions, pornography, drugs, codependency, and so on. We would deal with one each day, and although I could not identify with many of the cobwebs my friends at OnSite were dealing with, what I learned was that webs cover up the real problem.

  Our small-group gatherings were where the real work took place. These rooms contained the secrets and stuff that blockbuster movies are made of. The ten people in my group would become, over the forty-plus collective hours we would spend in that room together, some of my closest confidants—the safe ones. And it was in that safety, that I caught my first glimpse of healing.

  You see, Bill repeatedly told us that thirty percent of the work would be done by working things out through our own story, and the other seventy percent of the work would be done by helping other people work out their story. Sounds a little like helping a friend move, right? Like, I’m going to pack you up and move you into a new house, get sweaty, and have a sore back, but it’s not even my new house? Turns out that helping somebody else work through their story helps you work through yours. I didn’t understand how that might be true until I became the Bad Dad for an hour.

  “Who wants to go first?” Nancy asked.

  Not a single person raised their hand.

  Nancy wanted us to set up a life-size, three-dimensional picture of our families. But there was a catch: our family portrait needed to be our family when we were five years old. And we would need to pick other members of our group to portray not only us at five, but the nuclear family we had at five.

  Over the course of the next few days I would play various roles in various people’s stories. By the end of the week I was hoping to be nominated for a Tony Award.

  Let’s take Sharon’s story. (Sharon and her story have been fabricated by me to show the premise of our therapy time and to paint a picture of what incredible work was done in our small group rooms. Sharon is not a real person.)

  “Sharon” had been up-front with us all that she had not cried in over twenty years. Not because she didn’t love or hurt, but because she simply didn’t cry.

  She picked someone in our group to be her at five. She placed her in the corner of the room by the door, and posed her in a position where she was almost walking out of the room.

  And then she picked me to be her grandpa.

  Immediately I thought to myself, grandpa? I’m officially over forty.

  “Carlos, stand up,” she ordered.

  She stood me in the other corner of the room facing the five-year-old version of herself. She had me leaning toward her, almost wanting to chase her.

  Then she chose someone to play her sister. She placed her sister sitting on a chair with her back facing both Sharon and her grandpa.

  Sharon stepped back from the tableau she created and said, “Yup. Perfect. This was us.”

  What in the world?

  Nancy chimed in.

  “Sharon, talk to us. What are we looking at?”

  Sharon went into a story about her childhood that absolutely wrecked me. She got so deep so fast. But she was still emotionless. I had way more emotion at the story she was telling than she did.

  As she was telling us what was going on in her life, Nancy, the director in this experiential and therapeutic play, was helping move Sharon from thought to thought with the precision of a brain surgeon. I was mesmerized by both the story that I was currently a part of and the pace at which Nancy was helping Sharon get to the root of the story.

  The closer that Sharon got to the root of her issues, the more intently she began to stare into my eyes. But I had to remember: these were not the eyes of Carlos Whittaker that she was staring into. No. My eyes belonged to her grandpa, with whom she was about to have a moment that none of us were expecting.

  It took about ten minutes of “pretend” conversation with Sharon’s sister and grandpa to get us to that moment.

  We were told not to break character at any time, so I just kept staring at Sharon.

  “How do you feel about your grandpa, Sharon?” Nancy asked.

  “I hate him. I hate him,” Sharon responded very calmly.

  “Why don’t you tell your grandpa that?” Nancy prodded, pointing at me.

  So Sharon turned to me and very calmly said, “I hate you. But you know I hate you. I’ve told you I hate you every time I have seen you the past twenty years. Look at what you did to my family. And look at what you have done to me!”

  I wanted to yell back at Sharon that I, in fact, do love her, and she is worth so much more than she feels. But of course, that is what Carlos feels. Not her grandpa.

  So I kept my trap shut.

  Nancy continued pushing. “Sharon, are you feeling anything at all? Any anger? Any sadness?”

  “Nope. Nothing.”

  And then Nancy did something that completely changed the way I saw her. She went from simply being a therapist to being an artist.

  “Sharon, obviously you feel something. I mean, he messed with your head. Look at your sister, for God’s sake. She is a wreck.”

  “Nope. Nothing.”

  We all watched Nancy go over to the corner of the room and bring back a large rubber block. It was about three feet tall by two feet wide. With it, she brought a rubber bat. She placed the bat in Sharon’s hands and the block at her feet.

  “Sharon, please tell your grandpa what he did to you and your family and how it makes you feel. Only, this time, I want you to simply tap the block with the bat. Slowly. Just tap it while talking to him.”

  Sharon stared directly into my eyes and began to speak.

  Tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .

  “Grandpa . . . You know I hate you.”

  . . . tap . . . tap . . .

  “Remember all the times,”

  . . . tap . . . tap . . .

  “you would be the life of the party,”

  . . . tap . . . tap . . .

  “until your fourth drink in.”

  . . . tap . . .

  “All my friends thought you were the man, Grandpa,”

  . . . tap . . .

  “and you were. You would be able to maintain your cool until about the fourth drink, Grandpa.”

  . . . tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .

  “And then you would flip,”

  . . . tap . . . tap . . .

  “and nobody could tell us what was coming, Grandpa.”

  . . . TAP . . . TAP . . .

  . . . TAP . . . TAP . . .

  . . . TAP . . . TAP . . . TAP . . .

  . . . TAP . . . TAP . . . TAP . . .

  The taps turned from taps into thumps. As Sharon’s voice increased in volume, so did the intensity of the bat hitting the block.

  Nancy chimed in again, “Let him know how you feel, Sharon.”

  With the cadence of someone knocking at your front door, she screamed the next nine words while slamming that bat onto the block.

  “I hate you for what you did to us!”

  Yelling turned into screaming, and before you
knew it, a single tear emerged at the corner of Sharon’s left eye.

  “Don’t you smile at me, Grandpa! Do you hear me? I hate you! I hate you!”

  I wasn’t smiling. I was actually trying not to cry.

  And with those last three words, Sharon actually broke the bat and fell onto the floor weeping uncontrollably. Weeping tears that had been trapped inside her for twenty years. I immediately left my position to go pick her up.

  “Ah, ah, ah. Nope. Get back to your spot, Carlos,” Nancy snapped.

  Nancy walked over to Sharon and whispered something into her ears. Sharon stood up and looked at me.

  “This pain you caused me can’t hurt me anymore, Grandpa. It’s over. I’m in charge of it. Not you.”

  “Carlos,” Nancy said, “repeat after me, and say this while looking into Sharon’s eyes: Sharon. My name is Carlos, and I am not your grandpa.”

  I said that to Sharon, and she had to say back to me: “Hi, Carlos. You are not my grandpa.”

  Nancy had us do this because there is such energy and emotion wrapped into our role-playing sessions that if you do not “de-role” it’s possible for resentment to remain between the role-playing parties.

  I’m grateful for that because Lord knows I didn’t want Sharon to stick a knife in my back while I was sleeping.

  I went to bed that night a little overwhelmed—overwhelmed by the emotion of that first day, but also overwhelmed that Sharon knew why she was there. She knew the exact reason. And I was clueless.

  My dad didn’t abuse me. My mother loved me. What in the world was I going to do when it was my turn? Why had I made such poor decisions in life? Why was I rubbing crap all over my blessings time and time again?

  I didn’t know that first night, but I was about to find out.

  Let’s pause for a moment. I want to be clear about something: not everyone reading this book is going to need to go to an experiential therapy retreat deep in the woods of Tennessee in order to find and kill their spider.

  But we all will have to dig. We are going to have to dig back to the point of trauma or the point of pain and stare it in the eyes. And we all aren’t going to have Nancy and her flowing feather earrings with turquoise stones to guide us. The good news is we have a way better guide.