Spiritual bypassing, a term coined in the early 1980s by psychologist John Welwood, refers to the practice of using spiritual beliefs to avoid facing or healing painful psychological issues, emotional wounds, or life challenges. Instead, they get cloaked in simplified spiritual concepts, such as labeling them as “ego concerns”, wrapping them in convenient spiritual narratives.
This creates an illusion of having transcended pain. However, it can give way to pride, arrogance, deceit, and evasion of personal responsibility under the guise of wisdom. It can lead one astray from any true personal growth or spiritual development.
For as Brene Brown says, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity.” Avoiding your issues is a surefire way to block these life-giving emotions.
So if you’re on a journey of spiritual exploration, it’s crucial to be aware of how spiritual bypassing can undermine your attempts at self-development and prevent authentic healing and transcendence.
As someone who has overcome spiritual bypassing, I understand its intricate and deceptive nature, as you’ll read. I used yoga, meditation, and New Age philosophies to blind myself to deep inner suffering. It was my alcohol, my drug.
Thus, I aim to shed light on this elusive phenomenon, helping you recognize and understand the stakes of engaging in spiritual bypassing.
So let’s get started with how it manifests.
Manifestations of Spiritual Bypassing
The expressions of spiritual bypassing are varied and can be deceptively comforting. It might look like maintaining stoicism in the face of trauma with platitudes like ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ Or, consoling oneself over a loss by saying, ‘They’re in a better place now.’ These blanket mindsets are like a numbing cream to the stinging reality of when life situations cut through you.
Where I lived in California at a New Age retreat center, people would chalk any personal problem up to, ‘Oh there’s that Monkey-Mind again,’ as though to express inner struggles was really an egotistical attempt to get attention. People laughed their pain away or learned to hide it so as not to be seen as the dreaded ego!
In some cases, bypassing takes on the form of a perceived moral or spiritual superiority, where people believe they possess deeper wisdom than others. For me, after spending a lot of my teen years of doing alcohol and drugs, I found an escape from that chaos in New Age spirituality, which helped ground me in many ways.
However, because of my social-emotional immaturity, I rejected my friends, who were still wildly partying, by looking down on them from my new-found height of moral clarity. Looking back, I wish I’d have been kinder and more humble, being there for friends instead of making them feel judged.
Alternatively, bypassing can involve shirking practical responsibilities, such as eschewing certain jobs deemed ‘beneath’ one’s spiritual level or unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
These behaviors are not signs of evolved spirituality but rather defenses against confronting the raw truth of life’s complexities.
Here’s some red flags to be aware of when trying to identify Spiritual bypassing:
7 Examples
1) Positive Affirmations without Addressing Underlying Emotional Issues
Using positive affirmations or mantras as a way to avoid addressing deep-seated emotional wounds or unresolved conflicts. It’s the tendency to perpetually paint life in positive hues, ignoring or downplaying negative emotions or experiences.
This is more than just an optimistic outlook; it’s a refusal to acknowledge the full spectrum of human emotion, including boredom, loneliness, anger, and sadness. While positive thinking can be helpful, it becomes spiritual bypassing when it disregards the need for deeper healing.
2) Excessive Focus on Love and Light/Avoiding Sadness and Anger
Emphasize love, light, and positivity to the point of denying or invalidating the existence of negative emotions or experiences. Everything is “wonderful” or “beautiful.” This suppresses or represses important aspects of personal growth and emotional healing.
In relationships, this “always love and light” mentality is exhausting and erodes trust as partners can sniff out inauthenticity and a subtle lying about one’s struggles.
3) Detachment from Worldly Matters
Adopting an attitude of detachment from worldly concerns can be beneficial, but it becomes spiritual bypassing when it leads to a complete disengagement from social, political, or environmental issues that require attention and action.
This can manifest as a reluctance to engage in career development or provide for one’s family, under the guise of such pursuits being ‘materialistic’ or ‘not aligned with spiritual values.’ If left to go on unchecked, the family system or one’s financial life can be ruined.
4) Blaming Others or Circumstances for Personal Challenges
Rather than taking responsibility for their own emotions and actions, you blame external factors such as karma or destiny for challenges. This absolves you of personal accountability and hinders genuine self-reflection and growth.
5) Seeking Constant Spiritual Highs
Chasing peak spiritual experiences or relying solely on external sources, such as retreats, ceremonies, or substances, can become a form of spiritual bypassing when it becomes an escape from facing and integrating the more mundane aspects of daily life.
6) Intellectualizing Spiritual Concepts without Embodiment
Engaging in intellectual discussions about spiritual concepts without embodying those principles in daily life can create a disconnect between theory and practice. When you talk talk talk without doing the walk, you wear out your respectability with others and lose their trust. Not only that, but eventually, you secretly distrust yourself and spoil your own integrity.
7) Unquestioning Spiritual Authorities/“In-Group” Mentality
Blindly following spiritual teachers or gurus without critical thinking or discernment can lead to spiritual bypassing. It is essential to maintain a healthy skepticism, ask questions, and think for oneself to avoid bypassing personal growth and autonomy.
Also, choosing to only hang out with those who believe what you do is a red flag. If you start to speak in spiritually coded language to “those who know”- you might want to do some critical self-reflection. For instance, using terms from your yoga class on the regular may indicate you’re a bit compelled to “show off” your newfound spirituality.
Remember that these examples are not exhaustive, and spiritual bypassing can manifest in many other ways. But it’s crucial to engage in honest introspection to ensure that spiritual practices support genuine growth, healing, and integration. Not leap-frogging to where you wish you were, trying to skip over the inner work that would actually take you there.
So how can we catch the development of bypassing? What causes it?
Causes of Spiritual Bypassing
While the concept of spiritual bypassing was introduced by John Welwood, its implications extend far beyond his initial observations. It’s about using spirituality as a shield against painful psychological realities, as mentioned. This is where it starts: fear.
On the most fundamental level, bypassing arises out of a fear of vulnerability to our weaknesses and pain. There’s a deep-rooted impulse in us to hide feelings of sadness, loneliness, shame, and anger. We don’t want to be rejected or excluded socially. We shirk risking a loss of control that we think we have over our lives.
Additionally, the emotional exposure of being vulnerable seems especially overwhelming if in our childhoods or past we’ve been hurt when we’ve shared our deeper selves. It feels destabilizing. No thanks!
So to avoid this, we come up with ways to numb all that emotional quagmire. Some take to alcohol or serial dating. Others to overeating or working too much. And for those drawn to a spiritual life, this avoidance of hard things gets disguised as personal wisdom.
Spiritual bypassing can stem from the desire to repress pain. Here are some common factors that contribute to it:
Unresolved Emotional Wounds:
When people have deep-seated emotional wounds or unresolved traumas, they may turn to spiritual beliefs or practices as a way to escape or avoid confronting their pain. Spiritual bypassing becomes a coping mechanism to bypass uncomfortable emotions.
Desire for Instant Gratification:
In a culture that values quick fixes and immediate results, people may seek spiritual experiences or practices that provide instant gratification. This mindset can lead to bypassing the necessary work of inner healing and personal growth.
Misinterpretation of Spiritual Teachings:
Misunderstanding or misinterpreting spiritual teachings can contribute to spiritual bypassing. When individuals latch onto surface-level concepts without delving into the deeper meaning and integration of those teachings, they may engage in bypassing behaviors.
Fear of Facing Shadow Self:
Confronting and integrating the shadow self—the aspects of ourselves that we may deem negative or undesirable—can be challenging. Some people turn to spirituality to avoid facing their shadow self, preferring to focus solely on light and positivity.
External Validation and Authority:
Placing excessive trust and reliance on external spiritual authorities or teachers can contribute to spiritual bypassing. Individuals may surrender their critical thinking and personal autonomy, looking for validation or guidance outside themselves without engaging in their own inner work.
Cultural and Social Conditioning:
Cultural and social influences can shape our beliefs and expectations around spirituality. If a culture or social group encourages spiritual bypassing or emphasizes certain aspects of spirituality while neglecting others, individuals may unconsciously adopt those patterns.
Fear of Vulnerability and Intimacy:
Genuine spiritual growth often involves vulnerability and intimacy with oneself and others. Some fear this level of openness and choose spiritual bypassing as a means of maintaining a safe distance from such experiences.
It’s important to note that these causes can often intertwine and vary from person to person. Learning how to spot it is key to saving yourself from its negative repercussions.
Welwood’s warning about the dangers of this form of avoidance is crucial. Not only does spiritual bypassing hinder personal and spiritual growth, but it can also lead to inadvertently harming others or yourself.
Emotional detachment and the imposition of one’s spiritual beliefs onto others can create distance and misunderstanding in relationships. Let’s check this out more deeply in my personal example.
The Dangers of Spiritual Bypassing, Especially Trauma
In my early 20s, I found refuge at a New Age spiritual retreat center, unknowingly using it as a means to sidestep the daunting decisions of young adulthood and career choices. Immersed in yoga and meditation, I adopted a philosophy that prioritized chasing bliss above all, believing it to be the true essence of being.
This mindset, misunderstood in my youthful naivety, became a tool for me to don a facade of enlightenment. I wore all-knowing smiles as a badge of my ‘understanding of the truth of being,’ an effort to blend in with those on a similar path of enlightenment (who were on average 15 years older than me).
However, this ‘all is good’ mentality also became a dangerous mask, particularly in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. After being date raped at the retreat by someone twenty years my senior, a self-proclaimed New Age Buddhist monk, I minimized the gravity of the incident. I rationalized it as a spiritual lesson, as though he knew something I didn’t, like that sex was a way to break out of an ego trip, rather than confronting the painful reality that that m@#$% forced himself on me.
“Turning toward our pain is about bringing into our heart all that we have rejected, ostracized, disowned, neglected, bypassed, shunned, excommunicated, or otherwise deemed as unworthy in ourselves. Our heart has room for it all.”
Robert augustus masters
This incident starkly illustrates how spiritual bypassing can damage people, especially for those in vulnerable states. Like a young adult like me seeking guidance and meaning. Because I was unconsciously hell-bent on numbing my inner struggles to begin with, I was out of touch with the intuitive/emotional alarm bells in hanging out with that jerk that could’ve prevented the entire situation.
It’s a cautionary tale of how the search for spiritual fulfillment can inadvertently lead to bypassing real emotional pain and critically thinking about life experiences.
Learning to Think Again
Robert Augustus Masters, Ph.D and author of, “Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters,” says that people get confused about healthy and unhealthy detachment. In spiritual circles, it’s taught that one should rise above issues and embrace a spiritual outlook on life.
However, Masters warns that this should not be interpreted as overlooking pain and that in fact, one cannot grow spiritually without embracing pain, befriending it, working through it, and coming out the other side having been made more compassionate by it. Through studying his work, I’ve re-lived those traumatic experiences and rightfully grown into a better person because of facing that pain.
While sharing this is difficult, I do so to hopefully help people caught in similar situations or who are struggling with their belief systems. So how do we begin to get a handle on spiritual bypassing?
“Our resistance to our pain amplifies it. The more we try to avoid it, the darker and more tenaciously rooted it becomes. But when we stop avoiding our pain, when we cease judging or fighting it, its presence starts serving rather than hindering us.”
Robert augustus masters
Transforming Spiritual Bypassing into Spiritual Growth
Addressing spiritual bypassing requires a conscious effort towards self-awareness and introspection. It begins with a critical evaluation of your spiritual practices. You must get radically honest with yourself and be ready to look honestly in the mirror.
Ask yourself: are these practices a form of escapism from unresolved issues or uncomfortable emotions? Mindfulness is key here. By observing your thoughts and emotions without judgment, you can start identifying any patterns of spiritual bypassing.
Delving into your emotions, especially the painful ones, is vital. Don’t shy away from seeking support from therapists, spiritual mentors, or support groups. These resources can guide you through this introspective journey.
Another critical step is to develop emotional intelligence and acceptance. Spirituality isn’t about transcending human experiences; it’s about integrating and embracing them. Allow yourself to fully feel and process your emotions, practicing self-compassion and acceptance along the way.
Remember, true spiritual growth is about embracing all aspects of your humanity, even the messy and challenging parts.
Here are a few practical tips to help you stay grounded:
- Listen to Long-Time Friends: Value the insights of friends who have known you for years. Their perspective can be crucial, especially when you’re tempted to prioritize new, spiritual relationships over established ones.
- Embrace Humility: Regularly question your honesty with yourself and others. Acknowledge any tendencies towards a superiority complex. If you find you’ve been bypassing, talk about it openly, apologize where necessary, and learn from these experiences.
- Practice Radical Self-Honesty: Allocate time each week for self-reflection. View your thoughts and actions as if you were an outsider. Are they aligned with your true values?
- Develop a Holistic Spiritual Practice: Incorporate emotional healing into your spiritual routine. Techniques like journaling, therapy, shadow work, and body-centered practices such as meditation or yoga can help integrate your spiritual and emotional journeys.
In summary, spiritual bypassing can be a subtle but significant obstacle on your spiritual path. By embracing the full spectrum of your human experience and committing to genuine self-work, you can overcome this tendency.
This approach leads to a more authentic, integrated, and transformative spiritual journey, where emotional healing and personal development go hand in hand with spiritual growth.