Spiritual Bypassing

Spiritual Bypassing is a method by which negative ego mind control operates a person's ego mind, into believing only positivity really exists or as an avoidant behaviour to cover over and deny painful emotions, or those of others.

Spiritual Bypassing as an Ego Defense Mechanism

Spiritual bypassing describes a tendency to use spiritual explanations to avoid complex psychological issues.

The term was first coined during the early 1980s by a transpersonal psychotherapist named John Welwood in his book Toward a Psychology of Awakening. Spiritual bypassing can be defined as a "tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks. As a therapist and Buddhist teacher, Welwood began to notice that people (including himself) often wielded spirituality as a shield or type of defense mechanism. Rather than working through hard emotions or confronting unresolved issues, people would simply dismiss them with spiritual explanations. While it can be a way to protect the self from harm or to promote harmony between people, it doesn't actually resolve the issue. Instead, it merely glosses over a problem, leaving it to fester without any true resolution.

While spirituality can be a force that helps enhance an individual’s well-being, engaging in spiritual bypassing as a way to avoid complicated feelings or issues can ultimately stifle growth.

Signs of Spiritual Bypassing

Spiritual bypassing is a way of hiding behind spirituality or spiritual practices. It prevents people from acknowledging what they are feeling and distances them from both themselves and others. Some examples of spiritual bypassing include:

• Avoiding feelings of anger
• Believing in your own spiritual superiority as a way to hide from insecurities
• Believing that traumatic events must serve as “learning experiences” or that there is a silver lining behind every negative experience
• Believing that spiritual practices such as meditation or prayer are always positive
• Extremely high, often unattainable, idealism
• Feelings of detachment
• Focusing only on spirituality and ignoring the present
• Only focusing on the positive or being overly optimistic
• Projecting your own negative feelings onto others
• Pretending that things are fine when they are clearly not
• Thinking that people can overcome their problems through positive thinking
• Thinking that you must “rise above” your emotions
• Using defense mechanisms such as denial and repression
• Spiritual bypassing is a superficial way of glossing over problems in a way that might make us feel better in the short term, but ultimately solves nothing and just leaves the problem to linger on.

• Projecting overly positiveness or redirecting people away from their "negative" thinking to produce and live only a "positive" outcome
• Belief that we draw negative events into our own lives, therefore implying persons with a challenging life must have manifest it for a reason
• Believing that all others have to do to avoid the terrible victimhoods of their own lives (whilst only explaining their true feelings) is be positive and "rise above this depression like I do"
• Dismissive of other's pain or issues, instead seeing them as self-caused
• Lacks empathy and is unable to get inside other people's problems with them, due to a spiritual bliss anatomy of over-positive blindness and ignorance operating
• Believing that everyone is the "creator" of their reality, therefore if bad things happen it's the person's own fault that they created a bad event
• Inability to accept things as they really are, with a need or hidden subconcious desire to overlay the inner mental desires on top of the real reality = gaslighting of the self. Denies gaslighting of the self, and tends to believe others are not able to see the (superior) vantage point of the spiritual bypass agent.

Outcomes of Spiritual Bypassing

• Not feeling truly listened to nor understood and instead feeling confused or possibly gaslit by the spiritual bypass events
• Misplaced trust in the person appearing to operate with spiritual bypassing themes; taking on board the spiritual bypass as a form of superior attitude than dealing with emotional problems
• Cognitive dissonance: confusion or pedestalling the spiritual bypass techniques attempting to deal with life problems by ignoring their existence through the spiritual bypass mechansims
• Delayed emotional intelligence and delayed self-responsibility, in leui of the bypassing as a more favoured spiritually positive experience
• Poor choices based in ignorance, unable to apportion self-responsibility and instead place blame upon others, or god, or spirit

Examples

Spiritual bypassing can sometimes be difficult to spot because it is often very subtle. However, looking at examples can help make this phenomenon more apparent:

Following the death of a loved one, people tell surviving relatives that the deceased is “in a better place” and that it was “all part of God’s plan.” A woman is angry and upset about something that someone else has done. When she tries to share her feelings, her friends tell her to stop being so negative. A relative regularly crosses boundaries and behaves in ways that are hurtful to other family members. Rather than confront this behavior, those who have been harmed feel that they need to repress their anger and remain overly tolerant.