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.

• Believing that "spirit" tells us to do everything
• Obvious co-dependancy upon spiritual positive forces, cannot tell that spiritual forces are also trickers and masters of illusion for the purposes of control
• Gives power away to spiritual forces, whilst not taking real life accountability for the self and the self-choices and interactions

• 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.

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.

Spiritual bypassing is also often used to dismiss the very real concerns of people who are dealing with problems. People who are faced with discrimination are often advised to simply be “nice,” “civil,” or “patient” when dealing with blatant abuse. It suggests that people can rely on individual positive thinking to overcome complex social issues.

Recognizing Spiritual Bypassing

These common phrases could be considered to be spiritually bypassing and not taking full account of the situations at hand:

"Everything happens for a reason." "You create your own happiness." "It was for the best." "It was a blessing in disguise." "Good vibes only!" “Thoughts and prayers!” Before resorting to platitudes, ask yourself who the comment is really helping. Is it really giving someone comfort or insight, or is it just a way of dismissing a difficult situation so that you can feel better?

Causes & Effects of Spiritual Bypassing

Spiritual bypassing acts as a form of defense mechanism. It protects us from things that seem too painful to deal with, but this protection comes at a cost. Ignoring or avoiding the issue can make stress worse in the long-term and make the problem more difficult to solve later on. While avoidance is a primary motivator behind this type of behavior, there are other factors that play a role in shaping it.

Wellness culture, which often perpetuates ideas of toxic positivity and permanent optimism, is sometimes a driving force behind spiritual bypassing. It teaches people that they cannot be well or healthy unless they are able to rise above any negativity. The problem with this is that negative emotions are normal and often a sign that something needs to change. Ignoring these signs can lead to worse problems down the road.

An individualistic culture that promotes the idea that people must aim for self-actualization in order to achieve true happiness also contributes to a tendency to avoid difficult or painful emotions. Rather than trying to solve problems in the environment that lead to pain, individualism teaches people that they alone are responsible for their destiny.

Someone on the receiving end of the narratives given by Spiritual Bypassing may feel or sense and later observe and unravel the following:

• 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

Impact

Spiritual bypassing isn't always a bad thing. In times of severe distress, it can be a way to temporarily relieve frustration or anxiety. However, researchers suggest that it can be damaging when used as a long-term strategy to suppress problems.1

Spiritual bypassing can have a number of negative effects. It can affect individual well-being as well as relationships with others. Some of the potential negative consequences include:

• Anxiety
• Blind allegiance to leaders
• Codependency
• Control problems
• Disregard for personal responsibility
• Emotional confusion
• Excessive tolerance of unacceptable or inappropriate behavior
• Feelings of shame
• Spiritual narcissism
• Spiritual narcissism involves using spiritual practices as a way to increase self-importance. It often involves using spirituality to build the individual up, while also wielding it as a weapon to tear others down.

Denying Difficult Emotions

People often engage in spiritual bypassing when they think that they should not be feeling what they are feeling. Negative emotions can be overwhelming at times. Feeling of anger, jealousy, disgust, annoyance, and rage can be distressing, and people may find themselves feeling ashamed or guilty for feeling or thinking such things. Rather than deal with the negative feelings—and any resulting reactions to those feelings—spiritual bypassing becomes a tool for avoidance.Just as you shouldn’t try to suppress your own negative emotions in order to avoid discomfort, you should also avoid the desire to save other people from emotions or situations that make you uncomfortable. Trying to save or shield others—either from their circumstances or their own poor choices—can also become a form of spiritual bypassing.

Dismissing Other People’s Emotions

Spiritual bypassing can be a tool to dismiss what others are feeling. At times, spiritual bypassing can be used as a tool to gaslight others into staying silent about things that have harmed them.Rather than being allowed to express their pain, people who have been harmed are told by others that they are being a negative person. This tendency uses spirituality to reframe events in a way that lets people off the hook for the harm they may have caused.

Avoiding Responsibility

Spiritual bypassing also reduces the discomfort that people may feel as a result of cognitive dissonance. People feel uncomfortable when they hold two conflicting beliefs or when they behave in ways that are not in accordance with their beliefs.For example, if you believe yourself to be a good person, you might struggle to take responsibility for hurtful things that you have done. Admitting that you have harmed someone else through your actions not only causes feelings of guilt—it also conflicts with your desire to see yourself in a positive light. In this way, spiritual bypassing becomes a way to shift the blame back onto the other person while absolving yourself of any responsibility.

Anecdotes to Spiritual Bypassing

• Learning to question everything and remain kindly skeptical in order to make informed decisions over time
• Understanding negative energies do actually exist
• Being willing to listen and hear others emotions and life events without labelling or judging them as negative or positive
• Understanding that over-positivity to a person in deep truama is felt as extremely lacking in empathy and support. This can further widen the gap of trust between individuals, if the person using the spiritual bypassing actions continues to believe everyone else is the problem, and not their blindspots of overt-positivity and higher vibrations
• Be aware that each person develops their beliefs from their life experiences. In spirituality and religion, some of the harshest lies and paltering has been inlaid to have humanity be enslaved to these idealisms and ideas which actually have no resemblance nor factual interface with real life events.
• Check for cognitive dissonance. This is where two opposing or competing beliefs are believed as the same, or that they can exist together. This generates split reality, and means the person has a difficult time of understanding that two things which cannot truly co-exist is what they believe as similar truths. The cognitive dissonance comes when a positive person believes *only* in the positive, denying the negative, even if it is present at the same time. The cognitive dissonance says - this is weighted in positivity and thus cannot determine a real life assessment of the actual events as they are happening. This creates the blindspot, and to gloss over the negative.
• Check for over-positive projections like rose tinted glasses type of romantic ideals; check reality as it really is, and not how the inner spiritual desires want things to be.
• Assess personal risk and danger. Assess behaviours and actions - Do they line up? If not, look for possible spiritual bypassing and engage self checking to release from the patterns of the dynamics.
• Don't just take someone's word - check and assess for yourself for your own resonance
• Understand your innocence and weaknesses, double check that you are not overly dependant on anyone else especially if you detect a new-age tactic of toxic positivity.

References

Article adapted from [[1]]