Spiritual Bypassing

 

Spiritual bypassing is 

the use of spiritual ideas and practices to avoid or suppress unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and difficult life experiences. 

Instead of addressing pain, a person might retreat into practices like prayer or meditation as an escape, which can prevent deeper healing and growth. 

The term was introduced by psychologist John Welwood and can manifest as avoiding personal responsibility or using faith to dismiss uncomfortable emotions, as seen in instances of "toxic positivity". 

How it works

• Avoids emotional pain: It uses spiritual beliefs to justify ignoring or denying emotions like grief, anger, or trauma.
• Hinders growth: By sidestepping uncomfortable but necessary work, individuals can develop a false sense of enlightenment without true inner healing.
• Shuts down healing: Instead of processing experiences, it offers a superficial layer of escape, preventing deeper, more integrated healing.
• Manifests as toxic positivity: In some cases, it appears as a belief that one should always feel good or "above" pain, suppressing valid negative feelings. 

 

Examples of spiritual bypassing

1. Telling someone to "just have faith" or "give it to God" instead of acknowledging their pain or working through it.
2. Using affirmations to avoid confronting a difficult reality or a psychological wound.
3. Focusing solely on spiritual practices as an escape from challenging situations, rather than engaging with reality.
4. Dismissing one's own valid negative feelings by saying they are not "spiritual" or "good" enough.
5. In a relationship, failing to take responsibility for one's actions and instead blaming spiritual, not personal, reasons for bad behavior. 

How to avoid spiritual bypassing

• Acknowledge all feelings: Accept all emotions, positive or negative, as valid and temporary.
• Face the "shadow": Engage with and integrate the difficult parts of yourself rather than trying to suppress them.
• Use spirituality as a tool, not an escape: Spiritual practices can be powerful, but they are most effective when used to support, not replace, the hard work of emotional and psychological healing.
• Embrace discomfort: Use uncomfortable feelings as a catalyst for positive change and action, rather than as a signal to escape. 

Created by IA

Spiritual bypassing is a term I coined to describe a process I saw happening in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself. Although most of us were sincerely trying to work on ourselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.

When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits. I see this as an “occupational hazard” of the spiritual path, in that spirituality does involve a vision of going beyond our current karmic situation.

Trying to move beyond our psychological and emotional issues by sidestepping them is dangerous. 

It sets up a debilitating split between the buddha and the human within us. 

And it leads to a conceptual, one-sided kind of spirituality where one pole of life is elevated at the expense of its opposite: Absolute truth is favored over relative truth, the impersonal over the personal, emptiness over form, transcendence over embodiment, and detachment over feeling. 

One might, for example, try to practice nonattachment by dismissing one’s need for love, but this only drives the need underground, so that it often becomes unconsciously acted out in covert and possibly harmful ways instead.

I’m interested in how spiritual bypassing plays out in relationships, where it often wreaks its worst havoc. If you were a yogi in a cave doing years of solo retreat, your psychological wounding might not show up so much because your focus would be entirely on your practice, in an environment that may not aggravate your relational wounds. 

It’s in relationships that our unresolved psychological issues tend to show up most intensely. 

That’s because psychological wounds are always relational — they form in and through our relationships with our early caretakers.

The basic human wound, which is prevalent in the modern world, forms around not feeling loved or intrinsically lovable as we are. 

Inadequate love or attunement is shocking and traumatic for a child’s developing and highly sensitive nervous system. 

And as we internalize how we were parented, our capacity to value ourselves, which is also the basis for valuing others, becomes damaged. 

I call this a “relational wound“ or the “wound of the heart.”

There is a whole body of study and research in Western psychology showing how close bonding and loving attunement— what is known as “secure attachment” — have powerful impacts on every aspect of human development. 

Secure attachment has a tremendous effect on many dimensions of our health, well-being, and capacity to function effectively in the world: how our brains form, how well our endocrine and immune systems function, how we handle emotions, how subject we are to depression, how our nervous system functions and handles stress, and how we relate to others.

In contrast to the indigenous cultures of traditional Asia, modern child-rearing leaves most people suffering from symptoms of insecure attachment: 

self-hatred, disembodiment, lack of grounding, chronic insecurity and anxiety, overactive minds, lack of basic trust, and a deep sense of inner deficiency. 

So most of us suffer from an extreme degree of alienation and disconnection that was unknown in earlier times— from society, community, family, older generations, nature, religion, tradition, our body, our feelings, and our humanity itself.

Being a good spiritual practitioner can become what I call a compensatory identity that covers up and defends against an underlying deficient identity, where we feel badly about ourselves, not good enough, or basically lacking. 

Then, although we may be practicing diligently, our spiritual practice can be used in the service of denial and defense. And when spiritual practice is used to bypass our real-life human issues, it becomes compartmentalized in a separate zone of our life, and remains unintegrated with our overall functioning.

In my psychotherapy practice I often work with students who have engaged in spiritual practice for decades. I respect how their practice has been beneficial for them. Yet despite the sincerity as practitioners, their practice is not fully penetrating their life. 

They seek out psychological work because they remain wounded and not fully developed on the emotional/relational/personal level, and they may be acting out their wounding in harmful ways.

It’s not uncommon to speak beautifully about the basic goodness or innate perfection of our true nature, but then have difficulty trusting it when one’s psychological wounds are triggered. 

Often dharma students who have developed some kindness and compassion for others are hard on themselves for falling short of their spiritual ideals, and, as a result, their spiritual practice becomes dry and solemn. Or being of benefit to others turns into a duty, or a way of trying to feel good about themselves. Others may unconsciously use their spiritual brilliance to feed their narcissistic inflation and devalue others or treat them in manipulative ways.

Meditation is also frequently used to avoid uncomfortable feelings and unresolved life situations. 

For those in denial about their personal feelings or wounds, meditation practice can reinforce a tendency toward coldness, disengagement, or interpersonal distance. They are at a loss when it comes to relating directly to their feelings or to expressing themselves personally in a transparent way. It can be quite threatening when those of us on a spiritual path have to face our woundedness, or emotional dependency, or primal need for love.

I’ve often seen how attempts to be nonattached are used in the service of sealing people off from their human and emotional vulnerabilities. In effect, identifying oneself as a spiritual practitioner becomes used as a way of avoiding a depth of personal engagement with others that might stir up old wounds and longings for love. It’s painful to see someone maintaining a stance of detachment when underneath they are starving for positive experiences of bonding and connection.

To grow into a healthy human being, we need a base of secure attachment in the positive, psychological sense, meaning: close emotional ties to other people that promote connectedness, grounded embodiment, and well-being. 

As John Muir the naturalist wrote: 

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.” 

Similarly, the hand cannot function unless it is attached to the arm—that’s attachment in the positive sense. 

We’re interconnected, interwoven, and interdependent with everything in the universe. 

On the human level we can’t help feeling somewhat attached to people we are close to.

From my perspective as an existential psychologist, feeling is a form of intelligence. 

It’s the body’s direct, holistic, intuitive way of knowing and responding. 

It is highly attuned and intelligent. And it takes account of many factors all at once, unlike our conceptual mind, which can only process one thing at a time. 

Unlike emotionality, which is a reactivity that is directed outward, feeling often helps you contact deep inner truths.

The truth is, most of us don’t get as triggered anywhere in our lives as much as in intimate relationships. 

So if we use spiritual bypassing to avoid facing our relational wounds, we’re missing out on a tremendous area of practice. 

Relational practice helps us develop compassion “in the trenches,” where our wounds are most activated.

I help people inquire deeply into their felt experience and let it gradually reveal itself and unfold, step by step. I call this “tracking and unpacking”: 

You track the process of present experiencing, following it closely and seeing where it leads. 

And you unpack the beliefs, identities, and feelings that are subconscious or implicit in what you’re experiencing. 

When we bring awareness to our experience in this way, it’s like unraveling a tangled ball of yarn: different knots are gradually revealed and untangled one by one.

As a result, we find that we’re able to be present in places where we’ve been absent or disconnected from our experience. Through reaching out to parts of ourselves that need our help, we develop an intimate, grounded kind of inner attunement with ourselves, which can help us more easily relate to others where they are stuck as well.

I see relationship as the leading edge of human evolution at this time in history. 

Although humanity discovered enlightenment thousands of years ago, we still haven’t brought that illumination very fully into the area of interpersonal relationships.

John Welwood

Spiritual bypassing is the pattern where people leap into spirituality prematurely - adopting spiritual language, rituals, or identities without doing the necessary shadow work, character work, or the slow, uncomfortable process of addressing unresolved emotional material and restoring energetic balance.

We see spiritual bypassing especially in healer and spirituality circles - astrology included - where many of us quickly slip into “God talk,” high-vibration language, or spiritual practices before completing the important work of shadow confrontation.

Spiritual bypassing can manifest as:

the “I’m above this” stance, or

the more service-oriented form that stems from the Wounded Healer archetype

Carl Jung was one of the first to articulate the “Wounded Healer” concept - the idea that healers often project their own abandoned, victimized inner child onto the people they want to help, unconsciously attempting to heal themselves through others.

The issue is that when healers themselves are wounded, their helping can come from a place of bias or narcissistic injury.

This can manifest as rescue fantasies, control dynamics, blurred boundaries, or a subtle need to be needed - where the ‘healer’ can do more damage than good, by passing down their own wounded material to the people they are trying to help.

We all know people like this…

And if we’re really honest, we can probably recognize a few of these patterns within ourselves too.

Auch.

That “auch” is actually the most important moment.

If you’ve ever felt that tiny sting of “ouch… this might be me,” then welcome to Shadow! 

That flash of self-recognition is the very essence of Shadow work.

“This might be me” is the most difficult moment in any inner journey - yet it’s also where the most growth happens. 

This moment of self-recognition is what makes the difference between spiritual bypassing and genuine transformation.

Trauma, Shadow, And Spiritual Bypassing

Perhaps this is why the term “Shadow” is so often confused with trauma or with the difficult things that have happened to us.

When we focus exclusively on trauma - which, being rooted in one’s past, is astrologically linked to the IC - we cannot move forward to the next stage of the individuation process: confronting the Shadow, which corresponds to the Descendant.

This is not to minimize the role of trauma or its damaging effects. 

It’s a well-known fact that people who have experienced severe trauma have a far more complex task ahead of them - emotionally, psychologically, and somatically.

But it is important to conceptually differentiate between the 2, because Trauma work and Shadow work require very different approaches.

Trauma calls for trauma-informed support - therapeutic, somatic, or clinical frameworks that help stabilize and heal the nervous system.

Shadow, on the other hand, is encountered through projection - through what we see in others, react to in others, idealize in others, or feel pulled toward in one-on-one relationships.

Trauma is rooted in the past. 

Shadow is activated in the present.

While trauma requires healing, 

Shadow requires integration.

If we consider the psyche developmentally, trauma comes before shadow. 

Here is the “formula,” translated into astrological language using the 4 angles of the natal chart:

Ascendant (Purpose → Ego development)

→ IC (Past / Trauma / Early conditioning)

→ Descendant (Shadow work and relational mirrors)

→ Midheaven (Individuation OR spiritual bypassing / virtue signaling).

Sometimes, when we can’t deal with trauma directly - or when the usual coping strategies stop working - what does work is moving to the next step in the individuation process: Shadow.

Shadow work can be the bridge between trauma and genuine individuation.

Spiritual bypassing, however, is a sign that true Shadow work has been skipped. 

The person has moved straight from IC/trauma to Midheaven/Higher Self, bypassing - or doing incomplete work on - the Descendant stage of Shadow integration.

People who struggle with compulsions, addictions, temper tantrums, or a general sense of “not having grown up yet,” are operating primarily from the IC stage of individuation.

They haven’t done Shadow work because they don’t know how, haven’t been taught how, or haven’t yet developed the internal motivation or psychic structure required to move to the next stage.

Spiritual bypassing is something different.

It mimics Shadow work - or does it halfway.

Unlike people who are stuck in the IC stage, the spiritual bypasser has developed strategies that function well on the surface. They can delay gratification. They can present well socially. They can achieve, succeed, or even inspire others.

But something fundamental has been skipped along the way.

True Shadow work.

When we don’t do shadow work - which is ultimately the process of embracing our whole Self, the good and the bad, the flattering and the unflattering - we cannot be whole.

Even if we achieve success, we don’t fully enjoy it. 

We feel like impostors. We feel anxious, restless, or vaguely unfulfilled. There’s a lingering sense that “there must be more”.

So what happens when Shadow work is skipped?

The Cost Of Skipping Shadow Work

A split occurs - the classic good vs. bad divide in the psyche. The “good” parts are embraced, and the “bad” parts get projected outward.

The spiritually bypassing person naturally places themselves among the “good ones”. And everyone who doesn’t share their views, methods, or level of “awareness” becomes one of the “bad ones”.

The “enemy” becomes the dumping ground for all the negative material the psyche cannot bear to contain on its own.

This splitting strategy kind of works - at least for a while - because it creates a sense of meaning, coherence, and legitimacy. And the psyche loves coherence: “That’s me.” “I’ve always been like this.” “This is who I am.”

But there is a cost.

The cost of not dealing with the Shadow is massive energy consumption.

It takes enormous psychic effort to exile parts of yourself, keep them unconscious, and continually project them outward onto others. There is only so much pressure the unconscious can absorb - only so much our psyche can stuff down and hide in the dark.

At some point, the bubble has to burst.

Eventually, the facade collapses. 

By then, we are so entangled in our own story of who we are - the identity our psyche has carefully constructed to give our life coherence - that we no longer know who we really are.

Because that virtuous, spiritual Self is only half of who we are. The other half sits in a kind of psychic exile, a hole within us that will eventually press to be reclaimed.

And it will be reclaimed. Sooner or later. In this lifetime or the next.

By us - or by our partners, children, or the people closest to us.

Because not dealing with the Shadow has repercussions far beyond our own psychological comfort.

Shadow - Nothing Is Lost, Everything Is Transformed

According to one of the basic principles of physics: nothing is lost - energy is either transferred or transformed.

When the energy 

is not transformed, 

it is transferred. 

This principle explains so much of what we call intergenerational trauma.

Unintegrated psychic material doesn’t disappear - it spills into the relational field, shaping family dynamics, attachment patterns, emotional wounds, and even entire lifelines.

This is why so many children of high-caliber celebrities, successful entrepreneurs, scientists, or public figures - people recognized for excellence, achievement, or “high vibration” virtues - end up stumbling into addiction, emotional volatility, or tragic life stories.

Because the more the parent constructs a facade of being extraordinarily evolved, moral, spiritual, or exceptional, the more exiled the unintegrated material becomes - and that exiled energy has to go somewhere.

Often, it is the people closest to them who unconsciously absorb what the parent refuses to integrate. The child becomes the carrier of the unresolved.

It is this paradox that rings painfully true: 

the more virtuous the parent appears, the more burdened the child often becomes.

The issue, as we can assume, is that the parent is not truly virtuous. This virtuosity has been constructed - achieved by skipping the necessary steps of genuine self-confrontation, genuine humility, and genuine transformation.

It’s the same principle behind spiritual bypassing. In nature - and in life - nothing can truly be bypassed.

Acting from a “higher self,” feeling morally superior, or imagining ourselves as the “better person” can often be signs of an unintegrated Shadow.

Integrating The Shadow

Human nature is messy. We are not born evolved human beings. Of course, Shadow work is not an excuse to throw tantrums or justify bad behavior - at least not beyond our Saturn return.

But it is an invitation to accept our humanity, to welcome the parts of ourselves we might find less desirable, less flattering, or less convenient.

It means paying attention to what we don’t want to deal with. 

To what irritates us. 

To what makes us angry. 

What gets under our skin. 

What we judge. 

What we idealize. 

What we can’t stop thinking about.

The solution is not always to “take a deep breath”. 

Sometimes, no matter how much meditation we do or how many positive affirmations we repeat,

 “this shall NOT pass” - because it’s not meant to.

Sometimes the inevitable next step is to do the real, uncomfortable, liberating work of Shadow integration.

in, Astro Butterfly