Spiritual Bypassing by Karen Tate

Spiritual Bypassing

According to Wikipedia, spiritual bypassing is a "tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks."

This term was introduced in the mid 1980s by John Welwood, a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist who believed bypassing stunts people’s emotional development because it gives them an excuse not to look at painful issues. These issues can be political, social, cultural, familial, religious, etc.  In other words it’s a defense mechanism, a stall tactic, an avoidance mechanism for traumatized people to avoid what’s uncomfortable in their life.  We probably all do it to some degree to avoid the pain of our traumas and we might not be aware. 

According to JT --“When I talked about the bad behavior of someone, I was told to be compassionate.  Forgive.  I tried but I also began to see that trying to love and forgive bad behavior just lowered my defenses to abuse which I was beginning to normalize.“ Thank you JT.  I’m so glad to be hearing the words “normalizing abuse”!  I guess people have actually been hearing what I’ve been saying in my book, Normalizing Abuse!

Cindy was frustrated and said, “I’m fed up with this phoney love and compassion nonsense  It’s just people running from their shadow and making themselves feel good about it. And Sarah wrote…"Some family members made me out to be the bully for wanting to talk about things my brother does.  They want to gaslight me into thinking nothing happened or it wasn’t so bad.  Be the bigger person, take the high road and forgive!  Easy for them to say.  I was the injured party, not them!” 

According to Dr. Robert Augustus Masters, Ph.D in his book Spiritual Bypassing:  When Spirituality Disconnects Us From What Really Matters, “Spiritual bypassing is a very persistent shadow of spirituality, manifesting in many forms, often without being acknowledged as such. Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, over-emphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one’s negativity or shadow, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being….”  

Dr. Masters validates this avoidance behavior saying “When we are engaged in blind compassion we rarely show any anger, for we not only believe that compassion has to be gentle, we are also frightened of upsetting anyone, especially to the point of their confronting us.  This is reinforced by our judgment of anger, especially in its more fiery forms, as something less than spiritual; something to be equated with ill will, hostility and aggression, something that should not be there if we were truly loving. Blind compassion reduces us to harmony junkies, entrapping us in unrelentingly positive expression. 

That brought Dr. Masters back to mind as he says… “With blind compassion we don’t know how to – or won’t learn how to – say “no” with any real power, avoiding confrontation at all costs and, as a result, enabling unhealthy patterns to continue…When we mute our essential voice, our openness is reduced to a permissive gap, an undiscerning embrace, a poorly boundaried receptivity, all of which indicate a lack of compassion for ourselves (in that we don’t adequately protect ourselves).  Blind anger confuses anger with aggression, forcefulness with violence, judgment with condemnation, caring with exaggerated tolerance, and moral maturity with spiritual correctness.”

Let me remind you of the warrior goddesses who stand up in courage and strength, not cower or spiritually bypass because they’re unable to handle the uncomfortable or painful.   I believe the lion-headed Egyptian Goddess, Sekhmet, calls us to stand in our power, to say “no” without guilt or shame and set healthy boundaries so we’re not used or abused.  She is fierce compassion and tough love.  Even aspects of Quan Yin can be found holding various weapons including a pen and sword.  

SHE, the Divine Feminine, is not calling us to be spiritual, emotional or physical door mats.  Nor does She want us to confuse speaking in quiet whispers, being silent or bypassing with being spiritual or emotionally superior.

The Whistleblower Isn’t the Villain in the Story: We cannot change people or their behavior, only how we react to them, but can we as families, communities and cultures stop with the toxic positivity, the spiritual bypassing, the blind and overly tolerant compassion, even the misplaced love for the sake of honesty and our own intellectual, spiritual, political and moral health? 

Perpetrators are showing you who they are.  Wrong-doers, whether in politics or in our own personal orbits shouldn’t get a free pass because others are blind to their abuses, afraid to confront, look at or do something about misconduct, especially in the name of spirituality or even for the sake of the ascension of our culture. 

I say clearly therefore, it is an abuse to shame, demonize or silence the whistleblower or the injured party wronged by a perpetrator! The whistleblower, person or group calling out bad deeds doesn’t cast the same reflection as the person or group committing the bad deeds. Nothing is wrong with recounting deeds, being honest and wanting things to be equitably resolved or rebalanced – and sometimes that gets messy.  Be grateful for the person who is raising the red flag of warning so you have an idea of what might be down the road.