20 Signs That You Might Be Spiritually Bypassing

How To Tell If You Might Have Conflict Avoidant Parts Or Parts Trying To Avoid Trauma

"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. 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.…If there's a large gap between our practice and our human side, we remain unripe. Our practice may ripen, but our life doesn't. And there's a certain point when that gap becomes very painful."

-John Welwood, PhD, who coined the term “spiritual bypassing”

In his book Spiritual Bypassing, former cult leader-turned-psychologist Robert Augustus Masters, PhD defines spiritual bypassing as “the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”

He writes:

“We tend not to have very much tolerance, both personally and collectively, for facing, entering, and working through our pain, strongly preferring pain numbing ‘solutions,’ regardless of how much suffering such ‘remedies’ may catalyze. Because this preference has so deeply and thoroughly infiltrated our culture that it has become all but normalized, spiritual bypassing fits almost seamlessly into our collective habit of turning away from what is painful, as a kind of higher analgesic with seemingly minimal side effects. It is a spiritualized strategy not only for avoiding pain but also for legitimizing such avoidance, in ways ranging from the blatantly obvious to the extremely subtle. Spiritual bypassing is a very persistent shadow of spirituality, manifesting in many ways, often without being acknowledged as such. Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis 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 elements, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.”

-Robert Augustus Masters, PhD

We have to remember that it hurts to be human, and pain is always here for a reason. Pain is usually our body’s or our heart’s way of saying, “Pay attention. Something is out of whack and needs to be healed inside or reformed outside.” When we use “conflict avoidance in holy drag” to avoid pain, we limit the true growth our souls and our societies crave.

In a Super Soul Session, Glennon Doyle spoke eloquently about all the ways we try to avoid feeling what she calls “the hot loneliness,” including scrolling mindlessly through social media or popping pills. Just think of all the ways that our culture teaches us to grab for “Easy buttons,” the quick fixes and self-help tools and antidepressants and booze and social media obsessions and all the other things marketers target into our psyches to promise that there’s an easy way out of pain. In spiritual circles, the Easy buttons cloak themselves in spiritual garb. The Easy buttons come in the form of hours of yoga or meditation spent inhabiting non-dual awareness or ayahuasca ceremonies every weekend or attending one spiritual retreat after another seeking the next tool to avoid feeling the hot loneliness.

Glennon says, “The problem is that when we transport ourselves out of our hot loneliness, we miss all of our transformation. Because everything we need to become the people we were meant to become next is actually inside the hot loneliness of now. So when we Easy button our way out we are like caterpillars who jump out of the cocoon right before we would have become butterflies. Because pain is actually not a hot potato. It’s the traveling professor and it knocks on everybody’s door, and the wisest ones say, ‘Come in. Sit down, and don’t leave until you’ve taught me what I need to know.’ But we’ve got it all wrong. We are afraid of pain, but we were made for pain. We need to be afraid of the Easy buttons. Because the journey of the Love Warrior is to rush toward her pain and let her pain become her power.”

Being human hurts. We try so hard to avoid this fact, doing our best to numb ourselves with various addictions, overwork, obsessive love affairs, toxic positivity, or spiritual bypassing techniques to try to “love and light” our way past the pain. But no matter how you run away from pain, pain will track you down, stalking you like a leopard until you finally dive down into it and really let it touch you, not just intellectually, but  emotionally, somatically, and spiritually. When we’re ready, we have to go all the way into the pain (ideally with the help of a great trauma therapist) before our pain can transform us into the people we are meant to be next.

When people who have been spiritually bypassing first hear about the concept, it can be triggering and confusing, especially if someone suggests that spiritual bypassing can harm the bypasser, as well as other people.  It’s crucial to understand that spiritual bypassing is a trauma symptom, and all trauma deserves our compassion. We only use our spirituality to bypass painful feelings, beliefs, and core wounds if something hurts inside. It’s a much safer form of self-medication than heroin, but it is a way to self-medicate nonetheless. As spiritual teacher Adyashanti says, “You can get drunk on alcohol. You can get drunk on spirituality.” 

Just like breaking any addiction, nobody gets sober until they’re ready to face the music. If you’re reading this, I assume it’s because you’re ready to at least sit in on a sort of Spiritual Bypassing Recovery 12 Step meeting- to try it on, to wonder, to decide whether you’re ready to get spiritually sober or not. No judgment. Your choice.

Spiritual bypassing can be a potent way to protect ourselves from the pain of everyday life, so we won’t move beyond it until we’re ready to handle reality.  Like any addiction, we will keep spiritually bypassing until we’re ready to release these tendencies of our own free will, not because someone is pressuring us or shaming us, but because we’re resilient enough to move beyond this phase, with love and gratitude for how this way of being has helped us cope with hard times. 

Usually, this turning point happens and people become ready for recovery when it hurts too much to keep indulging in whatever behavior helps you numb your pain. Spiritual bypassing may not hurt you or others as much as a substance abuse addiction would, but make no mistake about it. While it has many benefits and can be very useful when you’re acutely suffering, spiritual bypassing prevents what truly heals and facilitates ongoing suffering- for yourself and others.

Robert Augustus Masters writes:

“The explosion of interest in spirituality, especially Eastern spirituality, since the mid-1960s has been accompanied by a corresponding interest and immersion in spiritual bypassing—which has, however, not very often been named, let alone viewed, as such. It has been easier to frame spiritual bypassing as a religion-transcending, spiritually advanced practice/ perspective, especially in the facile fast-food spirituality that infects our times. Many of the features of this, such as its drive-through servings of reheated wisdom like ‘Don’t take it personally’ or ‘Whatever bothers you about someone is really only about you’ or ‘It’s all just an illusion,’ are available for consumption and parroting by just about anyone. Happily, the honeymoon with false or superficial notions of spirituality is starting to wane. Enough bubbles have been burst; enough spiritual teachers, Eastern and Western, have been caught with pants or halo down; enough time has been spent with spiritual baubles, credentials, energy transmissions, and gurucentrism to sense deeper treasures.”

What characterizes spiritual bypassing? How can we recognize it in ourselves or others? Here are some common tendencies.