Deprogramming From Spiritual Bypassing Belief Systems

Excerpt From Love Bigger: An Exploration Of Spirituality Without Spiritual Bypassing

Our spiritual beliefs and practices can be some of the most sensitively guarded, defensively protected aspects of ourselves. Questioning them can feel disillusioning, disappointing, destabilizing, and disorienting, not to mention confusing. Our nervous systems can be quite fragile around such things, especially if we are in the privileged race, caste, socioeconomic classes, health status, education bracket, gender, or sexual identity but have also experienced trauma, as almost everyone has. This does not excuse our tendency to avoid fully healing young child-like parts so we can grow up and face reality. But it still needs our tender-hearted compassion and self-gentleness. Bullying our parts to try to make them heal and grow up faster never helps. But coddling our fragile parts so we don’t have to face them and heal them doesn’t help either.

As BIPOC trauma therapist, anti-racism teacher, and author of My Grandmother Hands Resmaa Menakem preaches, we have to temper and condition our nervous systems to be able to tolerate facing the pain of reality head on so we can heal, comfort, and grow up our developmentally stunted young parts, so we can be in choice about living with more integrity, honesty, and sacred activism. We can do so vulnerably and gingerly, not bullying our parts, but not indulging them either.

The good news is that, as long and slow as the process of recovery from spiritual bypassing tendencies can be, we can handle it- as long as we remember that we all have a spiritual Self that can hold us through it. It’s not just some of us who have a Self. Every single one of us does, and that Self cannot be traumatized, broken, wounded, or indoctrinated. It can break through in the most unexpected ways to help us heal.

If you’ve suffered from spiritual abuse or used your spirituality to unwittingly hurt others, you’re not alone in having been harmed and caused harm because of a set of spiritual beliefs that outgrow their usefulness at some point. Many can relate to the experience of either being born into a spiritual belief system and community of practice or joining one later in life. We all crave a sense of belonging, and especially when life gets hard, as it has for so many people lately, spirituality offers community, comforting beliefs and practices, hope for a better self and a better, more utopian future, a sense of certainty that can create the illusion of security in an insecure world, a way of making sense of a world that sometimes makes no sense, and resolution of uncertainty into dogma so we don’t feel so scared.

While such things might seem like healthy, comforting ways to navigate times of chaos, these tendencies come with a dark side that can hobble us when we need both feet on the ground and all critical faculties on deck. They can also soothe us when we should feel uncomfortable, narcotize us when we need to feel pain, and lull us into a false sense of security when reality is largely insecure. 

This tendency to use spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with trauma and unmet developmental needs, facing difficult to face realities, confronting injustice, standing up for yourself or others who might be oppressed, dealing with necessary conflict, and getting involved politically- termed “spiritual bypassing” by Buddhist psychologist John Welwood, PhD- is a common phase in the spiritual development of some people. Spiritual bypassing can happen not only in New Age communities, fundamentalist religions, and utopian cults; it can also happen in romantic relationships, family systems, and political parties. The belief system of spiritual bypassing tends to be governed by a series of oppressive beliefs propagated by so-called spiritual leaders who indoctrinate followers into such beliefs.  Then those followers go on to evangelize them like wildfire, to their children, to their friends and families, to their workplaces, and in their own inner worlds. 

The tendency to spiritually bypass crosses religions and this “groomed for abuse” belief system is not limited only to spiritual communities. Spiritual bypassing impacts families that are dominated by a coercively controlling parent, couples who are essentially a cult of two, work environments dominated by a controlling boss, and entire systems like the Catholic church or the yoga teacher training industry. The use of spiritual bypassing indoctrination impacts nearly every religion, including many Christian churches, the New Age “spiritual but not religious” industry, and the “non-dual” spirituality world based on a Westernized interpretation of Eastern religions.

As Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan explains in The Trauma of Caste, it also impacts modern Hinduism and the culturally appropriated white yoga community, which Soundararajan argues needs to be “de-Brahmanized” to end the caste oppression of innocent people born “untouchable” in much the same way that anti-racist activists are encouraging us to root out systemic racism in a “pigmentocracy” culture that elevates light skinned people and oppresses the darker skinned.

Although it has been clear to oppressed people long before 2020, the racial reckoning of 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd murder brought into stark light the oppressive nature of many spiritual belief systems. The #MeToo movement also catalyzed the fall of many cultic leaders who preach and indoctrinate spiritual bypassing beliefs that groom vulnerable trauma survivors to tolerate sexual abuse and other forms of oppression without holding leaders accountable.

For the purposes of deprogramming the indoctrination around spiritual bypassing patterns, I tried to focus in LOVE BIGGER on New Age spirituality, the yoga and wellness world, and the non-dual, presence-preaching “spiritual but not religious” belief systems, as they’ve been interpreted in the West. What we’ll cover will certainly be helpful to anyone at risk of coercive control, whether in a romantic relationship, in a cultic family system, or in a religious community that practices spiritual bypassing. But for the purposes of dissecting the beliefs commonly promoted by New York Times bestselling and Oprah-endorsed “spiritual teachers,” as we unpack New Age dogma through a trauma-informed, anti-oppression, decolonizing and anti-racist lens, we’ll focus specifically on how insidious spiritual bypassing is and how easily it can be used to oppress people, silence dissenters, disempower the oppressed, and avoid getting politically active.

Seekers looking for comfort from the slings and arrows of human life, especially in chaotic and unpredictable times, are vulnerable prey to being indoctrinated, coercively controlled, conned, exploited, and groomed to tolerate abusive behavior by religious leaders and spiritual teachers who seek to use those beliefs to oppress the believers. Sadly, those who are indoctrinated often quite innocently and unwittingly weaponize those beliefs to participate in the oppression of others when they think they’re actually helping people. Anyone committed to including anti-racism and decolonizing practices into their spirituality needs to pick apart with a critical lens the beliefs we aim at ourselves and bleed onto others.

The practice of certain spiritual bypassing belief systems not only oppresses entire communities of marginalized people. We can also weaponize these beliefs to oppress and abuse ourselves, preventing us from standing up for ourselves when we are getting mistreated and causing us to bully our most tender, vulnerable, traumatized parts. Just as a spiritual seeker might say to someone who is protesting oppression, “Get out of your victim story and take responsibility for the bad things that happen to you,” that same individual is likely to bully the victimized parts of themselves, blaming themselves for abuses that were not their fault. Bullying oneself and others in the name of spirituality and holding oneself accountable not only perpetuates abuses of power, locks in systems of oppression, and prevents holding perpetrators of unethical behavior accountable; it also causes innocent seekers to oppress themselves and others rather than heal from trauma.

When people break out of the trance of the spiritual bypassing indoctrination, they are often horrified to realize not only that they have allowed themselves to be masochistically mistreated, but also that they have unintentionally hurt others by propagating such beliefs and practices. When the penny drops, it can feel shattering, especially because we spiritual seekers tend to think we’re good, righteous, progressive, compassionate people who are non-judgmental and nice. Seekers may identify with many spiritual values that fluff us up, such as being an unconditionally loving or kind or benevolent or unprejudiced person. The cognitive dissonance that rings through our nervous systems if we realize that maybe we aren’t always so kind or loving- to ourselves or others- can lead to a painful inner fall from grace.

We can comfort ourselves by realizing that a true spirituality catches us right where we fall from the grandiosity of our identification as a righteous or “spiritual” person. Right when we might be tempted to collapse in shame, we are met in the temples of our own hearts with the unconditional love of the divinity that lives inside us all. At the same time as we might feel the startling sting of shame, regret, and remorse for the trauma we allowed ourselves to tolerate and inflicted upon others, we are cocooned and forgiven by that force of love which accepts us and holds us in sacred space, no matter what.

Waking up to the pain that rides shotgun with spiritual bypassing belief systems can feel very confusing, especially if the realization hits you quickly and takes you off guard, as it did for many during the Covid pandemic. That confusion often stems from recognizing how comforting these belief systems can be, especially if you’re in a privileged class, race, caste, gender, or other unjustly privileged group. Without those beliefs, reality can feel stark, cold, unfair, and uncomfortably uncertain. 

Holding Both/And

Like many things in life, the tendency to spiritually bypass comes with both light and shadow. This can feel bewildering for trauma survivors who might have a tendency towards black and white thinking. Unable to lump all things “spiritual” into either “all good” or “all bad,” they might be tempted to throw out the baby with the bathwater, turning away from spirituality altogether as a result of spiritual or religious trauma. To do so would be an understandable trauma symptom of religious or spiritual abuse. What I’ll be writing about spiritual bypassing recovery is designed to help you keep your health and happiness-inducing spirituality- while also unpacking and rooting out the oppressive tendencies built into spiritually bypassing belief systems.

If we throw out the baby with the bathwater, we run the risk of winding up in a great void that can further traumatize us. Rather than converting to the dogma of scientific materialism and skepticism, throwing out all mysteries and everything that falls in the realm of the sacred, we need to root out spiritual bypassing and replace it with a true spirituality, one that does not bypass trauma or the realities of a suffering world but also does not negate the sacred, holy mysteries in all of creation.

Deprogramming the indoctrination of spiritual bypassing requires a slow, steady recovery process. Just as recovering from cancer, an addiction, or an eating disorder takes time, needs diligence, and requires a community to help support the recovery process, spiritual bypassing recovery needs gentleness, patience, and the decision to make this your #1 priority for a while. It won’t be easy. It will require feeling some pain. It may not be as comfortable as the “love and light” crowd feels, at least in the beginning, but the rewards will be worth it. 

Why bother? Why detox from the comforting narcotic of spiritual bypassing? Because the payoff is intimacy- intimacy with your own traumatized parts, a deeper intimacy with other people, a heart-opening intimacy with oppressed and marginalized groups you may have inadvertently participated in oppressing, and a more vulnerable, tender-hearted intimacy with life itself.

There comes a time in spiritual bypassing recovery when we have to hold nuanced paradoxes, dissecting our belief systems and discerning what supports the life force in ourselves and our culture and what does not. Choosing which people and benefits to keep and which beliefs, practices, and people we need to give up as part of recovery is no small task and may take years to sort out. But it is work worth doing. Only then will we land on a spirituality that is truly nourishing, healing, social justice conscious, trauma-informed, and facing reality head on.

Such is the point of this education about spirituality without bypassing- to support your recovery from oppressive,  self-negating, reality-denying, masochistic indoctrinated belief systems and help you find your way to a spirituality that supports life, heals trauma, reverses oppressive and unjust systems, and participates in creating a world where nobody matters more than anyone else, all humans have equal rights, everyone is deserving of dignity, nature is our church, and we cooperate with sacred activism to solve the major problems our species and our world now face. 

If you’ve been using spirituality to avoid facing what has felt too painful to face- about yourself, your loved ones, or the world- you’re not alone.  There are hundreds of millions of others who have done the same, and you need not beat yourself up over it.  Spiritual bypassing is a trauma symptom that serves an intelligent purpose while we need it, helping us cope with an often overwhelming world.  Then one day, we either simply outgrow that phase, just as a toddler outgrows the “terrible twos,” or we get thrust out of it when our trauma burden gets too enormous to suppress anymore and our pain breaks through the bypassing, or our divine Self breaks through our defenses and calls us to a deeper truth.

We may have nostalgia for the spiritual bypassing phase once we grow beyond it, since it can be a lovely, even ecstatic phase of development for some people, especially those with more unearned privileges. It can function for an extended period of time to numb the pain it’s meant to override.  But if we fail to move beyond it, we get stuck in spiritual ruts, interrupting our progress on the psychological and spiritual path of healing and development in ways that can harm our relationships, the way we parent, our health, our creativity, our careers, our political engagement and activism if we are lucky enough to be part of a democracy, and our way of being in a world in need of our love. Making the move to develop beyond spiritual bypassing is a monumental step. Even still, it can be a scary, vulnerable, and painful step. It helps to have a gentle off-ramp during your recovery from this phase.

Daring to move to the other side of spiritual bypassing is a brave, badass step on the spiritual path. It’s also a very raw, vulnerable, and tender step because it often means you’ve grown up enough to realize that you may have been using your spirituality as a Band-aid to cover up the pain of unhealed trauma- in yourself or in the world.  If you’ve also been imposing your spiritual bypassing tendencies onto others, this may mean you’re coming face to face with some shadow work, as you realize that you may have lacked empathy- not only for your suffering parts but for the suffering of others.  This can be hard to face, which is why this next phase of spiritual development you are awakening into requires extreme self-compassion, gentleness, a deeply grounded body, an open heart, a realization that you can’t do better until you know better, and a community of others who are loving and accepting you wherever you are on your journey.  

So please- before we dive into the details, start with giving yourself a high five, a holy Hallelujah, and a big bear hug for being so brave.  Please know that by collecting together the material I’ll be sharing here, my intention is to help educate you and make it easier for you to explore in yourself what I have spent years unpacking on my own journey and in my own trauma therapy. You are free to take or leave whatever you learn here. I cannot guarantee that my own blind spots are not embedded in this material, nor would I ever want you to give your power away to me or take anything I say at face value without filtering it through your own discernment. Take what resonates. Toss what doesn’t. Trust yourself and the Divine within you.

In the first essays I’ll be sharing, we will be inquiring about and examining these spiritual beliefs, aphorisms, thought patterns, and practices through the lens of the unraveling of our culture in today’s post-2020 times. The questions we will examine will revolve around deprogramming- what must fall apart, what we must let go of. But we need not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We willl be throwing out the bathwater, but paradoxically, this dismantling will also help us crystallize the preciousness and value of the babies we want to keep as we move past deprogramming into a rebuilding phase of the healing journey. 

When we focus on rebuilding, we will be asking the question, “What is a healthier spirituality- one that his trauma-informed, embodied, emotionally intelligent, grounded in science and 3D reality, open to the mystical, in touch with the earth, empathic to the suffering in ourselves, in others, and in nature, politically engaged, and responsive to social justice issues?” The intention of this material is not to leave you lost, empty, spiritually bankrupt, and Godless. It’s to find the jewels in our spirituality, the gemstones of old and new that are inclusive of all marginalized people, in touch with the feminine, empathic, actively anti-racist and decolonizing,, and helping us be better stewards of each other and more caring citizens of Planet Earth.

As you read this, stay gentle with yourself and others. This is hard work, and if you’ve been using your spirituality to keep things light and superficial, avoid feeling your pain, or stay on Easy Street, this can feel rough. Think of it as tough love with a gentle hug. This is fierce compassion, flowing from a broken open heart burning with the passion of a desire that all beings who are suffering may one day find peace, equality, and justice. Only when we face the suffering within ourselves are we capable of offering love, compassion, true forgiveness, mercy, and grace to one another.  If our spirituality isn’t making us kinder- to ourselves and each other- maybe we need to love bigger. 

What is in this book may not always be what you want to hear. Those inclined towards reading spiritual books tend to enjoy feeling comforted, inspired, uplifted, and soothed. What you read may feel disorienting or disappointing or downright despairing sometimes, because the reality is that we are in a lot of trouble as humans on this planet right now. With that disclaimer, it is my hope that you will be trading in a false comfort for a truer mercy, a narcotized, ungrounded fantasy for a reality checking deep ground, and a way of being that causes harm for a deeper intimacy with our tender selves and the tender others who have been oppressed by religion and New Age spirituality,

It can feel crushing, destabilizing and disorienting to realize that most of what we think of as religious or spiritual teaching is really just meant to comfort the oppressive classes and make them feel better about maintaining power over the oppressed, disabling their natural empathy so they don’t leverage their power and privilege to uplift those they oppress and end the oppression. It’s also meant to indoctrinate the oppressed masses into ways of thinking that groom people for abuse and coerce them into not holding those in power accountable for the ways they might abuse their power.  Only just now are we beginning to turn the tables on this age-long power imbalance.

In Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything,Barbara Ehrenreich writes, “Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed the hungry or lift the fallen. Mercy is left entirely to us.”

I don’t identify as an atheist; nor do I identify as a theist. But I do believe that, in the end, morality means realizing that any belief that we live in a friendly universe requires humans to tap into the spiritual Source inside each one of us, and from this place, we have the opportunity to befriend one another and have mercy on the suffering that is part of the human experience- and do something to ease it, if at all possible. The goal of all spirituality is to find God inside each one of us, and live from there.

Mark Nepo says it best in Unlearning Back To God:

“Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry; an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace... To know this spot of Inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.

When the film is worn through, we have moments of enlightenment, moments of wholeness, moments of Satori as the Zen sages term it, moments of clear living when inner meets outer, moments of full integrity of being, moments of complete Oneness. And whether the film is a veil of culture, of memory, of mental or religious training, of trauma or sophistication, the removal of that film and the restoration of that timeless spot of grace is the goal of all therapy and education.

Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God.”