Spiritual Life and Our Emotions: When Spirituality Avoids Feeling

Spiritual bypassing names a subtle but pervasive tendency within spiritual life: the use of spiritual beliefs or practices to avoid painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. While often unconscious and well-intentioned, it can quietly undermine growth, wholeness, and genuine transformation.

What Is Spiritual Bypassing?

The term spiritual bypassing, coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1983, describes the use of spiritual beliefs or practices to avoid engaging with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and unmet developmental needs.

It is pervasive in our culture - both personally and collectively - where we don't have much tolerance or acquired skill to face our pain, preferring instead a numbing analgesic, particularly if it can be seemingly legitimized by 'higher' spiritual goals and values. The critical problem is that by avoiding confronting our pain, uncomfortable feelings and wounds, we 'split-off' part of ourselves and undermine our growth and capacity towards 'wholeness' or peace, the root of which, in biblical language, is the same. And for those in the Christian tradition, as well as other spiritualities, we are called to a life of peace, which is about completeness and fullness of our life and humanity rather than internally dividing ourselves into good and bad.

When Spiritual Practice Becomes Avoidance

Spiritual bypassing is a very persistent shadow side of spirituality, manifesting in many forms, often without being acknowledged as such. It can show itself in subtle and familiar ways, for example:

• Exaggerated detachment

• Emotional numbing & repression

• Overdone niceness verses emotional depth & authenticity

• Overemphasis on the positive

• Anger-phobia (confusing anger with aggression and ill will)

• Debilitating judgment about one’s negativity or shadow side

• Weak or porous boundaries

• Blind or overly tolerant compassion

The Cost of Splitting Ourselves

A common example is someone who runs around continuously seeking to serve and help the needs of others, often to great physical and personal detriment to themselves. In our faith communities we can reward such people as shining examples. However, if such sacrifice is done, at root, to cover over a sense of deep inadequacy and wounded identity, seeking the love and affirmation of others to buoy up a painful sense of worthlessness, then the so called 'self-less' behaviour is a way of dissociating from this uncomfortable feeling giving the illusion that all is well, avoiding addressing the real inner need to feel unconditionally accepted and truly loved.

As I explore in my earlier writing on this in 'Spiritual Life & Our Emotions: Towards Wholeness and Integration', it is only by recognising and staying with these needs in all their painful nakedness, and by bringing them into relationship with an unconditional, loving divine presence, that such wounds begin to heal. The laying down of ourselves in service of others needs to arise from a healthy ego willing to transcend itself — not from an injured ego using sacrifice and service to shore up a fragile sense of worth.

Being a “good Christian” can become a compensatory identity that covers over and defends against an underlying sense of deficiency — a felt experience of not being good enough, or of being fundamentally lacking. In this way, spirituality can be used to stay psychologically afloat, albeit rather precariously, with a veneer of bright spiritual acceptability that avoids the darker, more fearful material in our depths. When we refuse part of ourselves, and the paradox of our humanity, we create in our psyche what Carl Jung describes as our shadow — those aspects of ourselves we would rather not see, acknowledge, or bring into the light.

If we bury part of ourselves, feeling unacceptable or bad because of our emotional nature, our spirituality may exacerbate our feelings of worthlessness or 'sinfulness' and actually rewound us. Someone who fears their capacity to feel strong emotions, such as anger, as being bad in some way, suppressing them, can compensate by becoming overly tolerant, avoiding confrontation, and being 'nice' in quite an inauthentic way.

When we're entrenched in spiritual bypassing we tend to like our relationships sweet and light - no confrontation, no anger, no messy feelings. Relentless kindness, positivity and smiles tend to dominate the relational menu with everyone doing their best to make nice. But there is not just denial here but dissociation masquerading as loving kindness. Trying to move beyond our psychological and emotional issues by side-steeping them like this is superficial and dangerous. It sets up a debilitating split between our true Christ-like nature and our humanity, and posits the view that the deepest truth is found in transcendence of the physical, emotional and instinctive nature, undermining the more profoundly challenging message of the Incarnation.

I explore spiritual-bypassing further, contextualising it in today's spiritual cultures in: 'Spiritual Bypassing: Discernment, Healing, and the Holding Presence of God.'

Learning to Be With Our Feelings

Wallowing in our feelings is different from being with them. Wallowing tends to involve becoming caught in repetitive stories — looping around “poor me” or self-justification — whereas being with our feelings means opening directly and nakedly to the felt experience itself, allowing its underlying wisdom to emerge.  So, for example, if the feeling is sadness, wallowing might involve fixating on a story around 'poor me' rather than directly relating to the actual sadness itself, which may then allow us to relate to its underlying wisdom.

A simple example shows how listening to an uncomfortable feeling can become a source of genuine growth. Sue Pickering in her book 'Spiritual Direction: A Practical Introduction' describes a time when at a workshop on the spiritual life she was introduced to a woman who had two books of spiritual poetry published. She reveals how she congratulated her, but when then sitting down felt a wave of envy arise within her. She could have dismissed this response as 'unchristian,' but instead, in the space for reflection that followed, she let herself feel the envy, explore it and acknowledge it before God. In doing so it became clear to her that this 'envy' was drawing her attention to her own deeply held longing to give herself more fully to writing. She resolved to honour that longing and her excellent book above was the creative result. Sue neither rejected the feeling of envy or became swallowed by it, where she may have acted inappropriately out of it. Rather, she listened to the wisdom inherent in her feelings, even though uncomfortable.

Feelings then may be described as valuable raw material for growth, and give us a different level of information about ourselves than our rational mind can provide. The challenge is to find ways to refine our relationship to our feeling life so that we can come to a place of willingness to feel whatever we're feeling, and experience whatever we're experiencing, in a way that is liberating, and allows the wisdom of our feelings to touch and inform us without our falling into acting out of these emotions inappropriately.

Learning to relate differently to our emotional life is rarely something we do alone. Having a spacious, non-judgemental place in which to notice, name, and gently explore what is emerging can make a profound difference. If you sense that such accompaniment would support your spiritual journey, you can find more about how I understand and practise spiritual direction here.