Spiritual Bypassing: Discernment, Healing, and the Holding Presence of God

I first wrote about spiritual bypassing and how spirituality can avoid feeling, in 2015, at a time when it was little known or named within spiritual direction and accompaniment. Since then, the hazards of spiritual bypassing have come more clearly into view, particularly among those seeking to walk alongside others in their spiritual journey.

In brief, John Welwood in the 1980s, a well-known psychologist working with the psychospiritual, spoke from his experience of those he was working with, on how we can unhelpfully use spiritual practice to cover over deep unresolved issues within ourselves, like a veneer, in a way that avoids truth and the reality about ourselves and about our experience. When we do this, spirituality becomes just another way of rejecting our experience, escaping into the world of the transcendent. A kind of numbing analgesic — not unlike Karl Marx’s well-known critique of religion as “opium for the masses. Common examples are when people use spiritual practice to try and compensate for low self-esteem, social alienation, difficult feelings of shame, inferiority or other emotional problems or psychological wounding.

When our spiritual practice is not integrated with our psychological material, it can lead to shadow problems. We split ourselves in an unhelpful way that is not true to any path of wholeness or spiritual transformation. Our spiritual practice becomes unintegrated with the rest of life. This can set up a debilitating split between our true Christ-like nature and our humanity, and promotes the view that the deepest truth is found in transcendence of our physical, emotional and instinctive nature, undermining the more profoundly challenging message of the Incarnation, and rendering this world as tragically 'penultimate', as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), the German theologian and pastor executed by the Nazis, so poignantly put it.

However, I do want to nuance something important here. I have seen some now take the view that any experience of the comfort and holding presence of God or the Divine, however named, in the midst of pain, emotional suffering and difficulty, is a form of 'bypassing' it in some way. This clearly is not truth.

Knowing the holding presence of God in the midst of our pain and wounding, 'carrying us along in the intimate depths of the tragic thing itself' as Dr James Finley so poetically puts it, can be the very strength and resource that sustains us to gently be with the reality of the pain and wounding that life can bring. I can commend James Finley's latest autobiographical book 'The Healing Path: A Memoir and Invitation' as a living example.

It is also important to recognise that the language of spiritual bypassing itself can be misused or overextended. I recently attended an online workshop in the U.S. where Lissa Rankin MD offered a very interesting 'update' on spiritual bypassing since the original work of John Welwood, contextualizing it in today's spiritual cultures.

Here is a thought-provoking summary of some of the characteristics of spiritual bypassing she identifies.

I can definitely recognize the presence of these issues in toxic church environments where spiritual abuse has occurred.

What do you think?