When I first learned about the idea of “spiritual bypassing,” it was shattering to my parts. I felt busted, lost, ashamed, scared, embarrassed, and deflated. Here I thought I was an advanced spiritual being, capable of loving even the most intolerable asshats on the planet with a generous heart and unconditional love. I could forgive anyone, even Osama Bin Laden, since all humans are deserving of love and compassion, and hurt people hurt people. I regularly listened to my spirit guides, followed what I thought was spiritual guidance, meditated for hours in 21 day vipassana retreats, and pursued enlightenment with the same kind of disciplined rigor with which I’d pursued a medical degree in my twenties and New York Times bestseller status in my forties.
What is spiritual bypassing, you might ask? Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual ideas, practices, or beliefs to avoid facing unresolved emotional pain, psychological wounds, or relational difficulties. Instead of working through grief, anger, shame, or trauma, a person may “bypass” those uncomfortable feelings by turning prematurely to transcendence, positivity, forgiveness, or detachment.
The term was coined by psychologist and spiritual teacher John Welwood in the 1980s, who observed that many spiritual practitioners were using spirituality as a defense mechanism rather than as a path of healing, integration, and wholeness. He realized that spiritual bypassing practices might include:
- Minimizing suffering with clichés like “everything happens for a reason” or “just stay positive.”
- Using meditation, prayer, or ritual to suppress painful emotions rather than process them and move them through your body and psyche
- Overemphasizing love and light while ignoring anger, injustice, or shadow aspects of the psyche
- Forgiving others before fully acknowledging and grieving the harm done.
At its core, spiritual bypassing is less about spirituality itself and more about avoidance — a protective strategy that tries to leapfrog over the hard, messy work of healing and integration. As author of Spiritual Bypassing Robert Augustus Masters put it, spiritual bypassing is conflict avoidance in holy drag.
I was guilty of all that, yet I was unaware that I was even doing so until I read Robert’s book. I hadn’t realized I was blended with what IFS calls a Self-like part, parts that masquerade as Self but have an agenda to bypass suffering and skip over hard feelings and unprocessed traumas.
I was so blessed to discover IFS in 2013, within a month of realizing what I was doing. I honestly don’t know how I would have handled that insight had I not found the antidote to spiritual bypassing so swiftly, thanks to my cousin and IFS therapist Rebecca Ching.
The good news is that I did find IFS, and I’ve been practicing it ever since. The sad thing about waking up to one’s spiritual bypassing tendencies is that some people throw the baby out with the bathwater and discard spirituality altogether, especially if they have parts that have been victims of spiritual abuse.
If you’ve been spiritually bypassing or you’re trying to reconnect to your spirituality on the other side of spiritual bypassing recovery, I wanted to let you know that IFS founder Dick Schwartz is teaching an online program with Sounds True “The Spirituality of Internal Family Systems–A Practice-Based Journey to Your Sacred Self,”
Learn more and register for The Spirituality of Internal Family Systems here.
In this immersive 10-week experience, you’ll explore:
- Dr. Schwartz’s eye-opening journey from skeptical rationalist to spiritually receptive scientist convinced by the firsthand evidence
- The reality of helpful guides and ancestor spirits – Their regular appearance in client-therapist sessions, their relationship to Self, the verifiable information and guidance they bring, and how to work with them
- Why the core Self is more than just a psychological state – How it connects all of us to the Greater Consciousness, Divine, or God of the world’s wisdom traditions
- Accessing the energy of Self to heal and restore ourselves and others physically, emotionally, and spiritually
- Unattached burdens – Experiences described across spiritual traditions as harmful external energies, and how to engage Self-energy to protect ourselves
- Striking parallels between IFS therapy and shamanic and psychedelic journeys, and how to integrate their methods to heal and more fully connect with Self
- Using IFS with traditional spiritual practices – Which meditations and contemplative techniques can impede IFS work and which ones can support it
- Intergenerational and cultural burdens and traumas – How they are passed from parent to child—and even throughout entire societies—and how we can invite the restorative presence of Self together
- An in-depth, practice-based program with eight immersive guided exercises to allow you to experience the spiritual facets of IFS for yourself
Find spirituality on the other side of spiritual bypassing here.
If you’re brand new to IFS and you’re looking for a beginner course, I’m also teaching an IFS weekend Zoom workshop October 4-5 IFS For Self-Healing. It’s an IFS basics course that can prepare you to begin your spiritual bypassing recovery and pursue healing, integration and wholeness, whether you identify with the spirituality of IFS or not.
Learn more and register for IFS For Self-Healing here.
Mark Nepo sums it all up best in Unlearned Your Way 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. Psychologists call this spot the Psyche, Theologians call it the Soul, Jung calls it the Seat of the Unconscious, Hindu masters call it Atman, Buddhists call it Dharma, Rilke calls it Inwardness, Sufis call it Qalb, and Jesus calls it the Center of our Love.
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”
― Mark Nepo, Unlearning Back to God: Essays on Inwardness, 1985-2005