JW: Spiritual bypassing is a term I coined to describe a process I saw happening
in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself. Although most of us
were sincerely trying to work on ourselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to
use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional
issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.
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, in that spirituality does involve a vision of going beyond our current
karmic situation.
TE: What kind of hazard does this present?
JW: 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
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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.
TF: Might this account for some of the messiness in our sangha communities?
JW: Definitely. It is easy to use the truth of emptiness in this one-sided way: “Thoughts
and feelings are empty, a mere play of samsaric appearances, so pay them no heed. See
their nature as emptiness, and simply cut through them on the spot.” In the realm of
practice, this could be helpful advice. But in life situations these same words could also
be used to suppress or deny feelings or concerns that need our attention. I’ve seen this
happen on a number of occasions.
TF: What interests you most about spiritual bypassing these days?
JW: I’m interested in how it plays out in relationships, where spiritual bypassing often
wreaks its worst havoc. If you were a yogi in a cave doing years of solo retreat, your
psychological wounding might not show up so much because your focus would be
entirely on your practice, in an environment that may not aggravate your relational
wounds. It’s in relationships that our unresolved psychological issues tend to show up
most intensely. That’s because psychological wounds are always relational — they form in
and through our relationships with our early caretakers.
The basic human wound, which is prevalent in the modern world, forms around not
feeling loved or intrinsically lovable as we are. Inadequate love or attunement is shocking
and traumatic for a child’s developing and highly sensitive nervous system. And as we
internalize how we were parented, our capacity to value ourselves, which is also the basis
for valuing others, becomes damaged. I call this a “relational wound“ or the “wound of
the heart.”
TF: Yes, something we are all familiar with