Spiritual Bypassing: What It Is and How to Recognize It

RELATIONAL TRAUMA & RECOVERY • June 25, 2018

When the Tears Won’t Stop in Savasana

Nadia is 41, a cardiologist, and she hasn’t missed a single morning meditation in two years. She’s on a yoga retreat in Maui — the kind that costs more than most people’s rent — and she’s crying again in savasana. She doesn’t know why. She’s been crying in savasana for six months. She assumes she needs a deeper practice, more time on the cushion, a better teacher. She signs up for a sound bath at 7 a.m. and a breathwork class at sunset. She tells herself she just hasn’t committed enough. She’s wrong.

The tears in savasana aren’t asking for more spirituality. They’re asking her to stop running. What Nadia doesn’t know yet is that she’s been spiritually bypassing — using her practice as a very elegant, very well-intentioned escape from the grief, the burnout, and the childhood wounds she hasn’t let herself look at yet. She doesn’t need more meditation. She needs a therapist.

If that sentence landed somewhere in your chest, keep reading. This isn’t an argument against spiritual practice. It’s an invitation to look honestly at what your practice might be doing — and what it might be keeping at arm’s length.

What Is Spiritual Bypassing?

John Welwood, PhD, a psychologist working at the intersection of Western psychology and Eastern spiritual traditions, watched this happen repeatedly in the communities he moved through. People who were genuinely devoted to awakening, and who were simultaneously using that devotion to step around the most painful and unresolved parts of their inner lives. Welwood was careful not to pathologize spiritual practice itself. His concern was the use of practice as avoidance. There’s a meaningful difference between sitting in meditation to cultivate presence and sitting in meditation to avoid feeling the grief that woke you up at 3 a.m.

That distinction sounds simple. In practice, it’s one of the harder things to see clearly in yourself — especially when the practice feels genuinely good, genuinely meaningful, and is producing real results in parts of your life. The complexity is real. And it’s worth sitting with. You can read more about how unresolved pain shows up in high-functioning lives in my post on complex PTSD.

The Neuroscience of Why Bypassing Doesn’t Work

The framework for understanding spiritual bypassing has been developed by a small number of researchers and clinicians whose work is worth knowing by name.

John Welwood, PhD, psychologist and author, coined the term and introduced it in his 1984 paper in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. His core insight was that spiritual seeking could serve as a sophisticated defense mechanism — one that’s culturally praised, which makes it harder to identify. He observed that many practitioners used spiritual ideas about transcendence, non-attachment, and unconditional love as a way to avoid the developmental emotional work their psychology required.

Robert Augustus Masters, PhD, psychotherapist and author of Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters (North Atlantic Books, 2010), extended Welwood’s framework considerably. Masters described spiritual bypassing as not just an individual habit but a cultural one — embedded in wellness communities that valorize equanimity, positivity, and transcendence. He was particularly interested in how bypassing functions within groups: the subtle pressure to present as spiritually evolved, the shaming of anger or grief as “low vibration,” the way communities can collectively bypass by normalizing spiritual language as a substitute for genuine accountability and emotional honesty.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Boston University and author of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Viking, 2014), offers a different but complementary lens. Van der Kolk’s decades of trauma research demonstrate that traumatic experience is stored in the body — in the nervous system, in somatic sensation, in the way the body braces or collapses — in ways that purely cognitive or conceptual approaches cannot reach. This is the scientific basis for understanding why spiritual bypassing doesn’t ultimately work: the body holds what the mind bypasses. You can believe in non-attachment all you want, but if your nervous system is running a trauma response, that belief won’t regulate it. The wound doesn’t care how many retreats you’ve attended.

Together, these three thinkers help us understand spiritual bypassing not as a personal failing but as a comprehensible human response to pain — one that has real limitations, and one that becomes particularly entrenched when the culture around us rewards it. If you’re exploring the science of how emotional pain gets stored and held, my post on childhood emotional neglect covers related ground.

How Spiritual Bypassing Shows Up in Driven Women

Back to Nadia. In the months before the Maui retreat, she’d been waking at 4:30 a.m. to meditate before her hospital shift. She’d read every book by Pema Chödrön. She sat with a teacher twice a month. She described herself as “more grounded than I’ve ever been.” And she was also: estranged from her mother, avoiding her marriage, and so disconnected from her body that she hadn’t noticed she’d stopped eating lunch. The practice wasn’t wrong. The use of it was.

Spiritual bypassing in driven women doesn’t usually look like delusion. It looks like discipline. It looks like devotion. It can be genuinely difficult to distinguish from the real thing — which is exactly why it’s worth naming the specific ways it tends to show up. In my clinical work with clients, I see these patterns consistently.

1. Using positivity to avoid grief. There’s a version of “gratitude practice” that’s actually grief avoidance. When something painful happens — a loss, a disappointment, a rupture — and the first move is to find the silver lining rather than feel the loss, that’s worth noticing. Grief needs to be felt before it can be integrated. Reaching for gratitude too quickly can short-circuit that process.

2. Meditation as dissociation. Meditation, practiced as presence, is a powerful tool. Meditation practiced as a way to exit the body, quiet internal noise, and float above difficult feeling states is dissociation with a spiritual name. If you’re leaving rather than arriving during your practice, that’s information worth taking seriously.

3. Spiritual pride replacing self-examination. When the sense of having a practice becomes a form of identity superiority — “I’ve done the work,” “I’m not reactive like other people,” “I don’t let things get to me” — that’s often spiritual bypassing wearing the costume of growth. Real growth usually involves more humility and more discomfort, not less.

4. Bypassing anger through premature “forgiveness.” Forgiveness is a legitimate and important part of healing. But forgiveness that happens before the anger has been felt and metabolized isn’t forgiveness — it’s suppression with a spiritual justification. Anger, particularly in women with relational trauma, often carries crucial information about boundaries that were crossed and needs that weren’t met. Skipping it doesn’t resolve it.

5. Detachment from the body. A number of spiritual traditions teach non-attachment, and something gets lost in translation when that principle is applied to the body. When I ask clients what they feel in their bodies and they have no answer — not “I don’t know,” but a genuine blankness, an absence of sensation — that’s not enlightenment. That’s dissociation, and in women with trauma histories, it’s often a very old and very well-practiced survival strategy now operating under a new name.

The Wisdom Traditions That Get Misused

It’s important to be precise here: the problem isn’t Buddhism, yoga, meditation, or any other spiritual tradition. The problem is the specific way certain teachings get extracted from their full context and used in the service of avoidance. Most wisdom traditions, understood in their completeness, have far more to say about directly confronting suffering than about transcending it.

Buddhist teachings, for example, begin with the First Noble Truth: the acknowledgment of suffering (dukkha). The path doesn’t begin by skipping suffering — it begins by looking directly at it. The concept of non-attachment in Buddhism doesn’t mean not feeling; it means not clinging to feeling, which is a distinctly different thing. A practitioner who uses “non-attachment” as a reason not to grieve has fundamentally misunderstood the teaching. The body’s grief isn’t an attachment to be released. It’s information that needs to move through.

Similarly, the yogic tradition is deeply concerned with pratyahara — withdrawal of the senses — and dharana — concentration. When these practices are used to develop genuine presence, they are tools for awareness. When they are used to dissociate from the body’s signals, to suppress emotional experience, or to perform spiritual achievement for an audience, they’ve been turned against their original purpose.

Christian contemplative traditions — particularly mysticism — have a long history of engaging with darkness, suffering, and the “dark night of the soul” as central to spiritual development, not something to be managed away. St. John of the Cross didn’t teach transcendence of suffering. He taught the willingness to be brought through it.

The misuse of these traditions isn’t a modern invention, but wellness culture has industrialized it. The commodification of mindfulness into productivity tools, the reduction of complex spiritual practice to apps and subscriptions, the Instagram version of enlightenment — these environments actively reward the performance of inner peace while removing the difficult content of genuine practice. A woman who looks serene, doesn’t complain, and posts about her morning routine is rewarded. A woman who is in the mess of genuine psychological work often isn’t. That asymmetry is itself a form of cultural bypassing.

I include Mary Oliver here because her question cuts through bypassing with surgical precision. Spiritual bypassing, at its core, is often about postponing the life — waiting until you’re healed enough, evolved enough, at peace enough to actually live it. Oliver’s question has no patience for that postponement. Your wild, precious life is happening now. Not after the retreat. Not when you’ve finally arrived at equanimity. Now.

Both/And: Your Practice Is Real and It Can Still Be Avoidance

Here’s the place where this conversation most often gets stuck: the fear that if you name your spiritual practice as avoidance, you have to throw the whole thing out. That fear is understandable — and it’s also not how this works.

Both of these things can be true: your spiritual practice is genuine, meaningful, and has given you real things that matter. And your spiritual practice has also, at times, served as a sophisticated way to avoid what needs to be faced. These aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re the Both/And of being a complex human being who found a beautiful container and used it for multiple purposes simultaneously.

Maya, 36, is a product executive at a technology company. She came to therapy describing a meditation practice she’d maintained for a decade — and describing, with equal precision, the fact that she’d used that practice to manage a level of anxiety that she’d never actually addressed. “Every time I got really anxious, I’d meditate my way out of it,” she told me. “I thought that was healthy. I didn’t realize I was just getting very good at not feeling the thing that was anxious.”

What Maya discovered in therapy wasn’t that her meditation was worthless. It had given her a genuine capacity for presence that made the therapeutic work move faster. What she discovered was that she’d been using it to regulate rather than to process — to manage the surface while leaving the underlying material untouched. The work wasn’t to abandon the practice. It was to bring the same quality of presence she’d developed on the cushion into direct contact with what she’d been avoiding. That’s a very different instruction. And it turns out it works.

The Both/And here is: your practice can be a genuine tool for healing and it can be a place you hide. Both can be true at the same time. And naming that honestly — rather than defending the practice or condemning it — is what opens the door to using it differently. If you’re working through relational trauma in a therapeutic context, your spiritual practice can be a profound complement to that work. But the complement, not the substitute.

The Systemic Lens: Why Wellness Culture Rewards Bypassing

Individual bypassing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens inside communities and cultures that actively reward it — and understanding that systemic dimension is essential to understanding why bypassing is so common and so hard to see from the inside.

Wellness culture — particularly the version of it that’s been commodified into a multi-billion-dollar industry — has a profound investment in the appearance of equanimity. The product being sold, in much of this industry, is freedom from difficult feeling. Anxiety to be eliminated. Stress to be reduced. Overwhelm to be managed. The emotional difficulty is framed as the problem; the practice is framed as the solution. This framing is not neutral. It positions psychological pain as something to be optimized away rather than listened to.

For driven, ambitious women specifically, this message is particularly sticky. You’re already high-functioning. You’re already managing. You’re already accustomed to solving problems through skill and effort. The wellness industry offers a version of psychological health that looks and feels like another project to optimize — and driven women are very good at optimizing projects. The problem is that the psyche isn’t a project. It doesn’t respond to optimization in the way a quarterly report does.

Robert Augustus Masters, PhD, described this dynamic in wellness communities specifically: the subtle pressure to appear evolved, the way expressing anger or grief can get coded as “low vibration” or “not doing the work,” the community norm that equates spiritual advancement with emotional flatness. These norms don’t just tolerate bypassing — they require it. To be fully seen in all your emotional complexity is to risk being seen as not far enough along the path. That’s a powerful incentive to keep the difficult material hidden.

The systemic lens also means acknowledging that for many women, emotional suppression has been rewarded long before they found spiritual practice. The girl who learned not to cry so she wouldn’t be “too much.” The woman who learned that anger made her difficult. The professional who learned that vulnerability in the workplace was a liability. Spiritual bypassing doesn’t create these patterns — it finds them already installed and offers them a new, more culturally elevated container. Understanding that is important because it means the bypassing is rarely purely individual. It’s the individual’s psychology meeting a social environment that actively rewards that particular solution to pain.

What does the systemic lens suggest we do? Not abandon spiritual community — but bring critical awareness to the norms within it. Notice whose emotional expression is welcomed and whose is pathologized. Notice what the community’s relationship to anger is, and grief, and the expression of genuine struggle. A spiritual community that can hold difficulty without rushing to resolve it is a different kind of container than one that equates spiritual health with uninterrupted equanimity. And if you’re in therapy, having a clinician who understands both the genuine value of spiritual practice and the ways it can be used in the service of avoidance is invaluable.

How to Use Spirituality Without Bypassing

The question isn’t whether to practice. It’s how. Here are the distinctions that tend to matter most in clinical work:

Presence over performance. Spiritual bypassing tends to have a performative quality — even if the audience is only yourself. The goal becomes spiritual achievement: how many hours on the cushion, how equanimous you appear, how quickly you can forgive. Genuine practice tends to move in the opposite direction: toward honesty, not polish. The question worth asking isn’t “Am I practicing enough?” but “Am I actually more in contact with myself after practice, or less?”

Feeling before transcending. Most wisdom traditions, understood in their fullness, don’t teach skipping feeling. They teach developing the capacity to be present with feeling without being overwhelmed by it. That’s a fundamentally different instruction than “rise above.” The developmental sequence matters: feel first, then integrate, then — if transcendence comes — it comes as a result of genuine processing, not as a substitute for it.

Using practice to resource, not to avoid. There’s nothing wrong with using meditation, breathwork, or prayer to resource yourself when you’re overwhelmed. That’s a legitimate use of practice. The distinction worth making is between using practice to resource yourself so you can do hard things, and using practice to ensure you never have to do the hard things. The first is skillful. The second is bypassing.

Welcoming anger and grief. A practice that can only hold peace is a limited practice. Real integration requires that the practice be spacious enough to hold rage, grief, shame, confusion — the full spectrum of human experience. If your practice systematically excludes difficult emotions, it’s worth asking what that exclusion is costing you.

Pairing practice with professional support. For women with significant relational trauma histories, spiritual practice is most powerful when it’s paired with trauma-informed therapy — not instead of it. The practice can open the window. The therapeutic work is what helps you actually move through it. If you’re curious about what that combination could look like for you, I’d invite you to reach out for a conversation.

Nadia, when we finally got to it in therapy, said something I’ve thought about often. “I thought I was getting closer to myself in meditation,” she told me. “I was actually getting better at leaving myself very gently.” That’s spiritual bypassing in a sentence. The gentleness is real. So is the leaving. And the work is learning to stay.

Related Reading

1. Welwood, J. (1984). Principles of inner work: Psychological and spiritual. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 16(1), 63–74.
2. Masters, R. A. (2010). Spiritual bypassing: When spirituality disconnects us from what really matters. North Atlantic Books.
3. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking Press.
4. Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and religion. In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 11. Psychology and religion: West and East (pp. 1–105). Princeton University Press.
5. Fossella, T., & Welwood, J. (2011). Human nature, Buddha nature: An interview with John Welwood. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
6. Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence — from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.

If you’re a helping professional — a therapist, social worker, nurse, or caregiver — who uses spiritual frameworks to avoid your own pain, you may recognize this pattern as a form of compassion fatigue. Healing doesn’t mean abandoning your faith. It means going through it, not around it. If you’re ready to explore what that process could look like with support, I’d invite you to reach out for a conversation. What you’ve built spiritually doesn’t have to be dismantled. It may simply be ready to go deeper.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer