Spiritual Bypassing: Using Spirituality to Stop Feeling

Having a spiritual practice feels so good and it helps many people in numerous ways, but did you know that there is a thing called Spiritual Bypassing that takes your spiritual practice and turns it into a crutch for suppressing your emotions?

Spiritual Bypassing, if you aren’t familiar, is what they call it when someone uses their spiritual practice to avoid dealing with painful emotions, personal wounds, or difficult real-life problems.  I know, on the surface, this doesn’t seem like that big of a problem.  While for many people, their spiritual practice gets them through a lot of tough times and helps them enjoy the good times even more.  I’m talking about using your practice to bottle up your feelings instead of dealing with them.

Here are some manifestations of Spiritual Bypassing:

-            Toxic Positivity – this is where you force yourself or others to stay happy all the time, ignoring valid pain, sadness, anger or fear.

-            Using cliches like, “Everything happens for a reason”.

-            Forgiving too quickly, just to keep the peace without addressing the harm/hurt they caused.

-            Avoiding responsibility for your emotions, blaming Karma or Fate instead of taking action to fix an issue that you can control.

The reason this is harmful is that it keeps you from processing your feelings, it stops personal growth and emotional healing, it keeps you stuck in old patterns, it can hurt relationships and invalidate other people’s pain.

A great tool to use to help process your feelings is Somatics.  “Somatics is a field of movement and therapy that emphasizes internal physical perception and the experience of the body from within.” (Definition from Wikipedia)

The Core Concepts are:

-            Internal Awareness – this is where you tune into to your body noticing things like breathing, tension, and weight distribution rather than how your movement looks.

-            Mind-Body Connection – This acknowledges that the body also hold stress, trauma, and emotions, not just the mind.

-            Nervous System Regulation – Through slow, deliberate movements helps the body release muscle tension and retrain habitual patterns.

If you are interested in seeking a professional to navigate you through this type of work, make sure they are trauma-aware trained.  This training will ensure that they will be able to hold proper space for any emotions/feelings that come up during your session.

Let me know if you would like a more in-depth article on either Spiritual Bypassing or Somatics.

 Have a great week.

 Be kind, be you, and keep shining.

-            Angela