The Trouble With Spiritual Bypassing

How "Good Vibes Only" Becomes Its Own Kind of Harm

I've been sitting a lot lately. With others, and having conversations about plant medicine -- and healing -- and the many paths we have available to us to connect to our subconscious and being untangling knots within ourselves...and..

I've spent much of my career living in the bridge between science and faith, between the nervous system and the soul. I believe healing needs both.

But I've also watched people — clients, friends, sometimes myself in an earlier season of life — use spiritual language and or tools as a way to avoid healing instead of a way into it.

There's a name for this: spiritual bypassing.

And I want to talk about it plainly, because it can look so much like growth that it fools even the most well-intentioned among us.

What Spiritual Bypassing Is

The term was coined by psychologist John Welwood in the 1980s, and it describes the use of spiritual ideas, beliefs, or practices to sidestep unresolved emotional wounds, unmet developmental needs, or unfinished grief — instead of moving through them.

Just letting go. Glossing over.

It's not that meditation, prayer, energy work, plant medicines or faith are the problem. I use all of these things in my own practice and my own life. The problem is when they get deployed as a bypass — a detour around the parts of us that are asking to be felt, witnessed, and integrated, not transcended before their time.

Why am I writing this today? Am I pointing a finger away from myself, or in my own direction. I must confess, in my own direction. A pain in my chest, a longing and I suppose I know on a longical things will never be the ideal that I crave, and so I find myself using logic today, or thinking about a plant medicine ceremony ..

and when I sat in a quiet moment, I realized I need to feel the feelings of grief and allow my body, mind and spirit to work through the discomfort.

Spiritual bypassing convinces us we've done the work, when really, we've just found a more sophisticated way to avoid it.

What It Can Look Like

Spiritual bypassing rarely announces itself. It tends to arrive dressed as wisdom. A few forms I see often, both in the therapy room and in the wellness world at large:

Premature forgiveness. Rushing to "forgive and release" someone who harmed you before you've allowed yourself to feel angry, grieve what was lost, or name what happened honestly. Forgiveness that skips the feeling underneath it isn't forgiveness — it's suppression wearing a halo.

Toxic positivity. "Everything happens for a reason." "Just raise your vibration." "Focus on gratitude." These aren't inherently untrue, but when they're used to shut down grief, fear, or anger — your own or someone else's — they become a way of policing emotion rather than honoring it.

Detachment mistaken for peace. Using concepts like non-attachment or "staying above the drama" to avoid the discomfort of conflict, boundary-setting, or intimacy. Real equanimity is earned through feeling things fully. Detachment that's used to avoid feeling is dissociation with better branding.

Using faith to bypass boundaries. Believing you must be endlessly forgiving, endlessly patient, or endlessly self-sacrificing because "that's what a spiritual person does" — even when it means tolerating harm or abandoning your own needs.

Chronic self-blame disguised as accountability. Concepts like "you create your own reality" or "everything is a mirror" can be powerful tools for self-reflection. They can also become a cudgel — a way to blame yourself for illness, abuse, or misfortune that was never yours to create.

Bypassing the body. Living entirely in the realm of insight, energy, or belief while the body — where trauma actually lives — never gets attended to. You can understand your childhood perfectly and still carry it in your shoulders, your gut, your breath.

Why Spiritual Bypassing Can Feel Like Healing (Even Though It Isn't)

Here's what makes spiritual bypassing so slippery: it often feels like relief. And relief isn't nothing — the nervous system is genuinely soothed, at least for a moment, when we reach for transcendence instead of pain.

Spiritual language also gives us permission to stop. It offers a tidy narrative — "I've released it," "I'm at peace with it now" — that can quiet the discomfort of not having answers. It can earn us approval in spiritual communities that reward calm, positivity, or certainty over the messier truth of still being in process.

And bypassing often contains real insight. That's part of what makes it so convincing. A person practicing spiritual bypassing isn't lying to themselves out of nowhere — they're usually standing on a genuine truth (that forgiveness is powerful, that our thoughts shape our experience, that anger isn't the final word) and using it a little too early, or a little too completely, to avoid what's still unresolved underneath.

The difference between transformation and bypass often isn't the belief itself — it's the timing, and whether the felt experience underneath has actually been metabolized.

What the Alternative Looks Like

Real healing doesn't ask you to skip the hard parts. In my own work, I think of it through a biopsychosocial-spiritual lens — body, mind, relationships, and meaning all held together, none of them allowed to do the whole job alone.

That means:

Letting anger, grief, or fear move through the body instead of reframing them away before they're finished.

Setting boundaries even when it doesn't feel "zen."

Naming harm as harm, without rushing to find the silver lining.

Using spiritual practice alongside embodiment, not as a substitute for it — meditation and nervous system work, prayer and therapy, meaning-making and grief.

Being willing to sit in the unresolved middle of a healing process instead of performing its ending.

Integration is slower than transcendence. It's less photogenic. But it's the difference between a peace that can hold weight, and one that collapses the first time life pushes on it.

The Invitation

If any of this is landing for you, I want to say — gently — this isn't about shaming spirituality or the very real comfort it can offer. It's about asking whether the practices we lean on are helping us feel our way through, or helping us float over the top.

All healing requires a bit of science and a bit of faith. But it also requires honesty — the willingness to stay with what's true in the body, not just what sounds enlightened in the mind.

You don't have to rush your own healing to make it count.

— Dena