In Other words: Spiritual Bypassing
I started the In Other Words series on this blog to explore some of the popular terms that float around the worlds of self-healing and self-improvement. Along my own journey — full of bumps, breakthroughs, and more than a few "what on earth is happening?" moments — I stumbled across many of these terms. They helped me make sense of the more difficult parts of life, especially the ones tied to relationships.
Building a life that feels genuinely good often starts with understanding the things that feel... well, not so good. So through this series, I want to unpack some of the most well-known concepts. And today, I want to talk about spiritual bypassing.
I honestly can't remember exactly when I first came across the term — long before I truly recognised it playing out in my own life. I first noticed it in real-time when I was trying to connect with people who were, like me, walking some kind of growth path. But instead of feeling closer, I found it strangely hard to truly connect with some of them.
They seemed to know all the right things — quoting wisdom, sharing insights about becoming our best selves — yet something was missing. Real self-awareness. True connection. It was like trying to have a heart-to-heart with someone who was floating a few feet above the ground.
And that's where the idea of spiritual bypassing fits so perfectly: it explains a lot about how some people process life — and where things can quietly go off course.
What is Spiritual Bypassing?
At its heart, spiritual bypassing is about using spirituality as a shortcut.
Instead of working through pain, confusion, shame or grief, it’s about skipping straight to the "higher" truths — often with the hope that if we just stay positive, stay enlightened, stay detached enough, we can somehow avoid the messiness of being human.
And it’s something we all probably do, at some point, in small ways.
There are parts of ourselves we’d rather not look at. Who wouldn’t want to believe that by thinking positively enough or meditating hard enough, we could make the hard feelings go away? But when we bury those parts instead of facing them — when we pile “love and light” on top of wounds that really need stitches — they don’t disappear. They just work quietly in the background, often causing more harm than if we had dealt with them openly in the first place.
It often starts from a very understandable place — a real longing to feel better, to feel safe, to make sense of suffering. But somewhere along the way, the deep work gets swapped out for ideas that look good from the outside but leave something missing inside.
Spiritual bypassing happens when we cling to the idea — “everything is perfect,” “we are all one,” “just stay positive” — in a way that denies the real struggles of our life.
Instead of embracing both truths — the oneness and the difficulty — it tries to float above the hard parts.
And in doing so, it often makes real healing, real connection, and real growth much harder to reach.
How Can You Recognise It?
Spiritual bypassing can often sound compassionate, wise, or even enlightened at first glance. But if you look a little closer, it usually reveals itself through a discomfort with difficult emotions, messy realities, or the complexities of human experience.
Rather than facing pain directly, spiritual bypassing tries to leapfrog over it — using higher ideals to deny, dismiss, or gloss over what’s uncomfortable.
Here are a few ways it often shows up:
Over-simplifying pain
You might hear slogans like "good vibes only" or "focus on the positive," which suggest that suffering is simply a mindset issue. Instead of holding space for grief, anger, or fear — all of which are natural responses to life's challenges — this attitude encourages repression. Pain doesn’t dissolve just because we ignore it; it tends to grow underground.
Misusing spiritual truths to avoid responsibility
Ideas like "we are all one" sound expansive on the surface. Yet in practice, they can become ways of denying the real inequalities and injustices that exist. Recognising our shared humanity doesn’t mean pretending we all live under the same conditions — it means acknowledging where healing and action are still needed.
Disowning natural human needs
Teachings about non-attachment are sometimes distorted into the idea that needing people, resources, or community is a weakness. True spiritual maturity doesn’t demand emotional numbness — it recognises that connection, support, and belonging are essential parts of life.
Pathologising difficult emotions
Anger and fear are often labelled "low vibration" or "negative," as if feeling them means we’ve failed spiritually. In reality, these emotions can offer vital information: anger can highlight injustice; fear can point to genuine threats. The goal isn’t to eradicate them, but to listen and respond wisely.
Over-emphasising personal power
Some teachings imply that you create every aspect of your reality through your thoughts or energy. While personal agency is part of the “healing process”, this view often ignores wider social, economic, and systemic factors. It quietly blames people for circumstances outside their control, deepening the sense of shame we already carry ourselves and that we’re suppressing.
Ultimately, spiritual bypassing often feels like a subtle form of dismissal — a pressure to be "above" reality, or even: better than reality.
True spirituality doesn’t ask us to bypass our humanity. It invites us to meet it fully, with open eyes, open hearts, and open hands.
How Is It Different From Being Spiritual?
True spirituality isn’t about disconnecting from the pain, flaws, or complexities of life. It’s about facing them with awareness and openness, and using these challenges as opportunities for growth.
Take Buddhism, for example: One of its core teachings is about embracing dukkha — which translates roughly to “suffering.” The Buddha didn’t shy away from talking about the unavoidable discomforts of life. He didn’t teach us to pretend that things are always fine. Instead, he gave us tools to work with suffering: to understand its roots, its impermanence, and the possibility of letting go of attachment to it.
A Buddhist practitioner doesn’t avoid suffering. They sit with it, understand it, and transcend it by seeing it clearly for what it is — not something to escape, but something to understand deeply.
In contrast, spiritual bypassing would have someone simply insist, “I’ve transcended all suffering” — a claim that leaves no room for the messy, real experiences of the present moment.
Take Christianity, too — a faith that deeply values spiritual growth, but in a radically different way. The idea of grace in Christian theology teaches that salvation or connection with God isn’t about being perfect. It’s about recognising that we are flawed, that we fall short, and that we need something greater than ourselves to help us heal. In fact, it’s often in the recognition of our struggles and sins that we find the greatest spiritual growth.
The message is clear: we are loved and accepted in our imperfection.
In a way, spiritual bypassing would be the opposite: it would be someone insisting they don’t need forgiveness, pretending they are always “saved,” or claiming they have “outgrown” their faults and weaknesses. This can often mask a lack of introspection or genuine self-awareness, because it avoids the real, human work of facing the parts of ourselves that need healing.
When we compare that grounded, full-spectrum spiritual journey with spiritual bypassing, the difference becomes clearer. While spiritual bypassing claims a kind of “perfection” that avoids discomfort or difficult emotions, healthy spirituality invites those very experiences into the fold, accepting them as part of the human condition.
Spiritual bypassing often looks like the avoidance of “negative” feelings in favour of a one-dimensional, superficial positivity. It’s someone who claims to be enlightened or awakened but avoids dealing with life’s real struggles. It’s someone who refuses to confront pain or difficult emotions because of a belief that such things are “beneath them” or “not part of the journey.”
Healthy spirituality, however, gives room to pain. It sees it, understands it, and moves through it with grace. Rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, it uses the challenges of life to dig deeper into ourselves, revealing more of who we truly are, and connecting more genuinely with others.
Why Is It a Problem?
In short: because it keeps us stuck.
When we don’t allow ourselves (or others) to feel the full range of human emotions, we interrupt healing. Unfelt feelings don't disappear — they simply go underground, shaping our lives in ways we can't control or connect with.
And when it's not us, but someone close to us doing the bypassing, it can slowly erode connection. I once met someone I felt an instant excitement about — finally, someone “aware”! Someone who spoke about growth and authenticity. But as time went on, something felt off. Whenever I shared honestly — my fears, my doubts, my not-so-shiny parts — she drifted further away. She wasn’t exactly spiritually bypassing in the classic sense; but she spoke critically about others who did. But she was bypassing in her own way — avoiding uncomfortable emotions, holding others to ideals she couldn’t meet herself, presenting a polished version of her life, a life that was supposed to look grand on the surface.
It taught me something important: bypassing doesn’t always wear the same outfit. Sometimes it hides in the very critique of it.
Human connection thrives in shared vulnerability.
When we reach out — messy, hurting, needing a hand — and are met with advice, avoidance, or “you just need to raise your vibration,” it hurts, and we feel dismissed. Over time, it teaches us to pull away, to share less, to guard our softer parts. True relationships — the ones that last — need space for our real selves. When someone is caught in bypassing, they often can't offer that space. Not because they don't care, but because they haven't made room for it inside themselves.
Spiritual bypassing is just one flavour of evading life.
We can bypass with therapy talk: diagnosing everyone around us with attachment issues but not facing our own vulnerability. We can bypass with toxic positivity: forcing ourselves to smile and “be grateful” when our hearts are aching. We can bypass with intellectualising: thinking endlessly about pain instead of feeling it.
Really, any clever system we build to avoid sitting with life’s rawness can become a bypass.
But WHY?
Spiritual bypassing often emerges from a deep-seated insecurity, a need to find something — anything — that can provide meaning or a sense of control in an often chaotic, unpredictable world. Many people who fall into bypassing are not inherently bad or intentionally deceptive. They simply haven’t yet learned to confront the parts of themselves they’d rather leave hidden. Beneath the polished surface of their spirituality lies a cocktail of discomfort: insecurity, guilt, shame, fear, and a resistance to fully engage with the messy, imperfect nature of life.
The real issue here lies in the refusal to look beneath the surface — to confront the parts of ourselves we fear might reveal that we are unworthy, unlovable, or flawed. At the heart of this avoidance is something deeper: we’ve internalised the cultural and societal standards that have been imposed on us since childhood — the unspoken rules of how we should think, feel, and act. And when we inevitably fall short of these ideals, shame creeps in. It’s the discomfort of not measuring up, the anger we bury, the grief we try to outrun, and the vulnerability we disguise behind the safe facade of smiles and affirmations.
For many, spirituality becomes a refuge, a protective shield that offers the illusion of transcendence. By clinging to the idea that they’ve risen above their struggles, they create an identity built on the notion that they are "beyond it all." But in reality, this image of perfection only serves to mask the very flaws they are trying to outrun — flaws that, if embraced, could become powerful tools for true growth and connection.
But what happens when we avoid those uncomfortable, “ugly” parts? We begin to develop a sense of superiority, an unspoken belief that we are somehow "better" than others who haven’t yet learned to rise above their human struggles. This often bleeds into what some call spiritual narcissism — the belief that those who aren’t as “enlightened” or “awakened” are somehow lesser. It’s a subtle but dangerous mindset. I’ve met people who’ve made me feel as though my struggles were something to be ashamed of — as if being open about the difficulties I was facing somehow made me a "lesser" being. For them, the rawness of life, the parts of us that get messy, vulnerable, and imperfect, were things to hide from, not confront.
In this space, it’s not just about avoiding personal pain. It’s about turning away from the struggles of others as well. When we can’t accept our own imperfections, we project that onto others. We start to look at people who are in pain and dismiss them — or worse, feel superior to them because we’ve convinced ourselves we’ve "figured it out" while they are still lost in their raw humanity.
True spiritual growth isn’t about building a fortress of positivity or pretending you’ve transcended the human experience. It’s about showing up, fully, with the mess of life. It’s about realizing that imperfection is the human condition, not something to rise above or deny. The more we deny our own flaws, the more we build walls between ourselves and others, creating a false sense of superiority that only isolates us from what truly connects us: our shared vulnerability.
So How Do We Avoid It?
Avoiding spiritual bypassing is simple, yet profound: it’s about having the courage to face all of yourself — the parts you’re proud of and the parts you’re not too keen on. It’s about digging deeper, even into the uncomfortable areas we’d rather ignore — the insecurities, the wounds, the fears. Authenticity comes from not running away from these parts but rather, leaning into them with curiosity and compassion.
This is where real growth happens. It’s about showing up for yourself, doing the “inner work,” even when it feels like a challenge. It’s about embracing the messy parts of being human, listening to the pain that lies hidden, and being kind to the parts of you that need healing. When we take the time to understand ourselves — truly, deeply — we create space for genuine connection with others, and we stop relying on surface-level beliefs to shield us from reality.
Inner work, whether it’s diving into your own struggles or working through past trauma, is how we stay grounded. It’s a lifelong process of becoming the most honest version of yourself, not by avoiding the tough stuff, but by facing it head-on.
Instead of adding another belief system over our lives, we can turn gently inward. Our real “higher self” isn't floating above life. It’s right here, inside us, willing to get its hands dirty, willing to sit with sadness, rage, hope, shame, love — all of it.
In The End
I’m not writing this because I think my readers are the ones doing the bypassing. I’m writing it because you might meet people who are — and wonder why it feels so lonely, even when everything looks so “enlightened.”
I don’t believe words alone can bring someone home to themselves. But if anything I share here can help you feel a little more at home in your truth, then that’s enough for me. There’s nothing wrong with choosing positivity, gratitude, or lightness. These can be beautiful things — when they’re fitting, when they’re real (instead of enforced).
We all bypass reality from time to time — it’s part of being human. At its core, it’s just another way we cope with life’s complexities, much like an addiction. A way to numb the discomfort or escape the parts of ourselves we’re not ready to face. But just like any escape, it keeps us stuck, unable to truly grow or move forward.
The key isn’t to avoid spiritual bypassing — it’s to notice it when it happens, and gently course-correct.
Real personal growth isn’t about escaping pain.
It’s about moving through it, understanding it, learning from it.
And that's something no affirmation, mantra, or quick-fix philosophy can replace.
True spiritual maturity doesn’t reject the messy bits. It welcomes them. It knows that being human — fully, fiercely, vulnerably human — is the spiritual path.
I don’t know if I managed to give a short, complete picture of what spiritual bypassing is. But I do hope you'll add your voice to the conversation below. I'd love to hear your experiences.