Spiritual Bypassing — or how we sometimes use spirituality to avoid what hurts, instead of healing it

From the "Our Everyday Mind" series

---

Someone close to you has just gone through a painful breakup, or lost someone they loved. When they try to talk about it, they hear, with the best of intentions: "everything happens for a reason," "the universe has a bigger plan for you," "maybe you just need to raise your vibration." The person smiles, nods, says they're grateful for the lesson. The tears don't come. The anger, if it's there at all, gets relabeled almost instantly as "low energy" — something to release through meditation, not something to feel.

It looks like healing. It sounds like wisdom. And sometimes, it genuinely is.

But there's also a less visible pattern, in which spiritual language and practices don't open the way toward pain — they close it faster than they should. A pain that's bypassed, not processed, dressed up in beautiful words so it no longer has to be felt.

The term a Buddhist psychotherapist gave to an old pattern

In 1984, the American psychotherapist John Welwood — himself a Buddhist practitioner of decades — gave this pattern a name: spiritual bypassing. He defined it as the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to avoid or sidestep unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, or unfinished developmental tasks.

Welwood didn't observe the phenomenon from the outside, as a critic of spirituality. He saw it in his own community — among serious Buddhist practitioners, people who had meditated for years, some of them spiritual teachers themselves — and, later, in his therapy practice, in people who came to him precisely because their spiritual practice, however sincere, hadn't actually helped them heal.

What a sincere spiritual practice can hide

In an interview with Tricycle magazine in 2011, Welwood explained the mechanism with rare clarity: being a "good" spiritual practitioner, he said, can become a compensatory identity — an image that covers and defends a deeper identity, one that feels deficient, not good enough. Even when the practice is diligent, it can end up serving denial and defense, rather than transformation.

In that same interview, he described this exact pattern in his own dharma students: people who had practiced for decades, with complete sincerity, but whose practice never truly penetrated their lives. They came to therapy because they remained wounded and insufficiently developed on an emotional and relational level — and that unresolved wound sometimes found harmful ways out, despite years of authentic spiritual practice.

Worth holding onto: Welwood wasn't saying their practice was fake. He was saying that sincere practice and an unresolved wound could coexist, isolated from each other, without one ever truly touching the other.

From Welwood's Buddhist community to any support group today

You don't need a Buddhist community to recognize the pattern.

You'll find it in the quick reflex to turn any suffering into a "lesson" before you've even let yourself feel it. In the gently offered advice to stop being "negative" when someone actually has good reason to be upset or angry. In a meditation or gratitude practice used not as a space where emotion gets to exist, but as a method for making it disappear from awareness as fast as possible. In the phrase "it doesn't matter, it's all energy anyway," said right after a real injustice — one that might deserve, first, anger, and only then understanding. Not understanding instead of it.

I remember a difficult period in my own life when I searched, almost insistently, for a "lesson" in something that, in truth, simply hurt. Every attempt to find immediate meaning was, I think now, also an attempt not to sit inside that pain for one more minute. The meaning did come, eventually. But it came after I let the pain exist — not in its place.

Why the mind chooses this path

The explanation connects to a broader mechanism studied in psychology under the name experiential avoidance — the tendency to avoid contact with unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or sensations, even at the cost of long-term consequences that end up costing more than the discomfort avoided. Spirituality, seen this way, offers a particularly effective language for avoidance: it's hard to argue with ("who am I to say the universe doesn't have a plan?"), it sounds elevated and mature, and it offers, almost instantly, a sense of peace — exactly what the mind, faced with pain that's hard to carry, wants most.

Researchers Jesse Fox, Craig Cashwell, and Gabriela Picciotto developed, in 2017, the Spiritual Bypass Scale-13 — one of the first psychometric instruments built specifically to measure the phenomenon — in a study suggestively titled The Opiate of the Masses, tested on a community sample of 661 participants and structured around two dimensions: psychological avoidance and spiritualizing. In a qualitative study published shortly after, Gabriela Picciotto, Jesse Fox, and Félix Neto conducted eight in-depth interviews with people who recognized this pattern in their own experience, from which they drew 48 possible themes, grouped into ten categories — ranging from an excessive need to control one's own emotions or those of others, to an exaggerated tolerance for inappropriate behavior, to unconditional loyalty toward charismatic spiritual leaders, to a diffuse but persistent emotional confusion.

Not every spiritual refuge is avoidance

This is where things get more nuanced than they might first appear. Even the researchers who study this phenomenon note that spiritual bypass isn't clinically regarded as automatically harmful — especially when it shows up as a temporary strategy in the face of acute stress, or what some call a "spiritual emergency." Some researchers go further and suggest that certain behaviors labeled as spiritual bypassing might actually be a normal, perhaps even inevitable, stage in any path of spiritual development.

A meta-ethnography published in 2026, in Frontiers in Psychologyby Maitri Patel and Kumar, points in the same direction. The researchers synthesized five qualitative studies conducted between 2014 and 2023, drawing on 55 participants from culturally and religiously diverse backgrounds, and reached a similar conclusion: spiritual bypassing doesn't appear to be a fixed psychological deficit, but rather a contextually adaptive response to pain, sustained by the conditions around a person — and resolving it doesn't mean abandoning spirituality, but differentiating from a defensive form of it, in favor of a more integrative one.

The difference seems to lie less in the practice itself, and more in its duration and function: whether meditation, prayer, or energy work remain, long-term, the only answer to any pain — a way of never returning to it again — or whether, at some point, they become a space safe enough for the pain to finally be looked at directly. The literature on meditation and psychotherapy carries the same warning: profound spiritual experiences or insights into the nature of the self don't automatically mean that old psychological or relational wounds have also been healed.

I don't think an article can — or should — decide, on someone else's behalf, whether a particular practice is bringing them healing or avoidance at any given moment in their life. For the same person, it might be both, at different times.

What would change, knowing this

That not every peace found in spirituality is suspect, and not every phrase about "lessons" or "energy" is hiding avoidance. Often, it's exactly what it looks like: a sincere framework that genuinely helps.

That the useful question isn't "is what I'm feeling or practicing right now spiritual?" but a simpler, harder one: "did I actually feel what there was to feel — or did I skip straight to the part where I feel better?"

That the sturdiest spiritual practices, the ones that truly hold up over time, seem to make room for pain too, not only for peace — a space where anger, sadness, or confusion can exist without being immediately turned into something more presentable.

Maybe spirituality doesn't ask us to leap over pain so we can get past it faster. Maybe it only asks us not to stay alone inside it.

---

If you feel you want to explore more of what is happening in your emotional life, there is a space for that.