Ten years ago I wrote about spiritual bypassing as a broad pattern — using spiritual ideas to avoid the work of becoming a person. I still believe that description holds. But naming the pattern was easier than answering the question underneath it, the one that took me another decade to sit with honestly:
Why does a teaching that is genuinely true so often end up doing the work of a defense?
Not a false teaching. Not a shallow one. Surrender is real. Nonattachment is real. Forgiveness, acceptance, equanimity, the dissolution of a rigid self — these are not tricks invented to keep people asleep. Some of the wisest sentences human beings have ever produced live inside this list.
And yet I have watched — in Sedona and in my own body — those same true sentences become the exact material a wound uses to avoid being touched.
Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual beliefs, practices, states, or interpretations to avoid psychological pain, unresolved wounds, developmental needs, or difficult realities that still require attention.
This article is not a broader introduction to spiritual bypassing. If you want that foundation, I'd point you to what I wrote in 2016. This piece asks the deeper question: how does a defense find its way into something sacred, and use the sacred as cover?
A Teaching Doesn't Get Chosen at Random
Here is the distinction I have come to rely on more than any other in this territory:
The truth of a teaching and the function of a teaching are two different things.
A teaching's truth is what it says about reality. Its function is what it is being used to do inside a particular life, at a particular moment.
The same sentence — don't identify with the pain — can function as liberation in one person and as anesthesia in another.
The words don't change.
The person holding them does.
This means the interesting question is almost never simply:
Is this teaching true?
It is:
What is this teaching doing for me, right now, that I might not want to look at directly?
A Word on Relief
Before going further, I want to be clear about something this line of thinking could easily distort.
Spiritual practice can genuinely help a person survive a night, regulate an overwhelmed body, grieve, endure what feels unendurable, or find meaning in what otherwise has none.
Relief is not evidence of bypassing.
Prayer that calms a grieving person, meditation that settles a racing mind, surrender that loosens an exhausting grip on the uncontrollable — none of this needs to be treated with suspicion simply because it works.
The deeper question is not whether a practice brings relief.
It is whether the relief eventually returns a person to reality with greater capacity — to feel, act, relate, grieve, confront, choose — or whether it repeatedly substitutes for contact with something that still needs to be felt, understood, confronted, or lived.
That is the line this whole article is trying to draw.
Why Spiritual Bypassing Can Repeat Childhood Patterns
I grew up in a house split in two — my parents below, my grandparents above — and my grandmother's emotional storms ran the weather of that house.
When she was fed enough attention, enough daily reporting of everything that had happened in our lives, she could be warm. When she wasn't, the storm arrived, and it arrived through my mother, who absorbed it, and through the whole architecture of the house, which organized itself around not making things worse.
Nobody ever said this to me in words, but the instruction was unmistakable:
Put up with her.
Absorb it.
Stay calm.
Don't add to the weather.
One afternoon, for reasons I no longer remember, I locked the deadbolt on our apartment door and sat on the floor with my back against the wall.
The doorbell rang.
I didn't move.
It rang again.
I counted — five, eight, ten, twelve, fifteen — each ring faster and more pressurized than the last, my grandmother's panic pressing against the wood like a weather front.
When I finally opened the door, her eyes went straight to my body, scanning for damage, checking that I was still intact.
I did not know it then, but I had already been trained, cell by cell, in a discipline long before I ever heard the word spiritual:
Don't react.
Be the calm one.
Absorb what is coming at you rather than meeting it.
Years later, in an apartment in Salzburg, a borrowed copy of David Hawkins's Power vs. Force produced one of the most genuine mystical states of my life — warmth flooding my chest, the room suddenly humming with a stillness that felt intelligent.
That experience was real.
I do not walk it back.
Alongside a spiritual philosophy that genuinely opened something in me, I also discovered a far more sophisticated vocabulary for something I already knew how to do:
Put up with it. Stay above it. Don't add to the storm.
The teaching that came with the experience — surrender, nonattachment, rising above the emotional weather of ordinary human reactivity, staying identified with love rather than with whatever was disturbing it — fit the lock my childhood had already built with an almost frightening precision.
This is the mechanism I want this article to name clearly:
A spiritual teaching does not create a defense. It gives an existing defense a home.
And, crucially, a home that now feels sacred rather than merely learned.
Once don't react becomes nonattachment, once absorb the storm becomes surrender, the pattern is no longer simply a childhood adaptation we might eventually outgrow.
It has become a virtue.
Questioning it can begin to feel like questioning God, the teacher, or the path itself.
Which Part of Me Is Using the Teaching?
I moved from Austria to Sedona because of David Hawkins.
What I found there was not counterfeit spirituality. Some of the most sincere devotion I have ever witnessed lived in that community.
But among some students — myself included — there was an unmistakable pull toward using ideas about levels of consciousness, nonduality, and detachment to float above ordinary human difficulty rather than metabolize it.
I was not standing outside that culture, diagnosing it.
I wanted to be further along.
I wanted proximity to the teaching to mean something about who I was.
What eventually interrupted this was not more spiritual experience.
It was a different kind of teacher altogether — the Jungian analyst Nathan Schwartz-Salant, who had almost no interest in where I thought I was on any ladder.
He kept pointing somewhere else entirely:
Into the body.
Into aggression.
Into the family history I had assumed I'd already transcended.
Nathan asked a question the spiritual framework I had been living inside had not taught me to ask:
What was my own psychology doing with what my mind had come to believe?
At one point he said something that landed differently than any spiritual interpretation ever had:
"It's trauma you're discovering in your body, Daniel."
That sentence did not ask me to rise above anything.
It asked me to enter it.
Nathan taught me a distinction I now consider essential to any serious account of bypassing: the adult self has to be able to be with the wounded younger part without becoming identical to it.
Not fused with the fear.
Not rising above the fear.
Present to it, as an adult, without disappearing into either extreme.
He also gave me a word I had never applied to myself: aggression, in its original sense — ad-gredi, to move toward.
Not violence.
Not domination.
The capacity to step forward, protect something, say no, enter a conflict rather than transcend it.
I had inherited only two models growing up: my grandmother's storm, or my father's endless turning of the other cheek.
Nathan handed me a third option neither of them had modeled:
Grounded, forward movement.
Not collapse.
Not explosion.
Presence with enough spine in it to act.
Once I had that distinction, I could finally ask the question that this whole territory turns on:
Not: Is this teaching true?
But: Which part of me is using it, and for what?
How True Spiritual Teachings Become Psychological Defenses
None of the following principles are false.
Each one is genuinely capable of freeing a person.
Each one can also, in a different life — or at a different moment in the same life — become the exact material an old adaptation was waiting for.
Surrender can repeat collapse.
True surrender requires enough of a self to surrender something. When surrender is learned before selfhood is, it may not be surrender at all. It may be an earlier pattern — freeze, appeasement, learned helplessness — wearing a more dignified name.
Nonattachment can conceal a fear of intimacy.
It is easy to become detached from what we never let ourselves fully need in the first place. A person can speak fluently about freedom from attachment while the actual organizing force underneath is a fear of dependency, not liberation from it.
Forgiveness can bypass anger, protest, and the simple recognition that something happened.
Premature forgiveness can be a way of making pain disappear before it has ever had a witness.
Sometimes the more honest — and eventually more freeing — sequence runs:
That hurt.
That was wrong.
I am angry.
And only later, forgiveness that has something real to release.
Equanimity can repeat old emotional suppression.
A household that required calm above all else can produce an adult who mistakes the absence of visible reaction for peace.
Genuine equanimity can hold a full feeling without being overtaken by it.
Suppression cannot afford to feel the thing at all.
Selflessness can repeat self-erasure.
A child who survived by disappearing does not need a teaching that tells them the self is an illusion.
That child may first need to discover there was a self worth having before selflessness can mean anything other than a return to the earlier absence.
Acceptance can become a defense against agency.
It is what it is can be wisdom.
It can also be the sentence a person reaches for instead of making the phone call, setting the boundary, or leaving the situation that is, in fact, changeable.
In every one of these, the teaching is not the problem.
The problem is a person reaching for the version of the teaching that requires the least change, and calling that version wisdom.
Spiritual Bypassing Is Not the Same as Spiritual Ego
It is worth being precise about a nearby but distinct pattern.
Spiritual bypassing is primarily about avoidance:
What does this practice allow me not to feel, face, admit, or do?
Spiritual ego is primarily about identity:
What does this practice now allow me to believe about who I am?
They frequently travel together, but they are not the same mechanism.
A person who says, I don't get angry anymore because anger is ego, may be doing both.
The bypass is not having to feel the anger.
The spiritual ego is becoming the person who believes he has moved beyond it.
Keeping those mechanisms distinct matters because the work required by each is not exactly the same.
What Comes After Spiritual Bypassing?
For me, the solution to spiritual bypassing became psychospiritual integration.
Psychology alone was not enough.
Spirituality alone was not enough.
Over time, I needed a way of working that could hold both without reducing one to the other.
Psychology helped me descend into biography, trauma, family history, shadow, attachment, anger, dependency, and the parts of myself I had learned to leave behind.
But psychology by itself could not fully account for the spiritual experiences that had genuinely changed my life.
Those experiences were not simply symptoms to be interpreted through childhood.
Something real had happened.
Spirituality, on the other hand, gave me access to transcendence, meaning, surrender, mystery, and dimensions of experience that could not be reduced to personal history.
But spirituality by itself did not necessarily help me metabolize the unfinished psychological material I carried into those experiences.
What I needed was not one instead of the other.
I needed both.
Psychospiritual integration means holding spiritual realization and psychological development together without reducing either one to the other.
It means allowing more of reality back into the room.
The grief that was immediately reframed has to be grieved.
The anger that was classified as spiritually inferior may have to be listened to.
The boundary that acceptance helped us avoid may have to be drawn.
The dependency hidden beneath nonattachment may have to become conscious.
The choice we called surrender may turn out to require action.
The spiritual life becomes larger not because transcendence disappears, but because less of the human being has to be excluded in order to preserve it.
And psychospiritual integration is not only an intrapsychic process.
Much of what was wounded in relationship has to be integrated in relationship.
Insight alone is often not enough. Some parts of us change because they are finally met differently — seen without being shamed, held without being swallowed, challenged without being abandoned, and allowed to exist without being immediately spiritualized.
This is where relationship became indispensable in my own process. Psychotherapy, analysis, spiritual direction, mature community, psychospiritual mentorship, and other forms of serious accompaniment can each provide relational containers in which what we understand begins to become lived.
What mattered for me was finding relationships capable of holding both dimensions at once: what may genuinely have been revealed spiritually, and the unfinished human being who still had to live it.
The spiritual can keep psychology from reducing the person to biography. The psychological can keep spirituality from becoming escape.
That brings us back to the question at the center of this article:
What is this teaching doing in me?
Where is it opening me?
Where is it protecting me?
What feeling becomes unacceptable inside my spiritual worldview?
What part of my history finds this teaching especially attractive?
What action am I calling surrender because I am afraid to take it?
What would I have to feel if I stopped explaining what is happening?
These are not anti-spiritual questions.
They are questions asked in service of a spirituality strong enough to survive reality.
Recent research on spiritual bypassing has moved in a similar direction, describing a movement from defensive spirituality toward integrative spirituality — spiritual life that can coexist with emotional honesty and sustained psychological engagement rather than replacing it.
The target was never spirituality itself.
The target was division.
The problem was never that I wanted transcendence.
The problem was believing transcendence could spare me the work of becoming a person — that the storm upstairs, the deadbolt, the fifteen rings of the doorbell could simply be risen above rather than eventually, slowly, entered.
They couldn't be.
And I have come to be grateful they weren't.
The task now is not to become less spiritual.
It is to become less divided — spiritual enough to hold the transcendent, and human enough to still answer the door.