The Problem with Spiritual Bypassing
If you grew up in a faith community, you may have been taught to spiritually bypass the complex feelings you experience. Spiritual bypassing is essentially a thinking trap. It ignores the richness and complexity of your God-given design. You feel confused, scared, or uncertain. You don't know what to think or do. Instead of carefully working through the different layers of a complicated problem, you try to force-fit a spiritual pseudo solution. For example, you might tell yourself things like the following:
- All I need is prayer!
- Forgive and forget. That's the best way to approach this situation.
- Let go and let God.
Sometimes you spiritually bypass yourself. When you're conflicted inside, it's tempting to default to a subtle form of overspiritualizing — God would want me to do it! Or It must be God's will! Or It's the Christian thing to do! But does God really want you to do it? Is it really God's will? Is it really the Christian thing to do? Instead of engaging your mind and the tools God has given you, in addition to your spiritual resources, you project your decision- making onto God. You give God too much responsibility for the decisions that you, in fact, are making. It's the ultimate counterfeit trump card against inner conflict:
I can't figure out what to do, so I'll use God as a scapegoat.
Oftentimes other people encourage you to spiritually bypass — they assume that all your problems can be solved with a spiritual solution. A friend might encourage you to jump to forgiveness when what's really needed is to grieve a betrayal and establish healthy boundaries. Or a faith community might encourage you to spiritualize a problem that is not primarily spiritual. For example, a spiritual leader might encourage you to pray harder for God to take away your depression or medical condition instead of helping you to find a professional who is trained to help you. Or they might encourage you to love the person harming you instead of helping you to protect yourself.
Spiritual bypassing keeps you from adequately addressing the problem you are facing.
It also creates dissonance inside, or internal discomfort. You want to trust in God, but the problem is only getting worse. You start to blame yourself: If only my faith were stronger! As a result of that inner tension, you resort to any of the following unhealthy coping strategies:
Self-gaslighting: telling yourself you don't feel what you really feel
Numbing: suppressing your emotions instead of working to cope with them
Magical thinking: disregarding reality and denying yourself the opportunity to discover practical solutions
You miss out on opportunities to develop skills, gain knowledge, or receive care and comfort from others.
- Here's what is true: God created you with an ensemble of inter-connected parts, including thoughts, emotions, and a nervous system, designed to work together harmoniously like an orchestra. Your job, in partnership with God's Spirit, is to be the conductor of that orchestra, working patiently with all the pieces, bringing them out of dissonance and into a cohesive melody.
And that's exactly the kind of work that my client Katie needed to do. Instead of facing her complicated feelings and working her way through them, she had tried to drown them out: It's God's will that I marry him! But parts of Katie weren't sure about this decision. Parts of her were scared and anxious. Katie needed to patiently work through each of the truth-pieces in partnership with God until she arrived at a cadence that accounted for all the parts of her story.
Katie's case was indeed complicated. I'll admit that at first I assumed she and her fiancé weren't a good match. I was concerned about her apparent lack of feelings for Ike, the man to whom she was engaged. But as I set aside my own conflicting thoughts and assumptions and helped Katie painstakingly examine the many truth-pieces of her situation, a different picture emerged for both of us.
Katie had grown up with a significant amount of trauma, including having been abused by her father at a very young age. As a result, she had often been drawn to men who discarded or mistreated her. Toxic dynamics felt familiar to her, and she mistook familiarity for safety.
But Ike was different. He was kind, patient, and loving. He treated Katie with respect. He wasn't flashy, nor did he sweep her off her feet. The safety she experienced with him confused her — she didn't recognize it as the buzzy chemicals she had often mistaken for love. As we worked together, it became clear that she loved Ike deeply and recognized that he was a man who would be a true, loving companion through all the seasons of her life. A part of her, however, didn't recognize her feelings for Ike as love. This part of her experienced the safety she found in Ike as boring or uneventful — unlike the dramatic highs and lows of prior relationships. She was drawn to Ike, but she was also confused. Instead of working her needed to name, frame, and brave a deeper understanding of herself and of her relation- ship to Ike. She needed more time to completely fill out the missing pieces of this puzzle.
- God doesn't ask you to bypass the conflicting emotions you face.
What if those feelings are an opportunity to brave even deeper growth and healing?
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