Many people come to spirituality because something inside them hurts. We meditate, study non-attachment, orient toward transcendence, or repeat affirmations because we are seeking relief from suffering—or at least a way to make sense of it. This impulse is not misguided. It is deeply human. But sometimes, without realizing it, spirituality becomes a way to move around pain rather than through it. Psychologist and Buddhist teacher John Welwood named this pattern spiritual bypassing, describing it as the tendency to use spiritual ideas or practices to avoid unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks. Instead of integrating our humanity, we attempt to rise above it.
(Toward a Psychology of Awakening; Welwood interview in Tricycle)
Welwood emphasized that bypassing rarely comes from bad faith. Most people who bypass are sincere practitioners. They are devoted, disciplined, and genuinely seeking freedom. Yet something essential remains untouched.
Spiritual Bypassing: Premature Transcendence and the Inner Split
Welwood warned that bypassing leads to what he called premature transcendence—trying to rise above the human experience before it has been metabolized:
“Trying to move beyond our psychological and emotional issues by sidestepping them is dangerous. It sets up a debilitating split between the buddha and the human within us.”
— John Welwood, interview in Tricycle
This split often shows up when absolute truths—emptiness, impermanence, non-self—are used to dismiss relative truths such as emotion, need, grief, or relational conflict. Emptiness is favored over form. Detachment is valued more than feeling. Over time, spirituality becomes conceptual and one-sided, elegant in theory but thin in lived experience.
Welwood observed that many long-term practitioners speak eloquently about compassion or basic goodness, yet struggle with intimacy, boundaries, or self-trust. Their practice has matured, but their emotional and relational lives have not ripened alongside it. Spirituality becomes compartmentalized—alive on the cushion, absent in relationship.
Nervous System Reality Beneath Spiritual Language
One reason spiritual bypassing persists is that it often works—at least on the surface. Spiritual frameworks can soothe the mind while leaving the nervous system untouched. But trauma, attachment wounds, and chronic misattunement do not resolve through insight alone. They live in the body.
When spiritual practice is used to suppress anger, grief, fear, or longing, the nervous system does not settle; it contracts. What appears as calm may actually be collapse. What feels like spaciousness may be dissociation. The language sounds regulated, but the body tells another story.
Welwood repeatedly emphasized that psychological wounds are fundamentally relational. They form in early environments where attunement, safety, or consistency were missing. These wounds shape how the nervous system learns to survive. Without attending to this layer, spirituality risks floating above lived experience rather than inhabiting it.
Attachment Wounds and Spiritual Identity
Welwood noticed that many Western practitioners unknowingly bring attachment strategies into spiritual life. For some, spirituality becomes a compensatory identity—being the good practitioner, the helper, the evolved one—in order to cover an underlying sense of deficiency or shame.
For others, spiritual teachings reinforce a deficient identity. Welwood observed that people with depressive tendencies or insecure attachment often use teachings on non-self to further deflate themselves. Instead of liberation, non-self becomes another reason to feel wrong for having needs, emotions, or insecurity. As he noted, people may come to see their suffering itself as a failure of practice, which only deepens shame
(Tricycle interview).
In these cases, spirituality does not loosen identity—it hardens it. From a trauma-informed lens, spiritual bypassing often looks like a regulated story layered over a dysregulated body.
Spiritual Bypassing: Non-Attachment or Avoidance of Attachment?
One of Welwood’s most important contributions was clarifying the difference between non-attachment and avoidant attachment:
“Avoidance of attachment is not freedom from attachment. It’s still a form of clinging—clinging to the denial of your human attachment needs.”
— Welwood, Tricycle interview
What many people practice as non-attachment is actually avoidant attachment—a learned strategy that minimizes closeness and need in order to avoid disappointment or pain. This strategy often originates in early relationships where emotional availability was unreliable.
Paradoxically, genuine non-attachment grows out of secure attachment, not its absence. When people feel safe enough to need, feel, and bond, they are far less likely to cling. Without that safety, spiritual teachings can be used to justify emotional withdrawal rather than freedom.
Spiritual Bypassing: The Spiritual Superego and Toxic Positivity
Another subtle form of bypassing emerges through what Welwood called the spiritual superego—an internalized voice shaped by spiritual ideals that tells us how we should feel, think, or respond.
You should be more peaceful.
You shouldn’t feel angry.
If you were really practicing, this wouldn’t bother you.
Welwood warned that when spiritual teachings turn into prescriptions, they feed deficiency rather than wisdom. To survive early relational misattunement, many people develop identity strategies that later get spiritualized:
- A compensatory identity (the good meditator, the helper, the spiritually advanced one)
- A deficient identity (a deep sense of not being enough, masked by spiritual ideals)
Spiritual practice can then become a way to defend against shame, dependency, or longing rather than a path of liberation. When this happens, practice becomes compartmentalized—beautiful in theory, but not fully embodied in relationship or daily life.
This dynamic often overlaps with toxic positivity, where difficult emotions are reframed or dismissed rather than met. Pain becomes a personal failure instead of a doorway into understanding.
Spiritual Bypassing: Healing and Awakening as Parallel Paths
Welwood consistently argued that psychological healing and spiritual awakening are not competing paths. He described them as two developmental tracks—often called “growing up” and “waking up”—that can mutually enrich one another.
Welwood challenged the idea that feelings are distractions from the path. He described feeling as a form of intelligence—the body’s direct, holistic way of knowing.
Traditional Buddhism has not always distinguished clearly between reactive emotion and felt experience, sometimes lumping both together as samskaric phenomena to overcome. Welwood argued that when feelings are met with presence rather than suppression, they often reveal their own wisdom
(Tricycle interview).
As he wrote, we are not only humans learning to become buddhas; we are also buddhas waking up in human form, learning how to be fully human.
(Book: Toward a Psychology of Awakening).
When spirituality includes emotional honesty, attachment repair, and nervous system awareness, it becomes embodied. When psychotherapy honors impermanence, compassion, and transcendence, it becomes expansive. Integration, not replacement, is the work.
Spiritual Bypassing Reflective Exercise: Gently Noticing Bypass
Set aside 10 minutes for quiet reflection or journaling.
Bring to mind a recent situation that stirred discomfort – an argument, disappointment, shame, grief, or longing.
Ask yourself:
- Did I reach for a spiritual explanation before fully feeling what was present?
- Was there a “should” about how I ought to feel or respond?
- What emotion or need might that explanation have been protecting me from?
Notice without judgment. Awareness itself is already movement.
Spiritual Bypassing: A Healing Collective Way of Holding This
From a Healing Collective perspective, spiritual bypassing is not something to correct or pathologize – it is something to meet with curiosity and compassion. It often signals a nervous system that learned safety through distance, goodness, or transcendence when direct connection was not yet possible.
Healing happens not by abandoning spirituality, but by slowing it down enough to include the body, emotions, and relational field. Therapy becomes a place where spirituality doesn’t have to float above experience, and spirituality becomes a place where therapy doesn’t get stuck in story.
The inquiry is not about resolution. It is about relationship – meeting experience as it is, with presence rather than transcendence.
That, too, is practice.
At The Healing Collective, we focus on a Mind – Body – Spirit approach to healing. If you are interested in working with us, reach out today by clicking the button below.
Written by Shanen Ilg, Clinical Graduate Intern
