Four Common Bypass Traps to Watch Out For
Spiritual bypassing is when we neglect the human in favor of the spirit, completely missing the point that the human experience IS a spiritual experience.
I hear a lot about this in terms of how people will accept a more spiritual understanding before their nervous system has come to regulation, bypassing the experience of their body (for example, rage) in order to attach to the “spiritual understanding” (we’re all one, and rage is simply *an energy*).
But spiritual bypassing is more than that.
Here are four ways that I see spiritual bypassing running rampant, and how and why to look out for these dynamics.
“That’s just my ego.”
I hear this one all the time. People speak about the ego as if it’s unreal or insignificant, something to discard, something dirty of which to cleanse yourself.
But my ego is ME. It is me. It is every single thing I think I am. When I think I’m going to cleanse myself of ego, that’s my ego talking. My ego is important and necessary, my ego is my ally and ALWAYS has been. As I learn, my ego learns. If I relate to my ego as an enemy, I am relating to myself as an enemy, and my primary experience of the world is enmity.
I do not believe that my ego plays tricks on me. I treat my ego as sacred because I want to treat myself as sacred. The part of me that wants to treat myself as sacred is my ego, and the ego is part of what it wants to treat sacred. ALL of it is my ego. The ego is the only way to be self-conscious, because it is the concept of self.
It’s ok to value the experience of consciousness, it’s ok to have a robust concept of self. It’s ok to have and value your ego.
“It was a misunderstanding/trigger, they didn’t mean it.”
A misunderstanding is a wealth of information because when I misunderstand what’s happening, I have a REAL experience of that thing happening, even though it isn’t happening. How I react when I misunderstand what’s going on is how I would react if that thing were actually going on.
A trigger is a form of a misunderstanding. A trigger happens when we experience danger within a safe event.
Misunderstandings and triggers are real situations that must be taken seriously. When someone shows me who they are in a misunderstanding or a trigger, they are showing me a real aspect of who they are. This is not something to write off.
I’ve had people (with trauma of their own!) tell me that it’s understandable that someone is treating them poorly because the person is a trauma victim.
NO.
The only reason someone treats you poorly is because they are a person who thinks it’s ok under a certain circumstance to treat you poorly.
Misunderstandings and triggers are important and informative situations to assess your relationship with another person (and your relationship to your own standards for your own behavior), not only because they create real experiences, but also because misunderstandings and triggers are likely to reoccur.
Don’t try to excuse how someone treats you when they have a misunderstanding or experience a trigger. Don’t attempt to excuse your own treatment of others through misunderstandings or triggers. Your standards are your standards are your standards.
Own your standards, and believe others when they show you what their standards are.
“How do I know if I’m setting a real boundary or just accommodating my wounding?”
This one makes my eyes bug out of my head. What could be a better reason for a firm boundary than to protect a wound?? If your leg was broken would you question how fair it was to your partner to keep your leg in the cast?
And I get it, I do. You want to make sure you’re not over-fragilizing yourself, requiring others to tiptoe around reactivity. But that is precisely WHY your wounding needs robust boundaries, because if someone touches there, you’re gonna freak out. You’ll be hurt, and you won’t act the way you want to act toward others when you’re hurt.
Not creating robust boundaries keeps your wounds constantly festering, the way that not properly bandaging a fleshwound will continue letting in germs and delay the healing. Most people are not providing themselves with the exquisite safety they require as a result of their wounds, and the longer this goes on the more is required to restore healing. This is what actually produces the over-fragilizing, and even that is necessary.
If you’re asking yourself what to accept from someone else who seems perhaps overprotective of their wounds, remember that you can respect someone’s boundaries from afar. If others ask something from me that I consider to be too much, I can decline to interact with them. I do not have to judge whether their boundaries are reasonable or not. I can accept that they need that boundary and that I’m not willing to interact with those boundaries in place.
This is my go-to for people who seem to need to police language. I understand that you might not like to hear certain words, but that doesn’t remove my right to use them. It simply means that we are not compatible to interact while that’s the level of exquisiteness you require. That doesn’t make either of us unreasonable or wrong, it just makes us incompatible.
“You are ‘in your head’ and you should be ‘in your body’”
This one scares me a lot because I have watched men control and gaslight a woman by telling her she’s “too in her head” and “not in her body.” So that’s the first warning for this form of bypassing — no one else can tell you whether you are in your head or in your body because they CANNOT KNOW your internal experience. Anyone who claims to know your internal experience better than you is likely to be dangerous to you for a variety of potential reasons.
The judgment that being “in your head” isn’t a good way to be is related to the ego one. The ego is you, and your head is you. The experience of your ego, the experience of your head, those are real and valuable experiences, not to be bypassed. The information from your head is equally as valuable and important as the information from your body, and you need the one to truly deeply understand the other.
Your body informs your head and your head informs your body. (And by the way, your head is attached to your body, it IS your body.) Your head and body are meant to work in concert to help you make choices and decisions.
Asking you to cleave yourself away from your own reason, rationality, memories, and life experiences is something a predator will do to more easily manipulate your reality. Whether this is a “healer” trying to extract money from you, a partner who needs a sense of control to feel safe, or a potential lover who doesn’t like your boundaries, telling you to leave part of yourself out of the equation is a sign that someone is not capable of intimacy. Intimacy is presence with what IS. Not just the things you like, ALL of what is.
If you agree to “get out of your head” and “get into your body,” (as if they are mutually exclusive) you’ll have integration to do later in order to return to intimacy with yourself. This is what’s happening when you’re fretting after a breakup saying “I should have listened to my intuition in the first place.” But know that this process is also valuable, as you learn that you can ALWAYS re-integrate with yourself, and develop a deeper sense of trust in your intuition.
