According to Buddhist teacher and therapist John Welwood, spiritual bypass is “"a tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks". Since I work as a coach and therapist, I see this in some of the people who come to me for private sessions.
Such people usually have really high ideals and want to be loving, kind and forgiving towards others, including members of their own families and/or their own partners even if these relationships are unhealthy and there is a lack of healthy boundaries and respect for the basic right of each individual to be who he or she is.
Unfortunately, when someone is a “doormat” and/or a “people-pleaser” and says he or she has forgiven the people who have been disrespectful towards them or violated their boundaries in the past – it’s really a big problem especially if they are still being treated disrespectfully by these people. This is a clear sign of “spiritual bypass” because it means that they have not yet learned to set healthy boundaries or assert their right to be treated with respect.
I often ask these people the following questions:
- What about you? Why don’t you matter?
- Why are the feelings or ideas of other people more important than your ideas and feelings?
- Don’t you have a right to be treated with respect?
- How is allowing someone to treat you disrespectfully really being “loving and kind”?
- Wouldn’t it be more loving and kind to yourself and to the other person to set healthy boundaries?
- How are you helping yourself or the other person if you don’t have healthy boundaries and set limits and demand respectful behavior? What’s “loving and kind” about this kind of behavior?
- What about you being loving and kind to yourself?
When we explore these questions, we discover that love and kindness really has to begin at home, with ourselves, and that we have to learn to being loving and kind towards ourselves. Which translates into having healthy boundaries and being able to take good care of oneself. This is a vital step in healthy personal development and when we try to bypass this, it’s what we call “spiritual bypass” and it usually backfires…. For more about being assertive and setting healthy boundaries, see my book “Are You Happy Now? 10 Ways to Live a Happy Life” and Part Two of my book “Find and Follow Your Inner Compass”. Available on Amazon or on my Website: www.beamteam.com
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