Spiritual Bypassing: Meaning, Examples, Phrase Check

By the Awaken Library Editorial TeamEditorial Team · Updated October 20, 2026Oct 20, 2026 · How we write

Spiritual bypassing is using spiritual ideas to skip painful feelings or unfinished problems. John Welwood named it in 1984.

Spiritual bypassing meaning and where the term comes from

In August 1983 John Welwood, a psychotherapist who had trained in Buddhist meditation with Chögyam Trungpa, gave a talk at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. It appeared the next year in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. Welwood had noticed that some people in spiritual communities “seemed to be using meditation or their spiritual involvements to bypass certain kinds of personal, emotional ‘unfinished business’”, and he added that he could see the same temptation in himself. His definition:

“I have come to call this tendency to try to avoid or prematurely transcend basic human needs, feelings, and developmental tasks, ‘spiritual bypassing.’”

The useful words in that sentence are avoid and prematurely. Avoid is the plain part: practice used as a place to hide. Prematurely is the subtle part: the goal may be real (calm, forgiveness, letting go), but you jump to it before the feeling or the problem has been lived through. Many popular pages date the term to Welwood’s 2000 book Toward a Psychology of Awakening; the 1984 paper is sixteen years older and is free in the journal’s online archive.

Two neighboring ideas are often mixed up with it. Spiritual materialism is Chögyam Trungpa’s term from Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973): using spirituality to build up the ego, collecting experiences and status. Toxic positivity is a newer, non-religious idea, explained below. The first book devoted to bypassing itself is Robert Augustus Masters’ Spiritual Bypassing (2010). His publisher’s description defines it as “the use of spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”

Spiritual bypassing examples

Bypassing almost always shows up as a sentence. Here are ten that come up again and again, with the source of each type: Masters’ essay “Avoidance in Holy Drag”, Welwood’s paper, Cashwell and colleagues (2007, 2010) or Fox and colleagues (2017).

Every one of these can also be said honestly. “Everything happens for a reason” a year after a divorce, when you have cried and rebuilt, is not bypassing. The same words either come after the feeling or are used to skip it.

Signs of spiritual bypassing

Masters’ own list is clinical: “exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous boundaries” and “delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being”. In everyday life those tend to look like this (the examples are ours):

• Hard feelings get relabeled fast. Sadness becomes “resistance”, fear becomes “low vibration”, before anyone has asked what they are about.
• Anger seems shameful. You are proud of not getting angry, and conflicts stay unspoken.
• Forgiveness comes on schedule. The decision is made in a day; the sleepless nights go on.
• Practice replaces a step. Meditation, prayer or a retreat keep coming instead of the call, the appointment or the conversation.
• Distance passes for freedom. Closeness feels like “attachment”, so it is avoided.
• Others get explanations. A friend’s illness or loss is met with karma or “lessons” rather than help.
• A feeling of being further along. Family and old friends seem “asleep”, and the gap is comfortable.

These are signs in behavior, not a diagnosis. Masters writes that nearly everyone on a spiritual path bypasses to some degree, and that “the spiritual bypasser in us needs not censure nor shaming.”

Spiritual bypassing vs real acceptance

From the outside they can look the same: a calm face, kind words, no drama. The difference is in what happens to the feeling and to the next step. The table is our summary of Welwood and Masters, not a list from either of them.

A short test you can use: after the calm, is the feeling still allowed to exist, and has the next step happened?

Spiritual bypassing and toxic positivity

Toxic positivity is the rule that you have to look on the bright side whatever happens. One early use in print is in Jack Halberstam’s 2011 book The Queer Art of Failure; the phrase was made popular by the therapist Whitney Goodman on Instagram in 2019 and in her 2022 book. A 2026 scoping review of 59 studies defines it as “a socially enforced and overgeneralised norm” that dismisses negative feelings and blocks their honest expression, and notes that the research is still thin and has no agreed measure.

The two ideas meet in phrases like “good vibes only”, but they are not the same. Toxic positivity needs no spirituality at all; it lives in offices and on social media. Spiritual bypassing uses spiritual words and practices, and it can be quiet and serious rather than cheerful (“I’m beyond that”). We found no study that measures the two together.

Related research: people who habitually suppress their emotions report lower wellbeing and get along worse with others (Gross and John, 2003). That research is about suppression in general, not about spiritual practice.

Spiritual bypassing in Christianity and other traditions

Welwood described the pattern among members of spiritual communities, and the description of Masters’ book says that “Christian commandments or Buddhist precepts” can both give “easy justification” for ducking uncomfortable feelings. In Christian language it tends to sound like “just pray about it” instead of seeing a doctor, “God has a plan” said too soon after a death, or pressure to forgive quickly. The trouble starts when faith is used to skip a feeling or a step.

Research here is scarce. A 2021 study of 435 people in Honduras and Spain found that how much people bypassed depended on culture, and in the Honduran sample it went together with being Christian, church attendance and social support. It was a survey, so it shows links, not causes. We found no study on what Scripture says about bypassing, and we don’t speak for any church.

What research says about spiritual bypass

There is less research than the number of articles suggests. What exists is mostly surveys of students and community samples, plus a few interview studies:

None of these studies shows that bypassing causes depression or anxiety. They show that the two often appear together. The idea is useful in counseling, and the evidence behind it is still early.

Is spiritual bypassing always bad?

No. People in the interview studies describe it as real relief at the time. When someone is in shock after a loss, a prayer or “everything happens for a reason” can get them through the first night. The trouble starts when the shortcut becomes permanent and the feeling never gets its turn.

The 2026 review frames it as a stage: people tend to move out of it by telling their spiritual life and their psychological needs apart, not by dropping the spiritual life. So the aim is to let the practice include the parts you were using it to avoid. Shadow work is one way people do that; our guide to shadow work explains the method and where it came from.

If you recognize yourself

Most people who look this up find at least one phrase they use. That is the normal result, not a verdict. A practical order that works for most of the patterns above:

1. Pick one phrase, not all of them. The one you say most often, or the one that made you wince when you read it.
2. Next time you hear yourself say it, finish the sentence honestly. “Everything happens for a reason, and right now I’m…” Whatever comes after “and” is the feeling the phrase was covering.
3. Give that feeling ten minutes of plain attention. Where is it in the body, what is it about, what does it want? No fixing, no meaning yet.
4. Then do one small real thing. The call, the email, the honest sentence to the person involved. Keep the practice; put the step right after it.

If someone keeps saying these phrases to you, you don’t have to diagnose them. Saying what you need (“I don’t need a lesson right now, I need you to listen”) usually does more than naming the pattern. The check at the top of the page gives a ready answer for each phrase.

When to talk to a professional

Most bypassing is everyday and can be handled with honesty and time. Talk to a doctor or a therapist if:

• low mood, emptiness or anxiety have lasted more than two weeks or get in the way of work, sleep or relationships;
• what you try yourself, including practice, is not helping (this is the NHS’s own threshold for seeing a GP);
• old trauma keeps flooding back during meditation or prayer;
• you feel numb or unreal for long stretches.

You can ask for a therapist who is comfortable with spiritual life; your practice does not have to stay outside the room. If you have thoughts of death or of harming yourself, call or text 988 in the US, or Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, free and at any hour.

What this page does not promise. The check does not diagnose anything and gives no score, so it can’t tell you whether you are “a bypasser”. Nobody is one all the time. It does not replace therapy, and we don’t claim that any practice will remove bypassing.

How the check works

The ten phrases were chosen from the types described in Welwood’s 1984 paper, Masters’ 2010 book and essay, Cashwell and colleagues’ papers (2007, 2010) and the “spiritualizing” factor of the Spiritual Bypass Scale (2017). We wrote our own situations and did not copy the scale’s questions. For each phrase you mark, the result shows what it can cover, one thing to try (or a way to answer, if someone says it to you) and when the same words are fine. There is no score, because the same sentence can be honest comfort or a way around pain, and a count of phrases can’t tell which. Your answers stay in your browser and are not saved.

Related: spiritual awakening symptoms · dark night of the soul · shadow work prompts · Carl Jung and the shadow · self-inquiry (“Who am I?”) · what the higher self means · spiritual journal prompts · manifestation · empath