Nadia is 41, a cardiologist, and she has not missed a single morning meditation in two years. She’s on a yoga retreat in Maui — the kind that costs more than most people’s rent — and she’s crying again in savasana. She doesn’t know why. She’s been crying in savasana for six months. She assumes she needs a deeper practice, more time on the cushion, a better teacher. She signs up for a sound bath at 7 a.m. and a breathwork class at sunset. She tells herself she just hasn’t committed enough. She’s wrong. The tears in savasana aren’t asking for more spirituality. They’re asking her to stop running. What Nadia doesn’t know yet is that she’s been spiritually bypassing — using her practice as a very elegant, very well-intentioned escape from the grief, the burnout, and the childhood wounds she hasn’t let herself look at yet. She doesn’t need more meditation. She needs a therapist.

What Is Spiritual Bypassing?

John Welwood, PhD, a psychologist working at the intersection of Western psychology and Eastern spiritual traditions, first introduced this term in 1984. He watched it happen repeatedly in the communities he moved through — people who were genuinely devoted to awakening, and who were simultaneously using that devotion to step around the most painful and unresolved parts of their inner lives. Welwood was careful not to pathologize spiritual practice itself. His concern was the use of practice as avoidance. There’s a meaningful difference between sitting in meditation to cultivate presence and sitting in meditation to avoid feeling the grief that woke you up at 3 a.m.

That distinction sounds simple. In practice, it’s one of the harder things to see clearly in yourself — especially when the practice feels genuinely good, genuinely meaningful, and is producing real results in parts of your life. The complexity is real. And it’s worth sitting with.

The Science Behind It

The framework for understanding spiritual bypassing has been developed by a small number of researchers and clinicians whose work is worth knowing by name.

John Welwood, PhD, psychologist and author, coined the term and introduced it in his 1984 paper “Principles of Inner Work: Psychological and Spiritual” in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. His core insight was that spiritual seeking could serve as a sophisticated defense mechanism — one that’s culturally praised, which makes it harder to identify. He observed that many practitioners used spiritual ideas about transcendence, non-attachment, and unconditional love as a way to avoid the developmental emotional work their psychology required. He described this as trying to “rise above” the personal and emotional before adequately addressing it.

Robert Augustus Masters, PhD, psychotherapist and author of Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters, extended Welwood’s framework considerably. Masters described spiritual bypassing as not just an individual habit but a cultural one — embedded in wellness communities that valorize equanimity, positivity, and transcendence. He was particularly interested in how bypassing functions within groups: the subtle pressure to present as spiritually evolved, the shaming of anger or grief as “low vibration,” the way communities can collectively bypass by normalizing spiritual language as a substitute for genuine accountability and emotional honesty.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Boston University and author of The Body Keeps the Score, offers a different but complementary lens. Van der Kolk’s decades of trauma research demonstrate that traumatic experience is stored in the body — in the nervous system, in somatic sensation, in the way the body braces or collapses — in ways that purely cognitive or conceptual approaches cannot reach. This is the scientific basis for understanding why spiritual bypassing doesn’t ultimately work: the body holds what the mind bypasses. You can believe in non-attachment all you want, but if your nervous system is running a trauma response, that belief won’t regulate it. The wound doesn’t care how many retreats you’ve attended.

Together, these three thinkers help us understand spiritual bypassing not as a personal failing but as a comprehensible human response to pain — one that has real limitations, and one that becomes particularly entrenched when the culture around us rewards it.

How Spiritual Bypassing Shows Up in Driven Women

Back to Nadia. In the months before the Maui retreat, she’d been waking at 4:30 a.m. to meditate before her hospital shift. She’d read every book by Pema Chödrön. She sat with a teacher twice a month. She described herself as “more grounded than I’ve ever been.” And she was also: estranged from her mother, avoiding her marriage, and so disconnected from her body that she hadn’t noticed she’d stopped eating lunch. The practice wasn’t wrong. The use of it was.

Spiritual bypassing in driven women doesn’t usually look like delusion. It looks like discipline. It looks like devotion. It can be genuinely difficult to distinguish from the real thing — which is exactly why it’s worth naming the specific ways it tends to show up. Here are eight patterns I see in clinical work.

1. Using positivity to avoid grief. There’s a version of “gratitude practice” that’s actually grief avoidance. When something painful happens — a loss, a disappointment, a rupture — and the first move is to find the silver lining rather than feel the loss, that’s worth noticing. Grief needs to be felt before it can be integrated. Reaching for gratitude too quickly can short-circuit that process.

2. Meditation as dissociation. Meditation, practiced as presence, is a powerful tool. Meditation practiced as a way to exit the body, quiet internal noise, and float above difficult feeling states is dissociation with a spiritual name. If you’re leaving rather than arriving during your practice, that’s information worth taking seriously.

3. Spiritual pride replacing self-examination. When the sense of having a practice becomes a form of identity superiority — “I’ve done the work,” “I’m not reactive like other people,” “I don’t let things get to me” — that’s often spiritual bypassing wearing the costume of growth. Real growth usually involves more humility and more discomfort, not less.

4. Bypassing anger through premature “forgiveness.” Forgiveness is a legitimate and important part of healing. But forgiveness that happens before the anger has been felt and metabolized isn’t forgiveness — it’s suppression with a spiritual justification. Anger, particularly in women with relational trauma, often carries crucial information about boundaries that were crossed and needs that weren’t met. Skipping it doesn’t resolve it.

5. Detachment from the body. A number of spiritual traditions teach non-attachment, and something gets lost in translation when that principle is applied to the body. When I ask clients what they feel in their bodies and they have no answer — not “I don’t know,” but a genuine blankness, an absence of sensation — that’s not enlightenment. That’s dissociation, and in women with trauma histories, it’s often a very old and very well-practiced survival strategy now operating under a new name.

6. Using “everything happens for a reason” to avoid processing trauma. This is one of the most common and one of the most painful forms of bypassing I encounter. When something genuinely terrible has happened — abuse, loss, betrayal — and the response is immediate meaning-making, immediate framing as “what I was meant to learn,” that framework often forecloses the grief, the outrage, and the honest reckoning that real healing requires. Meaning can come. But it usually comes after, not instead of, the feeling.

7. Using community as avoidance of intimacy. Spiritual communities can provide a form of closeness that feels like connection while actually maintaining careful emotional distance. It’s possible to spend years in a community — meditating together, sharing meals, doing workshops — and never be truly known. When the warmth of collective practice substitutes for the vulnerability of real intimacy, that’s worth examining.

8. Spiritual seeking as workaholism’s substitute. Driven women who’ve worked on their workaholism sometimes replace it seamlessly with spiritual seeking. The busyness looks different — retreats, courses, teachers, reading lists — but the function is the same: staying so occupied that there’s no space in which the unaddressed material can surface. If your spiritual life has the same texture as your work life, it might be serving the same function.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

— Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

The Both/And of Spirituality and Healing

Maya is 38 and she came to therapy after a decade of devoted Buddhist practice that she described, accurately, as having saved her life. In her twenties, she’d been suicidal. The practice gave her a container, a community, and a set of tools for working with her mind that she credits with getting her through. She wasn’t wrong. It did help. Enormously.

And. And she was also using it — had been using it for years — to bypass her mother wound. Her mother was narcissistic, emotionally unavailable, and intermittently cruel. Maya had spent a decade practicing non-attachment in relation to her mother, working hard to arrive at compassion, reminding herself that her mother was suffering too. All of this was true. None of it had allowed Maya to actually grieve what she’d lost — the mother she’d needed and never had — or to feel the legitimate anger at the ways she’d been failed.

In therapy, the first time I asked Maya what she felt toward her mother — not what she thought, not what she’d arrived at through practice, but what she felt — she went quiet for a long time. Then she said: “I don’t know. I’ve been working so hard not to feel it that I’ve lost track of what it was.”

This is not an indictment of Buddhist practice. It’s an illustration of how genuinely helpful things can also function as avoidance — not because they’re wrong, but because we’re human, and we will use whatever is available to us to manage pain that feels unmanageable. Maya’s practice was real. The bypassing was also real. Both things were true at once.

The both/and framing matters. If you’ve found genuine support, meaning, or healing in a spiritual practice, that’s real and worth honoring. The question isn’t whether spirituality is legitimate — it is. The question is whether it’s being used in addition to or instead of the psychological work that your history requires. Those are very different things, and only you — with support — can really answer that question honestly.

The Systemic Lens: Why Spiritual Communities Enable Bypassing

Individual bypassing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s enabled — often actively — by the communities and the broader wellness culture that surrounds us. This is worth naming, because without the systemic piece, we risk locating the problem entirely within the individual and missing the pressure that shapes it.

Many spiritual communities, with the best of intentions, create cultures that pathologize what they call “negative” emotion. Anger is seen as a sign of insufficient practice. Grief is seen as attachment. Jealousy is “low vibration.” The result is a kind of emotional apartheid — certain feeling states are permitted (peace, gratitude, love, joy) and others are implicitly or explicitly treated as evidence of spiritual immaturity. When you live inside a community with those norms, bypassing isn’t just tempting. It’s what the environment rewards.

The wellness industry has amplified this significantly. “Good vibes only,” toxic positivity, the Instagram spirituality of unbroken sunrises and perfectly formatted affirmations — all of this is spiritual bypassing at a cultural scale. It packages avoidance as aspiration. And it sells extremely well to driven women who are already very good at performing equanimity.

There is also a dimension of privilege that rarely gets named in these conversations. The instruction to “just meditate,” to retreat, to step away from the noise and go inward — that instruction assumes a quality of material safety that not everyone has. The capacity to spiritually bypass often requires resources: time, money, access to wellness spaces. For women navigating material precarity, systemic oppression, and ongoing threat, the kind of spirituality-as-escape that Nadia has access to isn’t even available. Spiritual bypassing is, among other things, a phenomenon of relative privilege — and honest engagement with it requires acknowledging that.

None of this means spiritual community is harmful or that wellness is fraudulent. It means the culture around practice shapes the practice — and it’s worth being clear-eyed about that.

How to Use Spirituality Without Bypassing

The goal isn’t to abandon spiritual practice. The goal is to integrate it — to let it exist in a both/and relationship with psychological healing rather than as a substitute for it. Here are five ways to begin moving in that direction.

1. Practice somatic spirituality. Rather than using practice to exit the body, experiment with using it to arrive. This means paying deliberate attention to physical sensation during meditation, yoga, or prayer — not to control sensation, but to be with it. What does grief feel like in your chest? What does anger feel like in your jaw or your hands? Somatic spirituality is spirituality that stays in contact with the body rather than using practice to escape it.

2. Let your practice be a container for feeling, not a lid on it. If meditation is working, you should, over time, be more able to tolerate a full range of feeling states — not less. If you notice that your practice is creating a kind of emotional flatness, a sense of floating above rather than being present to your life, that’s important information. Real equanimity isn’t numbness. It’s the capacity to feel fully without being overwhelmed.

3. Bring your spiritual life into therapy. If you’re working with a therapist, tell them about your practice. A good trauma-informed therapist won’t pathologize your spirituality — they’ll be curious about it, they’ll ask what it gives you and what it costs you, and they’ll help you see where it’s integrated and where it might be functioning as avoidance. Your practice and your therapy can be in conversation with each other. They don’t have to be separate.

4. Know when you need a therapist, not a teacher. Spiritual teachers are often wise, often genuinely helpful, and often genuinely not equipped to work with trauma. If what’s arising in your practice is trauma — flashbacks, dissociation, activation, grief that doesn’t move — that material is asking for a clinically trained therapist who works somatically. This isn’t a hierarchy. It’s a recognition of different tools for different work.

5. Practice honest self-inquiry about function. Not “is my practice good?” but “what is my practice doing right now?” Is it helping you arrive, or helping you escape? Is it supporting contact with your inner world, or providing a culturally approved way to avoid it? This kind of honest self-inquiry — which can itself be a spiritual practice — is different from self-criticism. It’s just being willing to look clearly.

There’s something profound available on the other side of this work. When spiritual practice is integrated with genuine psychological healing, it doesn’t become smaller or less meaningful. It becomes more grounded, more embodied, more real. The peace that’s possible after you’ve actually grieved what needs to be grieved, after you’ve felt what you’ve been avoiding, after your nervous system has genuinely begun to heal — that peace is different in texture and quality from the peace you manufacture by staying above the fray. It has more weight to it. It’s earned.

Nadia, eventually, found a trauma therapist in Honolulu. She kept meditating. She also started crying during sessions — not the savasana kind, the kind where you know exactly why you’re crying. She told me later that the first time she let herself actually grieve her marriage in a therapy session, it was the most present she’d felt in years. Not floating. Just there.

If any of this is resonating — if you’re reading this and feeling that quiet, slightly uncomfortable recognition — I hope you’ll be gentle with yourself about it. Spiritual bypassing isn’t a character flaw. It’s a very human response to pain that felt too large to feel directly. And wherever you are in that, there’s a way through. Not around it. Through it.

Related Reading

1. Welwood, J. (1984). Principles of inner work: Psychological and spiritual. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 16(1), 63–74.
2. Masters, R. A. (2010). Spiritual bypassing: When spirituality disconnects us from what really matters. North Atlantic Books.
3. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking Press.
4. Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and religion. In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 11. Psychology and religion: West and East (pp. 1–105). Princeton University Press.
5. Fossella, T., & Welwood, J. (2011). Human nature, Buddha nature: An interview with John Welwood. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. https://tricycle.org/magazine/human-nature-buddha-nature/

Annie Wright

LMFT · 15,000+ Clinical Hours · W.W. Norton Author · Psychology Today Columnist

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist, relational trauma specialist, and the founder and successfully exited CEO of a large California trauma-informed therapy center. A W.W. Norton published author, she writes the weekly Substack Strong & Stable and her work and expert opinions have appeared in NPR, NBC, Forbes, Business Insider, The Boston Globe, and The Information.

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