Spiritual bypassing describes using transcendence to avoid psychological pain.

The reverse also occurs: clinical language can be used to avoid the numinous.

The DSM has had a category for this since 1994; practice has largely not followed.

First article of two parts.

In the early 20th century, Dr. Carl Jung was travelling alone when he was seized by a vision of a monstrous flood covering the lowlands between the North Sea and the Alps, with the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands in the water. At the time, he did not read it as a warning about Europe. He concluded that the material referred to him alone, and that he was perhaps menaced by some form of psychosis. The thought of war, he wrote later, never occurred to him.

Ten months after this vision, the First World War began.

The founder of depth psychology, a man who would spend the rest of his life arguing that the psyche speaks in symbol and image, first met his own likely numinous material by pathologizing it, interestingly enough. If Jung could do that to himself, the rest of the psychological profession can certainly do it to the people who sit across from them.

Jung wrote extensively on how primary, experiential, and direct psycho-spiritual encounters are the cornerstone of lasting transformation for the human psyche. Yet spirituality can also be misused in ways that quietly prevent growth.

The transpersonal psychotherapist John Welwood gave the field a phrase it badly needed in the mid-1980s. He named the way people in spiritual communities could use meditation, states of transcendence, or the language of oneness to sidestep grief, rage, and the other difficult emotions that arrive when a life falls apart or blows up. He called it spiritual bypassing, and the term has had remarkable staying power.

Wildly enough, we have never named the other direction with anything like the same clarity.

The Bypassing Runs Both Ways

Consider what happens when someone........

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