When the sacred is met only clinically, people may stop disclosing rather than object.

Missing psychosis or delirium is the mirror error, and it carries its own serious cost.

Discernment, rather than immediate interpretation, is what the work asks of clinicians.

This is Part 2 of a series about spiritual and psychological bypassing. Read Part 1 here.

In a previous post, I discussed how spiritual bypassing describes the use of transcendence to avoid psychological and emotional pain. I suggested that psychological bypassing is the reverse: the use of clinical or therapeutic language to avoid the sacred and numinous.

The question I ended on was not whether to psychologically interpret this, but whether the interpretation serves the person in front of us or protects the clinician from material they were not trained to hold.

Where the Reflex Comes From

Jung wrote about how Freud once urged him to make a dogma of his sexual theory, as an unshakeable bulwark against what Freud called the "black tide of mud of occultism." Two of the founding figures of modern psychotherapy split, in part, over exactly this issue. Jung treated the numinous as material to be acknowledged, understood, and integrated; Freud treated spiritual explanations as a threat to the scientific standing of the entire psychological enterprise and something that ought to be dismissed.

The second view eventually won the institutions, and most clinicians were trained within its assumptions without ever being told they were, in fact, assumptions. That is worth knowing, because a reflex you can trace is a reflex you can compassionately change and work with.

What It Costs When the Spiritual Is Discredited

Clients learn quickly which parts of their lives........

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