Spiritual Bypass - Shame Fuels The Flame

"Spiritual bypass" -- the use of spirituality to avoid or create a diversion from dealing with and confronting painful issues at the cognitive, emotional, physical and interpersonal levels.

"Involvement in spiritual teachings and practices can become a way to rationalize and reinforce old defenses. . . . Many of the "perils of the path" . . . result from trying to use spirituality to shore up developmental deficiencies.
—John Welwood (2000, p. 12) Awakening the heart: East-west approaches to psychotherapy and the healing relationship.

Well put.  Sometimes I wonder if the people who are most prone to spiritual bypassing are in the evangelical church.  I probably wonder that because that's been my own personal experience, and its aftereffects tend to linger.

Much of my individual work in recovery - including my recovery maintenance, heavily relies on applying a spiritual program of action -the 12 steps.  Though it's a spiritual program of action, the applications have covered far more than just thinking along spiritual lines, and the manifestation isn't exclusively at spiritual levels, it encompasses the cognitive, emotional, physical and interpersonal arenas.  For what good is a spiritual program of action if it doesn't have the capacity to make a profound impact at all levels?

I have not always interacted with life applying the tools from this program though.  I'm still a babe in recovery and in working the steps.  I was rather resistant in the beginning when I was initially introduced to the 12 steps and attended my first 12-step meeting.  Why?  Because I was an expert in spiritual bypassing, with my Pharisaical Evangelical Christian background, only recently having it challenged, by other Christians.

Whenever I sinned or behaved in a way in which I knew was nothing like Jesus, I would berate myself with Bible verses and shame (often while praying) for behaving or thinking the way I did.  If I even felt slightly hurt or offended by a circumstance or another person's actions or words, I would engage in this "spiritual" practice of shaming "truth" into my psyche.  I was addicted to using shame to medicate my aching heart, by anesthetizing its cries to be heard and to receive healing, from living most of my life with many basic emotional needs gone unmet or under-acknowledged.

The payoff?  -Feeling spiritually elite and self-righteous as a result of this practice, and most of all not facing or feeling the uncomfortable pain, which robbed me of the opportunity of discharging it through the painful process of honest grieving through acknowledging it, instead of shaming it.

In recovery, I am learning to accept those aches and pains by acknowledging them and meeting them with compassion instead of judgment and self-criticism (usually using Bible verses), and with growing confidence from believing that a Power greater than myself can restore me to sanity, because I've turned my life and my will over to the care of God, as I understood Him.

I have spent the majority of my Christian life shaming myself for the way I've thought or felt, and tried to diligently pray and shame them away using Scripture -an extremely misguided use of both, but that is what I had in my own personal tool box of coping skills -spiritually and emotionally abusing myself, taking "truths" out of the context of grace, and in the stinging context of shame.  I didn't realize just how dangerous this was, because it felt so damn normal, and even spiritual.

I believe this is what hardened hearts are primarily made of, at least from my own experience.  Layers and layers of shame, gone unchallenged and un-resisted, because it's too painful to go there.  Instead, the needs for healing in the cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal levels were resisted, while my unmet needs in those areas went challenged by operating out of a belief system that resisted accepting those as legit needs, as God-given needs.

Shame is what fuels the hardening of hearts, with the lie that it's protecting the heart.  It is the gasoline that kept my engine running a hundred miles an hour while on the spiritual bypass.  In contrast, it is in the context of empathy and compassion, led by grace and truth - which is the healing ointment for my soul's aches and pains.

I am now learning that the missing link in me receiving this was in the application of giving and receiving this from myself, which was always available from an unlimited source:  God.  I'm the primary one that's blocked its reception from Jesus, out of shame in holding false beliefs for years and years even especially as a Christian.

In recovery, with Jesus Christ as my Higher Power, I'm learning to get it right with myself, for then I'm much better equipped for dealing with humanity and its vast limitations, in real-time.  It helps in preventing me from being as devastated and resentful as I historically have been when others didn't get it right with me, and vice versa.

By cutting out shame from my spiritual diet, I have a far better chance at tolerating loving humanity, including my own, one day at a time.