Are You Spiritually Bypassing? Take The Quiz.

It’s not just spiritual anesthesia; it’s a recipe for getting exploited relationally.

Lissa Rankin, MD

October 19, 2026

As part of our book tour for our new book RELATIONSICK: Why Putting Yourself Last Is Destroying Your Life—And How to Heal, we’ve been in Michigan, where “unicorn” therapist and health psychologist Dr. Tracy Juliao of Total Health and Wellness Associates hosted us for a weekend’s worth of learning, workshops, community connection, fun, and belonging. If you or someone you know in Michigan is struggling with “relationsickness,” much of Dr. Juliao’s team of therapists have now been trained in how to heal relationsickness. (If you’ve now read RELATIONSICK, please go to Amazon and leave us a review here.)

We have a whole chapter in RELATIONSICK about spiritual bypassing and how spiritual beliefs and practices can actually interfere with standing up for yourself when someone is abusing their power in a relationship and causing harm to the “one down” person in the relationsick dynamic. We casually mentioned how spiritual bypassing can anchor in relationsickness and get in the way of healing it when someone raised a hand and asked “What is spiritual bypassing?” It surprised us how many people, most of them therapists, were unfamiliar with the idea. Most people in the audience identified as “spiritual,” coming from diverse religious and “spiritual but not religious” backgrounds. Yet when many had no idea what we were talking about, so we had to tread lightly. I promised to write them a blog post, so here it is, for those of you who are brand new to the term “spiritual bypassing.”

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Defining Spiritual Bypassing

So let’s start with brass tacks. What’s the definition of spiritual bypassing? Psychologist and Buddhist spritual teacher John Welwood coined the term.

“Spiritual bypassing is a term I coined to describe a process I saw happening in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself. Although most of us were sincerely trying to work on ourselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.

When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits. I see this as an ‘occupational hazard’ of the spiritual path, in that spirituality does involve a vision of going beyond our current karmic situation.”

-John Welwood

Since Welwood introduced the term, many others have adopted it and written in more depth about the way spirituality can be misused as conflict avoidance in holy drag, using spiritual practices like meditation to anesthetize psychological pain, twisting spiritual beliefs to avoid saying “ouch” or confronting someone who is committing harm, bypassing the necessary healing of trauma, skipping over holding perpetrators of abuse accountable, and avoiding pursuing justice for victims of harm done.

I’ll never forget the day I read one passage in the book Spiritual Bypassing. At the time I was a card-carrying spiritual bypasser myself, but I felt busted when I first read this quote:

“Blind compassion is rooted in the belief that we are all doing the best we can. When we are driven by blind compassion, we cut everyone far too much slack, making excuses for others’ behavior and making nice situations that require a forceful “no”, an unmistakable voicing of displeasure, or a firm setting and maintaining of boundaries. These things can, and often should be done out of love, but blind compassion keeps love too meek, sentenced to wearing a kind face.

Blind compassion is kindness rooted in fear, and not just fear of confrontation, but also fear of not coming across as a good or spiritual person. When we are engaged in blind compassion we rarely show anger, for we not only believe that compassion has to be gentle; we are also frightened of upsetting anyone, especially to the point of their confronting us. This is reinforced by our judgment about anger, especially in its more fiery forms, as something less spiritual; something that shouldn’t be there if we were being truly loving. Blind compassion reduces us to harmony junkies, entrapping us in unrelentingly positive expression.

With blind compassion we don’t know how to – or won’t learn how to – say “no” with any real power, avoiding confrontation at all costs and, as a result, enabling unhealthy patterns to continue. Our “yes” is then anemic and impotent, devoid of impact it could have if we were also able to access a clear, strong “no” that emanated from our core.

When we mute our essential voice, our openness is reduced to a permissive gap, an undiscerning embrace, a poorly boundaried receptivity, all of which indicate a lack of compassion for ourselves (in that we don’t adequately protect ourselves). Blind compassion confuses anger with aggression, forcefulness with violence, judgment with condemnation, caring with exaggerated tolerance, and more tolerance with spiritual correctness.”

Holy moly. When I read that, I had just come out of a very passionate but very dysfunctional relationship with a famous spiritual teacher who was incredibly seductive but with glaring narcissistic tendencies. I was naive and still dedicated to people-pleasing niceness, so he easily overpowered me when it came to gaslighting, manipulation, violating boundaries, hiding behaviors he knew I wouldn’t like, getting upset at me when I felt neglected by him, and trying to control me into agreeing to take part in activities and behaviors I really didn’t want to consent to.

When Spirituality & Premature Forgiveness Replace Accountability

The relationship ended badly, as such things do, when he finally agreed to respect a few boundaries and then promptly broke them. He accused me of being controlling by trying to protect myself from his unboundaried condom-less polyamory. He said he felt justified in breaking the agreements because I was trying to control him, even though he was the one who suggested the boundary he broke. Turns out he didn’t like having any limits imposed on him, even though they were meant to protect my own physical safety.

When he unapologetically broke the boundary, I became very upset and dysregulated on the inside, but I didn’t show it much on the outside. My parts inside were screaming and wanting to jump up and down and have a complete tantrum. Violent parts of me fantasized about punching him to inflict physical pain on him, as revenge for the psychological pain I was feeling inside. He told me his other girlfriends had frequently been violent with him. Now I understood way, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way I reacted.

I was zen. Full of equanimity. Spacious and compassionate. Extending empathy to him for not wanting to feel controlled.

Because I believed myself to be such a good and spiritual (read: superior) person, I did not raise my voice, call him names, jump up and down, hit him, or otherwise let on that I was more than a little bit upset. I simply grew silent, went for a walk, calmed myself down, meditated, and then told him in the kindest possible way that the romance was over. I then promptly convinced myself that I’d forgiven him and went about trying to establish a close friendship with him, something I later learned is called “premature forgiveness,” another Greatest Hit for spiritual bypassing types.

He praised me, as did others, for being such a remarkable person, so quickly able to pivot and return to love and compassion; even though I’d ended our romantic relationship. The other women he had treated the same way hadn’t always been so generous, he confided. I patted myself on the back. Good job, Lissa! I told myself I deserved a PhD in compassion. I could now graduate with honors and maybe one day get a hall pass from human incarnation after this lifetime was over. Maybe I’d earned my angel wings and could rest in eternal bliss when this lifetime was over because I had transcended my reactivity and stayed friends with my ex. Maybe I could finally get the gold star I’d worked so hard to earn in every other aspect of my life.

But as quickly as I inflated myself, a sinking awareness deflated me. That same day, I realized what I really had was a gold star in was letting abusive people off the hook and failing to hold them accountable for their harmful behaviors. I was stunned by this awareness, which flamed across my chest like the crimson of blood spreading from a gunshot wound onto a white dress. Because this awareness so complete shattered my image of myself as a spiritually superior person, better than all those angry people, I remember the day vividly.

It was July 4, 2014 on my country’s Independence Day, and I was at a party at a retreat center that has since burned down in the Sonoma County wildfires. As if struck by the lightning that sparked those fires, I had the instantaneous realization that while I might have earned a PhD in extending compassion to people who treated me abusively, I was in preschool when it came to extending compassion to myself or standing up for myself and protecting myself when someone treated me badly.

Reading Spiritual Bypassing and then many more books like it was a bitter pill to swallow, but it fundamentally split my life in two- before and after that lightning bolt moment. It took me many years to actually interrupt the pattern, and it still sneaks up on me in the most insidious of ways. I still refuse to dehumanize or withhold compassion from the abuser, but I no longer put the locus of my empathy on the perpetrator. Now, I still with survivors, including the survivor in myself. Twelve years later, it’s much easier but still sometimes challenging to hold people who hurt me and others accountable for harmful behaviors, and I still question myself a lot. I try to hold myself to those same standards, without expecting human perfection from anyone, including those who might claim to be “enlightened.”