I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast,
episode number 153, Spiritual Bypassing.

Hello, and welcome to the Heal from Infidelity podcast, where courageous
women learn not only to heal from their spouse’s betrayal, but to become
the boldest, truest, most decisive and confident versions of themselves,
ever. If you know there’s more for you than the life you’re currently
living but don’t quite know how to get there, you are in the right place.
Stick around to learn how to create a life that will knock your own socks
off. Is it possible? It is, and I’m here to show you how. I’m your host,
Andrea Giles. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

Hello, everybody, welcome back to another episode. Glad to have you all
here. Today I decided to talk about something that may feel a little bit
controversial, it may feel a little bit uncomfortable, and this is coming
from my commitment to you to bring to you the things that we all need to
look at, the things that we need to be aware of. And if it’s uncomfortable
to you, I want you to just notice it. We’re not judging, we’re not making
ourselves wrong. We’re just noticing. And then look at why you might be
uncomfortable. Okay? Spiritual bypassing. So, I’m going to give you a couple
examples of some things that I’ve seen recently inside my program, and then
we’ll talk more about exactly what spiritual bypassing is and why it can be
a problem.

Okay, I had somebody come recently and say that her husband has had a
couple different affairs and that he has gotten really involved in a
spiritual practice and he’ll go away for periods of time, like a weekend,
not long periods of time. But he’ll go away to be able to practice this
thing that he does, and he really loves it. He says it brings him a lot of
peace and that it’s helping him to heal. But whenever she brings up anything
about the infidelity, he completely shuts down. He says that he’s dealing
with it in his way, by doing these different spiritual things that he’s
doing, and basically wants her to back off. And she’s frustrated because
she will feel unheard and then get more aggressive, really wanting to talk,
and then it’ll turn into a conflict and he will walk away, leave. She’ll
feel bad about it, it’s not how she wants it to be, but she doesn’t know
how to get him to talk.

Okay, another example that I recently heard is that one of my clients, her
spouse has been going and getting help from a therapist, and he says that
that’s helping him so much and that it’s making him feel better and get
back in touch with himself and all of that. And that’s great, but he’s
still completely avoiding her. He’s still not talking about it. He still not
wanting to engage any more than he used to, he just says that he feels
better and he wants that to be enough. Let’s just move forward.

Now, why is this a problem? Let’s talk about infidelity. Infidelity is a
symptom, nothing more, nothing less. It’s a symptom. It’s an active raging
symptom of an underlying unresolved issue or multiple issues. If we have a
wound on our body, we can cover up the wound with medicine. We can use
medicine to where it almost seems like it’s not there, right? It almost
seems like it went away, no problem. We might even forget about it until it
rears its head again and when it does, it often is worse because the
symptoms were allowed to fester under the surface, not being given what
they need to actually heal. They’re just given what they need to feel
better temporarily. So if infidelity is a symptom, to cure it and make sure
it doesn’t rear its head again, it needs to be healed at its root. And the
people engaging in infidelity need to be healed at their root, as well as
those that are hurt by it.

So in those examples above, while they might be feeling good like taking
ibuprofen when you have a sore knee. The knee injury is still there, it’s
not healed. It might need some kind of diagnosis, some kind of plan of
healing, often some exercises that are going to strengthen it, that are
going to strengthen the tissue. Sometimes a knee replacement, right? There’s
more that needs to happen than just throwing some pills at it. It’s the same
around infidelity.

Many well-meaning practitioners or spiritual leaders give this kind of
advice, just don’t do it again. In reality, a lot of spiritual leaders and
practitioners are not trained in the area of infidelity. They don’t know
what they’re doing. I do not say that with arrogance, I say it as a matter
of fact. There are many that we go to and give a lot of power to that simply
do not know all of the ins and outs of infidelity and what actually needs
to happen. There is no Band-Aid solution, it has to be dealt with at the
root. And there are many out there that are well-meaning, but do not have
the training, and sometimes they don’t have the bandwidth, like the
emotional bandwidth to hold all of the pieces and all the hurts. Right? All
the pain that comes up with infidelity. And so often they’ll throw things
out there like, you need to just move forward. You just need to let it go.
You just need to forgive. You just need to not do that again. Right? You
just need to stop doing that.

One little example that I have seen a lot is where pornography is an issue
for some people, for many people. And when their church leaders, for
example, are just saying, “Well, just stop. Just stop. You can just stop,
right?” When in reality, it’s a symptom, it is a symptom. So to tell them
just to stop is telling somebody who loves their Diet Coke to just stop
drinking the Diet Coke. And we can go cold turkey for a while but if we
don’t get to the root of why we like that Diet Coke, maybe we need a little
energy boost, and then figure out other things that are healthier for us
that can give us an energy boost, etc., we’re going to go back to the Diet
Coke. Right? We’re going to go back to those things that we aren’t solving
at the root.

So sometimes well-meaning practitioners and spiritual leaders will say,
“Just stop, just stop, or just forgive, just move past it.” Right? But the
problem with that is that it’s not actually going to the root, we’re
bypassing. We’re bypassing the root. We’re bypassing facing it head on,
looking at it, really, really seeing it, talking about it, bringing
ourselves and our full attention and our full mind, our full capacity to
whatever it is that we’re looking at.

Now, some of my clients do this as well. Sometimes they want to rush to
forgiveness because they don’t want to face it. It feels easier to just
say, “Okay, I forgive you, let’s move on,” than to actually turn around and
look at the ramifications, look at the bigness, for lack of better words.
The large thing that’s there, that there’s a lot to see. And I remember
doing this.

I remember when I was married the first time, there was something that
happened that was a really big wake-up call. There was a chain of events
that happened that I knew, like Andrea, wake up, wake up. And even then,
even when I was told this story that did not land right, in my gut I knew
that there was information that I was missing. I knew it, but I did not deal
with it head on because I was thinking, well, how am I going to get to the
truth? How am I going to get to the root? How am I going to really
understand this? So I guess I have no choice but to just kind of take his
word for it and move on, even though I knew, I knew that there was far more
to it.

And it was the following year when the symptoms were continuing to rear
their head that I had to look, I had to look. I could no longer look away,
and that’s when I decided I needed to go. That’s what happened for me when
I looked really closely, is that I knew that that’s what I needed to do.
That is not going to be the case for many of you. Many of you do this thing
where instead of looking at any of the good things, it’s easier to focus on
the negative. It’s easier to focus on the hurt. It’s easier to focus on the
pain, instead of looking at all of it and looking at it as a whole, more
holistically. When we can look at it more holistically, we are going to make
better decisions. Right? And so we do this in various ways. We bypass in
various ways, but that’s one of the ways that I did.

So, what is happening here? Spiritual bypassing. Let’s talk about what
spiritual bypassing is, okay? So in preparation for this episode, I went
and did a little research. Okay, it says, spiritual bypassing is a way of
hiding behind spirituality or spiritual practices, such as forgiveness,
just jumping to forgiveness. It prevents people from acknowledging what
they are feeling and distances them from both themselves and others. Some
examples are, avoiding feelings of anger. Isn’t that interesting? Avoiding
feelings of anger because sometimes we’re afraid of what we will see if we
lean into that anger. Believing in your own spiritual superiority as a way
to hide from insecurities. Believing that traumatic events must serve as
learning experiences or that there is a silver lining behind every negative
experience. Okay, I want to talk about this one a little bit because as I
was studying this, like, well, let me check in here because what do I think
about that?

You’ll hear from me all the time that my belief around infidelity is that
we have to be able to see it from all the lenses. We have to be able to
view it in all the lenses. Now, this does not mean that I want any of you,
any of you to be like, yeah, infidelity is great. What’s the problem? You
can just think positive and… No. There are some things that we want to
think negatively about. There are some things we do not ever want to just be
even neutral about. Right? There are some things that, in my opinion, I
don’t want to be neutral about, like child abuse, for example. I don’t want
to be neutral about child abuse. Right?

But when I think about that concept of believing that traumatic events must
serve as a learning experience, I actually do think that our way through
trauma, part of our way of healing from trauma is to be able to find our
strength through it. To be able to realize that we do not have to be
identified by that trauma, and that we can take that trauma and choose who
we want to be, that we can choose what to do with it. But it’s never to
make the trauma itself just fine. It’s more, how am I choosing to view it?
How am I choosing to see it? And it is my opinion and my experience with
people that I have coached that have struggled to accept coaching. Okay?
That have struggled in really digging in their heels, that they’ve been
wronged, that those dig in their heels the deepest about how wronged they
were and how victimized they were and how traumatic it was. They have the
hardest time really choosing who they want to be moving forward, and it
ultimately costs them a lot.

Okay, so I think in this example, it’s kind of needing to put a positive
spin on anything such as, my kids have told me that, my bonus kids, they’ve
told me that when their mom died, so many people would say things to them
like, “Well, she’s in a better place. She’s not suffering anymore.” And
they just wanted their mom, they just wanted their mom. How is that
comforting to them? They wanted their mother. But the thing is, those
people saying that were well-meaning, but that is an example of spiritual
bypassing. We’re not going to actually sit with this person as they
profoundly grieve the loss of their mother. We’re going to put a shiny bow
on it, right? And call it something good. That’s an example.

All right, I’m going to continue with my list here. Believing that
spiritual practices such as meditation or prayer are always positive. I
think that’s interesting. This is just giving so much power to these
things, to prayer or to meditation. I’m going to give you another example
here. Somebody that I’ve mentioned before that I have followed for a while,
his name is Corey Muscara, and Corey went through a pretty tough time in
his life and he decided to become an expert in meditation, and he took it
to an extreme and he actually went and lived with monks for six months up
in the mountains in Tibet. And he had no outside contact for six months. He
had all of his meals prepared and brought to him, and he meditated for
something like 16 hours a day, and then slept and then did it again.

And Corey talks about how it was really easy when he was there, to feel
peaceful. It was really easy for him to feel good, that at first it took a
lot of concentration to shut things down and to get into a meditative state
but that once he was there, he felt really good. And he said that the real
test was coming home and being with people and being in conversation with
people and being in conflict with people, and just living life. That that
was the real test for him of, did I learn anything? And learning how to get
to a meditative state in real life. And so sometimes we bypass the real
stuff by taking all this time to be in prayer, to be in meditation, to be
in these spiritual practices where really it’s like, okay, how am I going
to face my fear?

From a business standpoint, sometimes if I’m trying something new or
pushing myself to do something new, it’s scary. It’s super uncomfortable
sometimes to put myself out there in ways that I never have. And sometimes
I have to be onto myself and go, okay, if I’m studying this other thing
about marketing or doing this or learning from this other person, am I
avoiding doing the work? Am I avoiding doing what I actually need to do to
drive my business forward, right? And that’s where self-leadership comes in.
What’s the thing I want? Nobody’s coming to do it for me, I need to do it
myself. And so getting out of that bypassing place and back to work. Okay?

Some other examples are extremely high, often unattainable idealism. Isn’t
that interesting? So interesting. Feelings of detachment. Focusing only on
spirituality and ignoring the present. Only focusing on the positive or
being overly optimistic. I know people like that, that are just like, oh,
but everything’s great and let’s just not go to negative, the cup is always
half full. And it can be kind of hard to be around, people that I know that
are this way, I don’t have real conversations with them because they don’t
really want to talk about real things. It’s all like this sugar-coated view.
Okay? Projecting your own negative feelings onto others. Pretending that
things are fine when they are clearly not. Thinking that people can
overcome their problems through positive thinking. Thinking that you must
rise above your emotions. Using defense mechanisms such as denial and
repression. Now, and then it says spiritual bypassing is a superficial way
of glossing over problems in a way that might make us feel better in the
short term, but ultimately solves nothing and just leaves the problem to
linger on.

All right, so here are a few cues that we are bypassing. All right? Some of
these words. You create your own happiness. Everything happens for a
reason. It was for the best. It was a blessing in disguise. Good vibes
only. Thoughts and prayers. Okay, now some of those things I believe, okay,
I do believe that we create our own happiness. I actually do believe that.
So some of these things might not be harmful on their surface, it’s what
we’re doing with them. It’s, are we doing it to avoid? Okay, are we
bypassing the things that we really, really need to look at around the
infidelity, the things we really need to see? And saying it was a blessing
in disguise, it was for the best, because it feels better than actually
facing it.

Now, I have heard multiple clients of mine say, “I can’t believe I’m saying
this, but I’m actually glad it happened. It woke me up, I woke up, we woke
up. Our marriage, I don’t know that it would’ve happened any other way. I
don’t know that we would’ve woken up to what we needed to see if this
didn’t happen.” So I want you to hear that they’re not saying it was a
blessing in disguise in a Pollyanna-ish kind of way. It’s very real for
them, it’s very real. This made us grow up and look at the things that we
have avoided for 20, 30, 40 years. Right? So that is the distinction there.

When we’re saying those things, are we avoiding or are we staring it down?
Are we saying them to not see, or are we seeing them because we have seen
and that’s what’s on the other side of it? Those are the questions, instead
of a platitude to make yourself feel better in your avoidance. Have you
stared it down? Are you looking at it? Really seeing it, and then that is
where you get because of the work that you’ve done. Right? Now, spiritual
bypassing, it’s a form of a defense mechanism. Okay, sometimes we just are
too afraid to look at the reality of things and feel the pain of it. We
don’t want to feel it, we want to avoid it.

And so with some of my clients where their guys are immersing themselves in
different groups or spiritual practices or things like that, that might
make them feel better temporarily, but where the problem lies is that
they’re not taking that feeling better and turning around and going to
their spouse and going in and going, I have avoided you. I have avoided this
relationship and I’ve avoided any kind of conflict or anything real for too
long and I’m over it and I’m going to take these things and I’m going to
bring them to the relationship that means the most to me. I’m going to
bring them here. Okay? And that is where real change happens in our
relationship, is when we can take those things and then translate them into
action within our relationships. Okay?

Now, I want to say something important. Sometimes when we are in the midst
of really, really intense emotion, spiritual bypassing can be a really
useful thing. When you are really distressed, it can be a way to
temporarily relieve frustration or anxiety or anger, whatever it is. Okay?
It can be a coping mechanism in a moment of distress. I am calling help
though when we use it in the long term as a way to avoid the things that we
really need to do. All right?

Here are some of the negative things that can happen when we spiritual
bypass. Anxiety, blind allegiance to others because we’re not really
thinking about it. We’re not facing the truth, the whole picture.
Codependency, control problems, disregard for personal responsibility,
emotional confusion, excessive tolerance of unacceptable or inappropriate
behavior, feelings of shame, spiritual narcissism. Okay, spiritual
narcissism involves using spiritual practices as a way to increase
self-importance. It often involves using spirituality to build the
individual up, while also wielding it as a weapon to tear others down.
Isn’t that interesting?

Okay, I have also witnessed this. I witnessed it in my first marriage where
we would have some kind of conflict and then he would go spend hours
studying spiritual things and then he’d write these things up and give them
to me as kind of a way to persuade me that he was being so spiritual and
that I needed to listen. Fortunately, I was onto it and so I could see
through it, but I think it bears bringing up. Okay? It is a way to deny
difficult emotions. Right? Our emotions can be really overwhelming, really
overwhelming. And spiritual bypassing is a way to just skim over.

Another thing that happens with spiritual bypassing that many of you maybe
have experienced, is dismissing other people’s emotions. It can be a tool
to dismiss what other people are feeling. It can be a tool to gaslight
others and to staying silent about things that have harmed them, like
putting a happy, positive spin on something that was not a happy, positive
thing for the other person, and an inability to sit there and hear their
experience because it feels threatening to you. Right? That is a form of it,
that could be really dangerous.

Avoiding responsibility. Spiritual bypassing reduces the discomfort that
people feel as a result of cognitive dissonance. People feel uncomfortable
when they hold two conflicting beliefs or when they behave in ways that are
not in accordance with their beliefs. Okay, so for example, if you believe
that you’re a good person and then you have on the other hand something
that you did that you know is outside your integrity. Really owning that in
its fullness and that you can be both people that’s this really good person
and this person that did this rotten thing, can create a lot of cognitive
dissonance. And so sometimes people go to the spiritual bypassing as a way
to blame shift, as a way to avoid, as a way to absolve ourselves of
responsibility.

We can also use spiritual bypassing to judge other people. We can dismiss
them and use spiritual or scriptural references about judgment, about why
people shouldn’t be judging and avoid altogether what it is they’re
actually saying. Right? Again, we all do this in different ways, both sides
of the coin with infidelity. We all do this. This is just to raise
awareness of it. Okay?

Bypassing becomes a form of victim blaming, especially in cases where
people are experiencing the negative effects of various kinds of trauma.
Okay, so this is telling people that they should stop being negative in
order to avoid exhaustion, anxiety, depression, and other physical and
psychological manifestations of stress. It’s essentially telling them that
they are to blame for their own pain and suffering. Okay? So the way that I
view this is that rather than blaming people, like with my clients, many of
them are in distress, right? Many of them are in the most difficult time in
their life. I would never blame them for it. The way that I view it as,
this thing happened and for most of my clients, it is traumatic, for most
of them. But I do believe that it is our responsibility to decide what
we’re going to do with it, only because it’s not wise to give that over to
somebody else.

The person that engaged in these behaviors, they’ve got symptoms of their
own, right? It’s not healthy for us to just hand over our healing to
another human being. They can help, they can help 100%. They can do things
that really help our healing process in a huge way, but ultimately, we have
to face it. This is not avoiding it. It’s not like, come on, just buck up
and get over it. It’s really growing our capacity to hold more, to feel
more, to process more, to grow up this part of us that wants to avoid pain.

Which brings me to my next point, that spiritual bypassing really stalls
out our growth. It stalls out our becoming more emotionally adult. It can
in fact, do opposite things of making us feel superior to others. It can be
a way to really stunt our own growth, to not really go into the things that
we need to learn to feel, to process, skills that we need to learn, right?

One example that I believe I’ve actually shared this before on the podcast,
but it bears repeating here, is a regret that I have is when I told my
first husband that I was going to be ending our marriage. It was right in
front of our therapist and I was so nervous going in, didn’t know what to
say, knew that it would be hurtful, of course, and I didn’t want to hurt
him. And I also didn’t want to feel like the biggest jerk, that I was just
walking away from this family of mine, which I wasn’t. I wasn’t walking away
from my family, but I was ending my marriage. And even though I always have
been a fairly spiritual person and I really was seeking guidance. I was
seeking guidance during this time, and I did feel that I had some pretty
clear guidance that I needed to go, that it was time. I used that as a way
to avoid actually telling the truth.

I said that God told me that I needed to end my marriage, that I needed to
end it. And he did not like that, and he’s like, “I don’t believe in a God
that would encourage breaking up a family.” And he was very angry. And in
hindsight, I think what was more true was I, Andrea, am choosing to end
this marriage. It is no longer a good place for me, a good place for our
family. I am choosing this. And if I could go back, that’s what I would do,
that’s what I would say. And I would own all of the discomfort of that, all
of any anger that he might’ve felt at that statement, I would own it.

And I know for me, I really avoided conflict. I hated it. I hated saying
hard things and feeling like a jerk. And there was a lot of gaslighting
that went on of denying what my actual experience was. And so I think that
some of my actions were a way to avoid some of those responses. And in
reality, I wish that I would have just said what was true and let the chips
fall where they may. I think that I would’ve respected myself more, because
there was a part of me that knew that I was kind of hiding behind God,
rather than standing there in my own strength, in my own power, in my own
authority and saying, “I’m done and I’m leaving.”

So I do want to give credit to, I looked at lots of different places for
different research about this topic, but one that had a lot of really good
information. It was an article in Verywell Mind, and it was by someone
named Kendra Cherry MSEd. Okay, just want to give credit where credit’s
due. Much of what has been said is my own, but I wanted to just make sure
to give credit there as well.

So to sum this up, spiritual bypassing is something that is easy to do, but
it generally comes from avoidance. It can even masquerade sometimes as
being more virtuous than other people, putting us above other people, and
not really getting to the root of what things are really happening. The
things that are real. Okay? Now, I want you just to check in with yourself,
see what lands, see if there’s things that you are avoiding. I’m hoping that
this will help you to have courage to step into your relationships and to
call out what you see. If your partner is doing this, you can bring this
episode. This is what this is. There’s a name for it. Okay?

Now I want to invite you, if you want support, like a ton of support in
growing your capacity to face what is true, join my program. Join my
program, we do this a lot. One of the core things that you study in my
program is facing truth. There’s several different trainings that I have in
regard to this, as well as live coaching. Tons of live coaching calls where
I help my clients grow their capacity to face what is true so they can live
in high integrity with themselves. There is nothing better than knowing
that you are living with an integrity for yourself. So if you are
interested in that, you can apply to be in the program. I actually recently
changed the structure of my program to application only. I want to guard
who joins. It’s not for everybody, it’s a very high caliber group. We don’t
man-bash, we don’t criticize if somebody’s staying or if somebody’s
leaving. It’s very high level, and so it is now application only.

So if you are interested in joining, you can go to the show notes and
apply. You can go to my website and apply. Andreagiles.com, and we would
love to have you if the fit is right. All right, thank you so much. I will
see you on the next episode.

Thank you for listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast. If you would
like to be kept in the know about upcoming free classes, new podcast
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