Chap 8a. — Spiritual Bypassing
What follows is a reflection I wrote sometime after those early church years. It came as I began to see how my spiritual seeking—so sincere and life-saving—had also become a shield. A way to stay afloat when what I really needed was to sink into the truth of what had never been allowed to be felt. This piece emerged during a season of reckoning, when I started to see that healing wasn’t just about reaching for the light—it was about learning to sit in the dark without abandoning myself again.
For a long time, I thought I was on a spiritual path. And I was—but I was also trying to outrun something.
I didn’t know then that my devotion to higher truths, my longing for stillness, and my fierce commitment to forgiveness were also strategies—beautiful, well-meaning strategies—to protect me from pain I didn’t yet have the capacity to face.
I had grown up in a home where feelings weren’t allowed—any of them. Where asking for help could be dangerous. Where love wasn’t conditional. It simply didn’t exist.
In that kind of soil, you learn quickly to adapt. To disappear. To hold your breath in the presence of chaos.
Later, when I found spiritual teachings, they felt like oxygen. A lifeline. And in many ways, they were.
I see now how easily those teachings can become another layer of protection—a way to float above the wreckage rather than walk through it.
I meditated instead of feeling. I quoted scripture instead of setting boundaries. I forgave too soon—not because I was enlightened, but because I was afraid to be angry. I mistook my dissociation for transcendence. I called my numbness peace.
But healing, I’ve learned, is not about rising above the wounded child within me. It’s about sitting beside her. Listening to her. Holding her hand when she’s scared. Letting her know she never has to be exiled again.
There is nothing unspiritual about pain. There is nothing wrong with the messy, trembling human parts of me.
In fact, it is there—in the ache and the confusion, in the re-parenting and the tears—that I finally met something truly holy.
Not the kind of holiness that floats on a cloud, but the kind that kneels beside you in the dark and whispers, I’m here. You’re not alone anymore.
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