Rewriting the Narrative: Spiritual Bypassing Series #4

Hello and welcome back! Another chat is brewing, a new planetary alignment is sliding in, and things are heating up, metaphorically and literally. Today’s chat might be a bit challenging, so I encourage you, dear reader, to pause and build a comfy nest with your journal, your tea, and your wits, because we’ve got some exploration to do and this is a long one. We are getting super deep with this one so let’s also take some breaths and check our capacity. It’s ok to take this in chunks. I’ve got coffee and a blood moon keeping me company as I write this, so let’s jump in.

First and foremost, I’ve been hearing “I’m stuck and I don’t know why” quite frequently lately. Not to worry, we are all human and this is a common issue. It’s usually a matter of knowing what needs to be done, desiring a change, and then…not quite being able to act on it. I, myself, have also experienced and continue to experience this sensation. I often compare it to leaning against a large window: I can see everything on the other side of it, but there’s still this barely visible barrier in between me and the landscape and I can’t help but to press my forehead against it, yearning for the other side but feeling trapped and concerned about what might happen if I actually break through. Will I get hurt? Will it be what it looks like? What will I need??? While there are a lot of visible factors to this such as the economy, the state of the world right now, the weather, the season, and individual self-care, but this is a liminal space so let’s put words to the invisible part, hm?

Outside of the typical obvious, there is more here than meets the eye. We have to look at action potential and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and about our world. Stories have incredible power, even when they are fiction. Most of us developed our “self-story” early in childhood and kept adding to and editing from there. The early experiences of the life span can continue to influence us all through our lives and can get quite meddlesome when unaddressed, leading us to creating “loops” or lesson cycles where we repeat an experience, usually subconsciously, over and over and over until we can either make sense of it or let it go.  The ways in which we process these loops (because everyone makes them) really matter to our self-concept, self-esteem, self-efficacy….self. We have a tendency to search for and attach meaning wherever we can and, often, spirituality helps us apply and create a framework for our reality as it gives form to the formless and meaning to the meaningless. The spiritual bypassing aspect comes in here with some of the ways we sometimes use spirituality to try to process big things in our pasts. As a reminder, spiritual bypassing is utilizing spirituality to gloss over or replace the actual self-reflection required to break or change the loops we create with our beliefs. So, in this case, spiritual bypassing is utilizing spirituality to gloss over or explain trauma or explain away our very poor choices, therefore bypassing guilt, shame, and the impacts of our choices as well as the choices of others we may have endured. This is problematic because it robs us of emotional release and absolutely blocks lessons from progressing. It can trap us in unhealthy situations from a place of “deserving” and prevent us from reaching our individual or collective potentials from nothing other than the stories we are telling ourselves which are derived from the meanings we attach to our experiences. Let’s break this down a little further, with a separate reminder that this blog is not therapy nor a replacement for therapy. My goal in this is to make us think and maybe loosen some of those stuck places, and I cannot include every single factor and therefore am going to stick to individual choices. This is an optional perspective. If you like it, keep it. If you don’t, throw it away, but I digress. Back to it.

In general, trauma can cause beliefs to emerge after certain events due to the meaning we attach to these events. These beliefs influence our reality, but since they emerged from something harmful, they are often distorted or harmful in and of themselves. These beliefs influence our perceptions, therefore our thoughts, therefore our actions, thus creating a “reality” or a "timeline" of events that our bodies follow because we believe them to be true, writing our “story”. For example, if someone believes that the bad things that happened to them in childhood were their fault, they might develop a harmful belief that all bad things that happen around them are their fault and they are unlovable because of this, thus becoming trapped in a loop of self-sabotage to prove that belief to be true. They might unconsciously create or stay in problematic situations due to this belief to reaffirm the attached “reality” that they are the cause of all bad things and therefore unlovable. If this false reality is never addressed, it can lead to a lifetime of self-sabotage to maintain that false reality. The self-sabotage is the key to the reality. If the false reality is that we are unlovable, then we will not receive love when it is given and we will, as mentioned, subconsciously but sometimes consciously, destroy the connections that offer us love. Why? Because accepting that love means that we actually are lovable and therefore… wrong. If this piece is wrong, what other pieces are wrong? Accepting this could lead to an identity shift, an entirely new perspective, and big feelings. It would force us to re-write parts of our story, if not the whole story. It is easier and simpler to continually reject that love than it is to engage in the self-reflection. Why? Because the known is the path most traveled, the one we’ve been walking for so long, basing so many choices on it and this other one, the self-reflection one, is big and kind of scary. No one wants to scrap an entire manuscript at what feels like the 11th hour. Choosing the shift would be a lot and self-preservation is a thing. Capacity is a thing. Systemic oppression is a thing. Environmental factors are a thing. However, this also means that when we do choose the path of self-reflection and address the gaping plot holes in our stories, we automatically break the trauma loop because we’ve done something new, which can lead to different outcomes, ones that we actually control. Addressing harmful beliefs can shift our internal reality, which influences our external reality. If we stop self-sabotaging to maintain the story we're telling ourselves, we automatically change the path that we are on, thus creating a new story or “timeline” or “reality” for ourselves. The good stuff and the options available to us in our new story were always there, we just couldn't choose them because they invalidated the harmful beliefs and the story. New beliefs, new perspective, new feelings, new actions. Ones that we choose rather than were forced upon us from whichever set of authority we were born to and whichever set of circumstances we were forced to endure. Self-sovereignty.

The balance here is that, if we replace one problematic belief set with another equally problematic one, we just scoot the loop instead of breaking it. For example, if someone shifted from the above belief set of being the source of bad things and therefore unlovable to the belief set that before birth, they had “chosen” or agreed to all the traumatic events that they’ve experienced through their life, this only addresses part of the harmful belief-the unlovable part, not the “source of all bad things” part. This may bring some comfort in the form of control over the situation, a re-establishment of autonomy, and a way to accept, release, and move through those events, yay! That’s awesome! However, what does that say about the autonomy of the others in the situation? What does that say about our own sense of self? What kind of harmful narratives might also arise from that viewpoint? How do we learn to grow and take accountability for ourselves and address the harm that we or others may have done if it was all “pre-planned” and “consented” to? Also, what does that viewpoint say about those in marginalized communities or those living through horrific life events? Do we do nothing, say nothing, intervene less because they “agreed to it/chose it before birth”? What we apply to ourselves becomes our bias and therefore gets applied to others. Are we seeing how this can go sideways really fast and rob us of empathy, compassion, and reasoning as well as justify very harmful decisions because we were “meant to hurt that person” or that person was “meant to hurt” us or others even though it can also create warm fuzzies about ourselves and our abilities? This isn’t to say someone isn’t allowed to have this belief, it just means we need to really sit with and question our beliefs in totality rather than just looking at “how does this belief benefit me?” We also need to consider how it’s harmful and what additional impacts it has on our external world view.

Honestly, Law of Attraction is an excellent example of this because if you step back from it and examine it, Law of Attraction says that everything that happens to us is our fault because we asked for or attracted it somehow. Yes, I have listened to Abraham Hicks in entirety. I am also familiar with Bashar. And…the 1960’s-1980’s when this belief set arose in the face of…the civil rights movements and conscious discipline parenting (yes, it’s that old. Mary Ainsworth, look her up). Law of Attraction is great for serendipity, big wins, and positive things or for creating a more positive mindset but…what about what happens to children? What about people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time? What about marginalization? Again, where is the autonomy and accountability for the perpetrators in all of this? Are they justified because someone “attracted” it? Are we really gonna stand on the “they were asking for it” victim-blaming platform? Super. Hard. Cringe. There’s always balance. We have to be as aware of our capacity for harm as our capacity for good. If we are always seeking the positive and ignoring the negative, that’s how we accidentally trap ourselves and avoid accountability, which perpetuates harm on all levels. Our brains will fight to prove whatever belief we adopt, regardless of how problematic or skewed it is. Logic is not pure, friends. It is also corruptible. We have got to learn to listen to that little voice telling us we are out of alignment with ourselves. However, since that voice presents itself as shame and guilt, we have a tendency to ignore or avoid it because no one likes feeling badly about themselves. I would like to offer an alternative.

What if, instead of trying to explain away, justify away, spiritually bypass our guilt and shame, what if we….make friends with it? I know, I know. Wild of me to even suggest, as most of us have turned those (absolutely essential) emotions into level 10 persecutors. But, what if they’re not actually? Just hear me out for a minute. Guilt and shame are necessary because they are our natural self-inhibitors. Guilt and shame help us learn what is and what is not in alignment for ourselves. Shame typically means we’ve done something out of alignment internally that is harmful to ourselves while guilt usually means we’ve done something out of alignment externally that is harmful to others. We need these inhibitory emotions to develop pro-social behaviors and maintain relationships. The issue is that these emotions are very consistently weaponized in our culture to the point that, rather than being good friends that say, “Hey, babe. That wasn’t very helpful. Maybe not do that again?”, it’s more like a spiral of self-deprecation and verbal abuse that has been heaped upon us until we start heaping it upon ourselves.

Setting aside the “why” for a moment, this is how the story starts and this is the point where we have to break it. Are we truly bad, terrible people? Or are we human beings who make mistakes and grow through failure and who have endured things and maybe started mirroring what we were being shown? I personally prefer the latter, even when it forces me to come face to face with my choices and realize that my trauma is not a valid reason to treat people I have chosen to love poorly. They did not traumatize me, so they do not deserve my trauma behaviors. Now, I love my angry part. She’s probably my favorite part because she has walked with me through everything. She’s the one who pushes me and knows I deserve better and will not tolerate disrespect, regardless of who it’s coming from. But, with the life I’m creating for myself, she doesn’t need to serve in the same capacity. She doesn’t need to come out quite so strongly and absolutely decimate my relationships anymore. I’ve removed myself from that and from those people. Her purpose has been served. In order to release and mature her, I had to sit in my guilt. The guilt of using this very powerful tool inappropriately in spaces where I needed to be calm and collaborative. The misplaced guilt of thinking that I’m just a harmful being who does harmful things and therefore I don’t deserve…whatever. I had to review the positive relationships I destroyed with my anger, feeling justified at the time because they “didn’t know what I’ve been through.” Hey, babe, they don’t need to. That trauma story does not serve anymore as we have moved our way completely out of that situation. None of those people can touch us anymore. None of those people have any access to us. We are no longer in that environment, and so now all we are doing with our anger is hurting ourselves and other people in an attempt to hold onto the only evidence of what we survived we have left: our behavior. Talk about soul-deep self-sacrifice. But that lead to the realization that I was blaming myself for other people’s behavior, seeing as I developed that angry part in response to the mistreatment I endured. Their treatment of me was not justified. My anger kept me safe from them but it became what I was punished for. I felt guilty then, so I kept recreating that in my adult relationships until I saw the balance. My anger is not the problem, my behavior when I’m angry is. This is not to say I’m not still scrappy as hell and don’t hold boundaries, it just means that I’m aware that I no longer have to fight like a rabid raccoon backed into a corner…or act like my mom. My chosen people aren’t upset that I am angry or bringing something to them. They’re upset at how I’m showing my anger or my approach in bringing something to them. I copied the behavior shown to me until I accepted that it was a choice for me and therefore a choice for the ones who did it to me. Not my fault. Not ever actually my guilt. I had to make myself guilty to realize the guilt was never mine. It was hers. Goofy. Just some food for thought.

Wrapping back to our start and tying it all together, what story are you telling yourself about yourself? About what you deserve? About what kind of person you are? What emotion are you protecting yourself from? Why? In this case, I was feeling stuck because I believed my choices always lead to harm, and therefore was afraid to make new choices, try new things, or engage with the healthy habits I so desperately need. I was punishing myself for being an angry person, but it was so deep I couldn’t see or touch it until it surfaced again, so strongly it took my breath away. I sat with myself and the feeling, breathing, rocking, meditating on the physical sensation until the memories came of when that feeling started. I was angry, 5 years old, and I was blamed for my mother’s response to my anger. Shamed for my 5-year-old behavior with the “why do you make me do this?” and some other things that really imprinted that moment in my mind. In that moment, a story was created and reinforced that my anger makes bad things happen, even though I was actually the one being intentionally baited to rage all the way up until I moved out. Funny, isn’t it? I needed to be angry to keep myself safe. My anger was weaponized against me. It created a loop. To end the stuckness, we have to make friends with the emotions we are most afraid of. We have to find a way to reintegrate our emotional expression to work for us rather than working for others. If we are in alignment with ourselves, it is much easier to align ourselves with actions that reflect that inner knowing. If I know I am a person who can remain calm and that I have created a life in which I do not have to absolutely lose my shit to be heard, it makes it a lot easier to choose to walk away for a moment or sit quietly and allow things to settle. I don’t lose my temper. I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel the need to punish myself, which makes it easier for me to sit calmly and play my video games without guilt, or do the yoga without guilt, or get in the shower without guilt. You get it. Addressing it at the root and in totality allows for the flow of energy towards all the stuck placed. We just gotta find it.