I want to share a perspective shift I had earlier this year around positive thinking and spiritual bypassing. For years I struggled with experiencing negative thoughts and exaggerated reactions to everyday challenges or drama in my life. Eventually I ended up in therapy, where I learned to broaden my perspective on upsetting experiences. I learned to redirect my attention away from how a given situation was causing me problems and instead consider the opportunities that could emerge from it. In therapy this is a technique known as positive reframing.
Positive Reframing
Positive reframing is an important tool for interrupting negative thought patterns and expanding one’s perspective on a difficult experience. Utilized by skillful therapists, positive reframing can help people shift away from self-victimization and into an empowered position within their situation. In self-development and spiritual communities, this is a part of “positive thinking.” The ultimate aim is to reduce negative self-talk and increase one’s confidence and optimism, leading to greater success and motivation overall. It’s an effective tool, but it’s a tool that can easily become a source of even greater neurosis for people like me, who struggle with perfectionism and vulnerability.
When I was in therapy, I found it difficult to experience emotions like grief or shame without dissociating or turning to anger. There was an old belief inside of me that these feelings were unproductive and a waste of time. I had spent so many years suppressing painful emotions that I didn’t know how to soothe myself through them any other way. Such emotions could feel so intense that I easily became overwhelmed by them. As I was learning how to self-regulate and respond to my emotions, I easily took to positive reframing. It was not hard for me to see in every situation the opportunities for growth, the lessons learned, the even worse outcomes avoided, and so on. This seldom did anything for how I was feeling about a situation, but it gave me something else to focus on. It wasn’t long before this new skill was hijacked in service of the part of me that desperately wanted to avoid feeling distress – that wanted everything to be perfect.
Spiritual Bypassing: When Positivity Becomes Toxic
I noticed an increasing hypervigilance towards any distressing or negative emotions. I couldn’t respond the way I used to – by holding others “accountable” (blaming) or complaining endlessly (self-victimizing). That would be immature, and I wanted to be mature. I wanted to be the kind of person who doesn’t take anything personally and so never gets bothered (a lofty ambition). Every time I noticed myself becoming annoyed or disappointed, I reminded myself to feel grateful for the lessons in that moment, while gritting my teeth as I ignored my displeasure. In my mind, this was what was meant by detaching and letting go. It felt like if I didn’t do this, then I was losing progress on my healing journey – because “healthy, spiritual people” don’t get angry or feel reactive towards everyday challenges. I mean, that’s how it seems, right? Internally I was patting myself on the back, but what I was really doing was spiritual bypassing.
Spiritual bypassing is essentially toxic positivity – the compulsion to feel only “good” things and never feel “bad.” It is easier than ever to fall into this trap. Spiritual growth and healing is often portrayed across social media as blissful, even magical. We’re all aware by now that social media presents us a distorted picture of how glamorously amazing everyone’s lives are – and we are assured that we can achieve such a life through positivity. Feeling self-pity, anger, or depression is seen as “low vibration” and if you want to be evolved or healthy then you need to “vibe high.” Such ideas are even uttered alongside declarations for radical self-acceptance, their proponents often unaware of the inherent contradiction at heart.
Here’s the thing: there are no “low vibe” emotions. Emotions are natural and healthy psychophysiological phenomena. It’s the way we engage with our emotions that can be “low” or “high” vibration. I believe the reason “low vibe” is generalized to feelings like anger, fear or sadness is because people most commonly associate these emotions with maladaptive coping mechanisms. Violently lashing out at people, avoiding opportunities or situations out of fear, or getting stuck in a victim mindset are all ways that we lower our vibration. When we deny aspects of our experience that provoke anger, sadness, or fear, we are doing the opposite of releasing, surrendering, or allowing. Instead we’re resisting, holding tension in the body. It’s a form of self-abandonment, because our unpleasant feelings are just as much a part of us as our joy, compassion or pleasure. Accepting all of our selves is a critical part of spiritual development, the core tenet of shadow work. However, it’s incredibly difficult and can even be damaging to try and do this if you have no resources or skills for coping with distressing emotions.
Internal Resourcing: How Do You Cope?
When someone is well-resourced internally, it means they are able to experience the feelings and sensations of emotions without becoming overwhelmed by them. Such a person is able to keep their rational, decision-making faculties “online” while angry or sad or distressed because their threshold for tolerating such sensations is high. Still, everyone can become overwhelmed and lose their center. In such situations the well-resourced person is able to recognize their overwhelm, draw upon their inner resources to down-regulate the nervous system, and return to a centered state where clear, rational decision-making can take place. Such resources may include taking deep breaths, asking for support from a loved one, or politely excusing themselves from an uncomfortable situation. On the other hand, someone who is less-resourced may become reactive, lash out, and try to exert control over their environment in response to distress. They may also turn to more self-destructive activities like drugs, risk-taking, or even self-harm as means of self-regulating. Such people are still drawing upon inner resources to cope with their distress, but these strategies result in harm to themselves or the people around them, so it’s considered maladaptive.
If you find yourself struggling to cope with distressing emotions, I urge you to seek out a mental health professional. I completely empathize and understand that many people (myself included) have tried “talk therapy” without success. It is important to make an informed choice about the kind of therapy you seek, which means doing a bit of research on potential providers and learning about the modalities from which they operate. Many people do not realize that their problem with “talk therapy” is often a problem with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which focuses on rationally evaluating and modifying behaviors.
CBT has been the gold standard in mental health for many clinically validated reasons, but in my experience it is often over-represented among available options for therapy. I’m not trying to say that CBT is a bad therapy, but it has its limitations for people like me. CBT was never that effective for me because I was already skilled at doing the things that CBT teaches you to do. I believe people with “high functioning” mental illness can relate. I didn’t need to be more rational or functional in my behaviors, I needed to dismantle a lifetime of emotional armoring against trauma. Some therapeutic models I’ve personally had success with and recommend exploring (with a licensed therapist) include Internal Family Systems, Attachment-based therapy, somatic or mindfulness-based therapies, hypnotherapy, and EMDR. In my experience these models are effective at addressing the core barriers to emotional regulation and differentiation. Establishing strong internal resources for coping with distress, as well as learning how to set boundaries and so on, is the first step to being able to experience emotions like grief, anger, shame, and fear without judgment. We need a strong foundation to hold us before we can be transformed by healing experiences.
Transcending Through Allowing
There is nothing wrong with positivity and looking for opportunities that can come out of challenges, but this doesn’t negate the challenge. Difficult situations can be both empowering AND grief-inducing, terrifying, frustrating, etc. Being able to allow an experience to be “all the things” – as contradictory as they may be – is what enables us to integrate and be transformed by the whole experience. In Jungian psychology, this is similar to “holding the tension of the opposites” and the transcendent function. The transcendent function is how the psyche reconciles between the ego and the unconscious, allowing completely new, profound insights and transformations to emerge.
When you hold on to a black and white view of an experience, you are effectively blocking the bridge between your ego and unconscious. The ego, refusing to interact or engage with the aspects of the experience it deems “unallowed,” is unable to be touched or accessed by the resources within the unconscious that can heal it. Transcendence and spiritual elevation isn’t earned by enslaving our internal experience to the will of the ego’s ideations about what’s acceptable and what isn’t. It is something that instead flows freely and naturally when we stop resisting the whole truth of our experience. An example of this in action is the transformation of my previously held assumption about spiritual development – that if I wanted to be calm, equanimous, and compassionate that I shouldn’t feel angry, disappointed, or triggered. I could only keep those feelings caged for so long before it became obvious something needed to give. Cyclical patterns of stress and conflict found me realizing that I was subconsciously stuck in engaging the same behaviors that I had resolved to walk away from in therapy. I grew aware of my resistance to feeling unpleasant and did some troubleshooting.
The opposite of resisting is allowing, and I knew that allowing meant feeling some discomfort. The solution therefore was to identify what I needed to get myself through the discomfort. For me, that meant engaging in mindful presence. I returned to my practice of taking a moment to pause, notice how I was feeling, and get curious about it. Why was I feeling distressed? What did that feeling feel like – what was its shape, its age, its situation? What did that information tell me about what I was lacking or needing in the present moment? Sometimes this was severely uncomfortable and distressing, so I needed additional care. An ice pack and deep breathing, maybe some trauma-informed yoga, or a request to be held by my husband. The concern isn’t to figure out a solution or action plan for whatever is provoking the unpleasant emotion. At this point of the process, the ego’s job is to simply allow, observe, ask questions, and if needed identify and address any needs that will facilitate more allowing.
I cannot stress enough the importance of this step: allowing. Allow yourself to be angry, sad, jealous or scared! Allowing is passive, non-action – the part where we pause and feel. In these moments, there can be a storm of emotions and impulses to act in ways that are not conducive to my desired outcome for a situation (for example, wanting to blame and criticize out of anger when underneath that anger may be a desire for closeness and affection). A lot of the time, my true desire doesn’t reveal itself until after I have fully engaged with my emotions mindfully. That is why instead of focusing on trying to decide what I should do about a stressful situation, I direct my focus to the feeling in my body. This can be very uncomfortable, and when it is I try to remember to breathe through it. I continue holding my attention on just the feeling – the sensation it creates in my body, the energy of it. Eventually with enough time the feeling lessens in intensity, usually after 10-20 minutes. That’s often the moment when new information or content emerges from within.
Over time, I have learned a lot about myself by taking time to get acquainted with my distress, anger, and sadness. One of the most important was the realization that feeling these feelings doesn’t mean I must or will act them out in order to resolve them. That I can feel angry, disappointed, or fearful and that these feelings will not cancel out my capacity to act thoughtfully and in accordance with my values. In fact, a great many of my emotional experiences require no action at all and resolve on their own after being given space to be felt. It is only when the same issue comes up repeatedly that I know there is some work to be done. Sometimes that work is external, like a difficult conversation with a loved one, though more often it is internal.
The internal work that I’ve been called to do usually involves revisiting old memories and taking the time to fully comprehend the entire impact the experience had on me. Realizing that an unpleasant experience wasn’t just annoying or unfair, but that I felt isolated and rejected with nowhere to turn for comfort, for example. Sometimes I am surprised to discover profound grief and empathy for myself during these realizations. Memories of experiences that I took for granted or seemed trivial instead become a deep source of self-compassion and understanding towards myself. When this happens, my entire perspective towards those experiences and myself expands into something I previously couldn’t have conceived of. That is the experience of transformation, of the transcendent function. In some ways it seems simple enough, but for anyone with a trauma history this process can seem like an impossible task.
A Final Note on Trauma
Trauma, particularly interpersonal trauma, fundamentally alters the way the nervous system responds to stressors, including intense emotions. This is why it is necessary to have established some internal resources for coping with distress before moving forward with this aspect of shadow work if you have a trauma history. Trying to do this without any tools can be retraumatizing and just make things worse. All those erratic thoughts and impulses are your natural defense mechanisms against trying to feel the emotion behind them, in the body. The nervous system gets ramped up and can overwhelm you if you haven’t learned how to manage distress. So, please be patient with yourself!
I didn’t learn how to do this without help, and it took a few years before I really got the hang of it and could do it on my own. With enough practice in safe, contained environments, I built up enough resilience to feel profoundly awful, fearful, grief-stricken and know that I am going to be perfectly fine afterwards. Now, I know how to feel through my emotions to completion rather than giving in to reactive impulses. I hope that by sharing my experience that others can learn to do the same thing. If you need help exploring what’s keeping you stuck, consider booking me for a tarot reading.
