Beyond Spiritual Bypassing

Facing The Unbearable™

John Welwood gave us a phrase that continues to ring with truth: spiritual bypassing. He described it as the tendency to use spiritual beliefs or practices“ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to avoid difficult feelings”. In bypassing, we try to leap into transcendence while leaving our rawest human wounds untouched.

This bypass doesn’t remain a private affair. In relationship, it often becomes a pact of avoidance; two partners silently agreeing to protect each other from the very material that could awaken them.

The Pact of Avoidance in Partnership

Every couple, consciously or not, sets limits on how much truth, pain, and conflict will be allowed in the room. Bypassing seeps into these agreements like a quiet anesthetic. One partner, concerned about overwhelm or afraid of not being enough might insist, “Let’s not dwell on pasts hurts or betrayals; let’s stay positive,” while the other, fearing abandnment or rejection might agree, silently or overtly, "I just want the safety of some peace, so I won't push for resolution or repair .”

On the surface, it sounds like harmony. But beneath, both are avoiding what Welwood called “the personal wound," the deep places of disconnection within us that long for love and yet fear it.

Over time, this pact of avoidance starves intimacy. The relationship may appear calm, but its vitality withers. The ache of what is unspoken, unfelt, grows heavier with each bypass.

From Transcendence to Descent

This is why Fluid Intimacy™ suggests that repair in relationship cannot come from transcendence or bypassing, but from descending into The Unbearable™.

Welwood reminds us that “relationship is a powerful vehicle for awakening because it constantly exposes our personal limitations and the places where we are stuck”. To face “the unbearable” is to let the body tremble with grief, to admit shame, to name anger without disguise. It is kindly, consistently confronting our defenses; respecting them, but not protecting them.

This is not indulgence in suffering; it is devotion to reality. When we stop leaping over the abyss of our wound and instead pause at its edge, together, connection and presence returns.

Jennifer Welwood gave voice to this descent in her poem Forget About Enlightenment:

Forget about enlightenment.

Sit down wherever you are

And listen to the wind singing in your veins.

Her invitation is not to escape into purity but to turn toward the raw pulse of existence . . . every wound, every tremor of fear as the sacred ground of awakening.

The First Step of Repair

So, what does this mean for intimacy?

Before repair, before apology, before forgiveness . . . there must be recognition. A willingness to see how bypassing has shaped the bond, how absence and avoidance have cost something real.

It means shifting from “Let’s move past this” to “I see how I’ve hidden from myself and from you. I see how my avoidance of myself has shaped our dynamic.”

This is the first step toward Fluid Intimacy™: Recognition of the habit, the resistance, the silent commitment to not looking; not naming, not feeling, not changing. We have the choice to remain trapped in the pact of avoidance, or to experience the possibility that repair can bring life into our partnerships.

Welwood warned that bypassing “prevents us from doing the emotional work that is necessary for spiritual maturation”. The path of intimacy asks us not to bypass but to descend; to stay in contact with the wound, to meet the raw pulse of existence in ourselves and in each other.

Only then does partnership stop being a refuge from reality and become what it truly is: a practice of awakening.