What is Spiritual Bypassing vs Through-Passing
Channel: Simply Always Awake
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Read a transcript preview of “What is Spiritual Bypassing vs Through-Passing” from Simply Always Awake, uploaded on 2026-09-12.
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Language: English (original, YouTube automatic captions)
[0:00] In the early 1980s, a therapist named
[0:03] John Welwood
[0:05] uh coined the term spiritual bypassing.
[0:09] And what he meant was something pretty
[0:11] specific.
[0:12] He noticed in certain spiritual
[0:14] communities or in uh spiritual contexts,
[0:19] certain people
[0:20] would use spiritual terminology,
[0:23] spiritual ideas
[0:25] to sidestep emotional issues that were
[0:28] unresolved,
[0:29] traumas, and
[0:33] very notably
[0:34] developmental tasks that were never
[0:36] fully completed.
[0:38] And I think this is a very apt term for
[0:40] that, spiritual bypassing.
[0:42] Uh
[0:44] what I wanted to talk about in this
[0:45] video is something that I'm going to
[0:47] coin my own term for just because it's
[0:50] not it's not the same thing at all, but
[0:52] it has some flavor of that in that it's
[0:55] a way that we can overlook
[1:00] what really needs to be addressed in
[1:01] certain contexts
[1:03] through
[1:04] uh
[1:05] a mechanism that does come about through
[1:08] awakening.
[1:09] >> [snorts]
[1:10] >> So, the contrast is and the term I'm
[1:12] going to use
[1:13] as I just kind of came up with it for
[1:15] this video is
[1:17] spiritual through-passing.
[1:19] Um
[1:21] so, the the contrast is that spiritual
[1:25] bypassing
[1:26] uh is often in people who haven't had
[1:29] any kind of awakening. It could be in
[1:30] someone awakening, but it typically
[1:32] would not be.
[1:34] Um it's very cognitive in nature
[1:38] um and
[1:40] it's
[1:41] partially unconscious, which shares its
[1:44] uh that quality shared with spiritual
[1:46] through-passing, which I'm going to talk
[1:47] about.
[1:49] But, what's different is that spiritual
[1:50] through-passing typically happens in
[1:52] people who have already woken up.
[1:54] Um
[1:55] it's also unconscious. Maybe a little
[1:58] more accessible Uh um
[2:00] cognitively. Like it