Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters

Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters is a work by Robert Augustus Masters (2010).

Core claims

• Masters does not merely catalog misuses of spirituality; he provides the clinical anatomy of how transcendence operates as a dissociative defense—making his work the therapeutic companion to Hillman’s philosophical critique of spirit’s betrayal of soul.
• The book’s central diagnostic insight is that spiritual bypassing is not a failure of spiritual practice but a success of the self-care system: the same archetypal defenses Kalsched identifies in trauma survivors co-opt spiritual language to maintain their protective encapsulation.
• By insisting that authentic spirituality must metabolize rather than transcend emotion, Masters reverses the hierarchy embedded in Western spiritual traditions since Paul’s substitution of pneuma for psyche—the very substitution Hillman traces as the root of our psychological culture’s malnourishment.

Related questions

• How does Kalsched’s Protector/Persecutor model in The Inner World of Trauma illuminate the specific mechanisms by which spiritual practice becomes co-opted as a dissociative defense, and where does Masters’s account extend or challenge Kalsched’s framework?
• Hillman argues in “Peaks and Vales” that the psyche has genuine spiritual needs that the puer can fulfill through the puer-psyche marriage; does Masters’s critique of spiritual bypassing risk pathologizing the legitimate spiritual hunger Hillman identifies, or does it honor it by different means?
• Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul proposes that Ficino’s placement of soul between spirit and body heals their polarization; how does this Renaissance therapeutic model compare to Masters’s insistence that emotional embodiment is the precondition for authentic spiritual life?

See also

• Library page: /library/recovery/masters-spiritual-bypassing-when/

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