Emotional
October 3, 2023

Spiritual Bypass, Anger, and Resentment

by
Dr. Roy Vongtama

Spiritual bypass is when we "skip over" feeling something by rationalizing it with a thought, such as, "Just let it go," or "they didn't mean it," or any of the hundreds of things we say to avoid our feelings.

Sound familiar? It should, because we all do it.

Why? To avoid feeling hurt, anger or rage towards people we don't want to feel a "negative" feeling towards. Or as my friend says, "I don't want to think bad things about people who are supposed to care about me."

It's a perfectly understandable thing to do, mind you, but it's not healthy.

Why? **Because if we have already had a reaction to something, we cannot undo it by a thought.**

The feeling gets disconnected and stuck, and it stays in there and builds up, because it's not a "one time" event. The likelihood is that you've been doing it for a long time.

Then what results is a deeper state of disconnection that arises much later as resentment.

This bypass then creates the reality you were concerned about, ironically, when you did the bypass in the first place:

you don't want to be around that person, because for some reason, "you don't like them" or "they are annoying" or "they just bother me." But the real reason lies in that first moment, when you didn't feel what was really there, and it got stuck.

Now you're resenting them and cannot pin a reason on the feeling.

If that's happened to you, take a look in the mirror, you might have sabotaged yourself, maybe a long time ago.

When we don't allow ourselves to feel what is there, when that uncomfortable feeling is not allowed to surface and register in your body, you create an unhealthy pattern.

My advice: Pull out some paper and do the "burn pages" exercise (also listed in the articles).

Then resolve to do it differently: feel what the moment makes you feel, then speak up, so it doesn't happen again!