In John 8 Jesus proclaims he is the light of the world. His presence is a challenge to all who listen to Him. John records he said to the “Jews who had believed him . . . ‘the truth will set you free’” (John 8:31-32). But there were many others who were not set free. Many very religious people had a difficult time unseeing what they saw was obvious: they were already free. They responded to Jesus, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?” (John 8:33).

Often the truth about ourselves is the hardest truth to see, particularly when our view of the self is consciously and unconsciously tied to our religious practice and belief. The Jewish leaders saw themselves as descendants of Abraham. With this firm understanding of who they were in the world intricately intertwined with their religious practice and belief, they could not consciously imagine that they were not already where they ought to be. Nevertheless, Jesus insists each of them is “a slave to sin” (John 8:34).

They were caught in spiritual bypass. When religion is used as a defense, it is twisted to help us avoid a deeper truth. As a result, it might cause us to miss seeing reality facing us in our own backyard. Jesus presents a new way.

What is spiritual bypass?

Spiritual bypass is a term that has been increasingly used since the early 2000’s. Authors in academic and popular psychology use it to describe an individual’s use of spiritual belief, experience or practice to avoid psychological issues which evoke anxiety and other troubles.

Many psychological theorists use other phrases which capture the same general concept as “spiritual bypass.”

• Beck differentiates “existential” religion from Freud’s early formulation of religion as wishful thinking and discusses the problem of “religion-as-defense-mechanism.”
• LaMothe coined the expression “fused faith” to describe an individual’s attempt to fuse with an omnipotent, universal object (God) in order to maintain a sense of agency, continuity, and cohesion in times of distress.
• Frame chose “bullet-proof faith” to convey a rigid belief structure used inappropriately.

All of these labels depict psychological processes operating unconsciously in individuals which are used to avoid painful psychological wounds. Like all defense mechanisms, they bypass the difficult task of attending to issues that negatively impact mental health, warp decision-making, and quash adult development.

For instance, “Judy” entered psychotherapy because she thought she was being too angry with her children, shouting at them and punishing them too harshly. She is 34, with two young children, has a husband of eight years and a full-time job to manage, and she feels “stretched to the breaking point.” She described her marriage as “average, with its ups and downs, but lately we’ve been fighting a lot.” She and her husband belong to a local Christian church and consider themselves very devout people.

Judy tearfully spoke of her difficulty going to sleep. She had rarely slept more than four hours a night for three months. She lost weight, as well, and says her husband commented he’s worried about her. She feels unfulfilled and complains of friends who seem to want her help, but whom she regards as insincere. “They aren’t really interested in me if I need help.” She spoke haltingly about her feelings of “constant guilt” about her children being in day care. Judy seemed clearly depressed to her young therapist, but she had a hard time when her therapist suggested that she was experiencing depression. “Shouldn’t I be joyful? I mean, I’m a Christian. I’ve prayed about all this. I know God wouldn’t leave me in despair.”

Just prior to coming to therapy, Judy experienced a more severe turn in her symptoms and stayed in bed for three days. She reported not being able to make herself do anything. “Luckily it was the weekend, so I used a sick day and by Tuesday, I just made myself get to the office.” When asked if she ever thought of harming herself, she said she would never do such a thing. “Think of my children – that wouldn’t be right!” She later admitted that she’d wished she could drive away to the coast and just let herself veer off a cliff into the sea. “Something quick and final.”

Judy is a fictionalized client, but this composite case demonstrates a common set of psychological and emotional issues that can be particularly challenging for Christians. The great good that spiritual belief and practices provide in life and development can also become a central part of an individual’s mental health struggle. Instead of promoting growth, religion can, paradoxically, come to block it. The good is spoiled and becomes bad.

Because of an unfortunate tendency in the history of the field of psychology to pathologize faith, many devout Christians have turned away from the help psychology can offer for people like Judy. In the wider North American culture, where therapy-as-healing is embraced with abandon, some pockets of Christian subcultures look on psychotherapy with suspicion or hostility and consider psychotherapy a “worldly” pursuit. Some Christian leaders have taught that emotional issues and mental health problems are a sign of spiritual unfaithfulness. Others argue that more rigorous application of biblical truth is the only spiritually sound practice a devout person can turn to in addressing emotional difficulties.

This suspicion leaves people like Judy stranded with painful emotions and increasing symptoms of clinical depression or other treatable mental health issues. In Christianity Today, a Christian psychiatrist wrote of a conversation he had with a missionary who was struggling with mental health problems. The missionary told him, “We don’t have emotional problems. If any emotional difficulties appear to arise, we simply deny having them.”  Pray more. Read the Bible more. Trust more. Confess your sins. Count your blessings. Serve others. Change.

Judy, and those like her, try these steps, repeatedly, but they frequently remain depressed, and unable to change. The good practices of faith, reading, praying, and serving others, seem to miss impacting their emotional difficulty.  Often when the client finally comes to therapy they have been suffering for a long time. Unsuccessful in overcoming their problems, they may plunge deeper into painful self-doubt and feelings of failure, inadequacy, and worthlessness. Denying these feelings in an effort to be more faithful can produce dangerous outcomes.

In Judy’s case, she had a complicated set of beliefs about herself, others, and God that lurked outside of her daily awareness. She often behaves in ways that hint at these deep and mostly hidden beliefs or describes feelings that reflect how they powerfully affect her self-concept. But until her recent inability to manage her depressive symptoms, she would not have acknowledged them. Even as she began addressing her difficulties, she could not consciously name what was causing her struggle.

If it were simple to name unconscious beliefs, we would all gladly change.  These hidden views of herself and others, as well as Other, are a product of Judy’s early life experiences  woven into her unconscious inner world far more than they are a product of sound theology or personal religious experience. In order to maintain a sense of personal equilibrium and to protect the established sense of self that she has constructed over her lifetime, she bypasses or unconsciously evades emotional pain through the defensive use of religious belief or practice. The depressive symptoms she reported were a signal that her defensive processes were no longer working to keep her anxiety in check. Her anxiety is breaking through.

At times, any psychological defense mechanism can be vital for an individual. These processes allow us to manage the anxiety that is triggered by various external events which threaten to overwhelm our ability to cope. However, when these same processes become rigid and prevent needed, albeit painful, change in our inner world and our relationship  patterns, the good derived from these defensive functions of the personality has curdled. What is good can go bad.

For devout Christians it is possible that the good, faithful practices and convictions that served them well at one point in their lives will become obdurate beliefs and/or practices that block their ability to adapt and grow in the course of their stressful or challenging life.  They can become marooned in patterns of thinking and feeling which inhibit or prevent personal development and thwart enacting  adaptive changes in behavior. All the while, they are being bruised by bumping into the walls of their rigid  application of what they believe is a life of faith. What was good and, on the surface continues to appear to be good, has in reality been spoiled and becomes bad.

The literature from psychodynamic and cognitive theories of psychotherapy has common themes that are particularly relevant to the concept of spiritual bypass. These common themes pertain to the psychodynamic conceptualization of defense mechanisms and the cognitive conceptualization of coping strategies and schemas. We will explore dynamic theory first and then cognitive. Both will demonstrate how devout clients may unconsciously use spiritual bypass as defense and coping strategy to avoid a confrontation with deep feelings and beliefs they hold about themselves, other and God.  In avoiding these confrontations with their inner world, the devout client blocks needed psychological and spiritual growth.

Psychodynamic

In this modality a defense mechanism is created to push intolerable thoughts, wishes, memories, etc. out of consciousness. These intolerable things are “hidden” and unintegrated, but they still influence a person’s life and choices. For Judy to experience lasting change, the contents of the unconscious must become conscious, she must become aware of her unintegrated or objectionable mental material.

For devout clients who are encountering psychological symptoms they can not manage, the challenge of bringing unconscious material into consciousness can be interpreted as allowing “unfaithful” thoughts or feelings to surface — a threatening enterprise to many of them. Any empathetic therapist can see and feel how this process threatens the heart of a client’s view of self and their sense of safety in the world — both are deeply connected to their faith. Unconscious material that contradicts or deviates from orthodoxy or disrupts some homeostasis shakes the foundation of the person’s identity. It all “feels wrong.” Like all of us, a devout devout person might resist becoming aware of such hidden material. But unlike some of us, they could reinforce their resistance by recommitting to their religious practice in order to bypass all confrontation with the painful internal experience.

Attachment

Fairbairn amplified Freud, the father of psychodynamic theory, by noting how our basic impulses driving us to reproduce and thrive are not merely about seeking pleasure but are also about seeking an “object” with which to relate. This principle was deepened by Bowlby in attachment theory. The intrapsychic world conceptualized by these theories is one of internalized objects (mental models/images of external people the child interacts with) and internalized object relations (mental models/images of how relationships work).

With these teachers, the picture of human behavior broadened to envision individuals unconsciously seeking relationships that repeat patterns familiar from their experience and defending against objects or events that disrupt this internal expectation. The individual’s expectations, view of him/her self, and view of others are all shaped by these internal templates. When events occur in the person’s interactions with the external world, change will be unconsciously defended against in order to preserve what seems “true” to the individual according to past experience.

These defensive processes can become associated with the person’s faith practices and set the stage for spiritual bypass. In Judy’s case, Ann, her therapist, learned that Judy organized much of her behavior around attempting to please others by being right and by being helpful, sometimes at the expense of asserting her own thoughts, feelings, and preferences. She thought these actions of “service” to others were her duty as a Christian and as a Christian mother and Christian wife.

As Ann listened carefully to Judy’s stories about her childhood, their dialogue turned to the exploration of Judy’s requirements of herself. These requirements were rooted in her difficult relationship with her mother. Judy despaired of ever pleasing her mother and internalized a view of herself as doomed to failure, although she unconsciously worked with all diligence to disprove this in practically every encounter with friends, co-workers,  bosses, her husband, and even her children. The way she hoped to find the connection to others she longed for was to unconsciously set aside her own desires and to evaluate how to please others or attain a sense of being right before them. In essence she was working off an internal template of others as if they were all like her mother, withholding affirmation and closeness.

The problem was that as she set aside her unique preferences, thoughts, etc., she was preventing intimacy from developing. She was repeating the past, using the same defensive processes she had learned in her childhood in dealing with her mother. These defensive processes now had the strength of consciously being associated with her religious convictions and she did not see them as emanating from her troubled past.  She had “internalized her mother” who may well have been coping with an array of difficulties that Judy and Ann cannot identify. Judy, however, carried an internal model within her and repeated actions based on expectations, assumptions, and beliefs that she created while she was a child. In adulthood we all need to revise these models. But Judy’s were glued to her faith, which made it difficult to  consciously evaluate these inner object relations and the defensive patterns. She was stuck in spiritual bypass and depressed.

View of self

Psychodynamic theorists began to center on a client’s self-esteem development and management. This led them to develop a clearer idea of the “self.” They saw a person’s sense-of-self develop as their personality moved out of scattered experiences of changing events toward an increasing feeling of continuity. As one matures, their self becomes an object itself, a distinct, ever-present, and identifiable “I” or “me.” Jesus demonstrates this self-awareness with His “I am” statements in the Gospel of John.

Kohut’s theory of self psychology came to emphasize the differentiation between self and object. For this school, establishing a cohesive self is the most important developmental achievement and maintaining of this self-organization is basic mental health. As the twentieth century wore on other theorists began to do research with infants and came to see the self emerge through interaction with caregivers. They discerned phases of development toward individuation that might be arrested if things did not go well.

Individuation and autonomy became hallmarks of our understanding of healthy mental functioning. As psychology came to value individuation in mental health, our treatment approaches were shaped to promote autonomy in clients who seemed to lack the necessary inner strength to separate from past objects, who continued to act out of the fixed internal models they developed in childhood regardless of what happened in the external environment.

For the devout client facing mental health issues, the maintenance of their self-organization often connects to their religious belief and practice. So when things change and they need to adapt, that is, they must modify their view of self or of others, some clients unconsciously defend against becoming aware of their means of self-organization. They bypass the opportunity to understand themselves more deeply because their defensive processes are attached to their religious practice or belief. To reflect more deeply on their motivations is interpreted as doubting or challenging God or even as sin. This rigid orientation can help a client “hold it together,” but it may not serve their growth as experiences (perhaps even orchestrated by God) challenge them to transform their understanding of the self and their relationship patterns, including their relationship with God.

Judy struggled to let go of her view of herself as a “good Christian wife” and all the definitions of that phrase she had developed out of her hidden belief she was required to be perfect in order to avoid rejection. Her theology of salvation by grace did not impact her deeper psychological law. When she first started therapy, she struggled to admit to herself  that she did not dare trust in the grace of Jesus Christ. She spoke words of faith all the time and consciously believed what she said, but in reality she did not trust that she could be loved without producing “works.” Her therapy involved a careful identification of her mistrust and a painful tracing of where this mistrust came from in her experience. Only after working in this way for some time could she begin to wrestle with the radical claims of Jesus and all the fear they generated in her.

Judy felt she might lose her faith altogether if she did not continue to “hold to high standards.” She feared she would lose her self. This is a common fear among humans that Jesus identifies and challenges: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it” (Luke 9:24). A reasonable extension of these psychological theories makes it evident that spiritual practice, when employed as spiritual bypass, can work to block needed growth in individuals. The innate processes within the personality observed by these various psychological theorists and the good processes of Christian discipline and belief are spoiled when the imbalance of spiritual bypass emerges.

Cognitive

As the title of the theory of cognitive therapy suggests, this form of psychotherapy says human personality and behavior are structured around the cognitive process. Beck teaches, “Cognitive therapy is based on a theory of personality which maintains that how one thinks largely determines how one feels and behaves.” Information processing is at the center of this theory of how humans function.  The survival of any human being is based on their ability to take in information from the environment, give it meaning, and formulate a response based on the meaning attached to the stimulus.  Without this information processing ability the individual cannot survive. Cognitive therapy focuses on our cognitive ability and identifies where it is functioning adaptively. It assesses where cognitive processes in the client are furthering the individual’s health and where they have developed in maladaptive ways and are thwarting the person’s well being.

Faulty or ineffective information processing leaves any individual vulnerable to “systematic biases” that influence how they attach meaning to various stimuli from their environment. Selective information processing can lead to variety of pathologies and symptoms. For example, when a person reports symptoms of high anxiety, the possibility of a systematic shift toward selectively extracting themes of danger from the environment is possible. Such shifts are induced by attitudes or beliefs that people hold which predispose them, under the pressure of difficult life situations, to begin interpreting their experiences in a biased way. For example, a person who believes they may die at a young age because their parent experienced an early death may begin to interpret various normal physical sensations as indicators of catastrophic illness. They then may develop panic attacks.

For many Christians, cognitive therapy has a strong appeal because it often sounds like the Bible: Romans 12:2 calls us to “renewing the mind;” Phil. 4:8 admonishes to find peace as we, “think about such things.” “Biblical Counseling” has often been called CBT in sheep’s clothing. Your pastor may integrate the latest CBT with their spiritual direction. So it is no surprise that spiritual bypass can also be conceptualized within this theoretical framework. The concepts of automatic thoughts and schema/core beliefs are key elements that reveal where spiritual bypass may be at work.

Automatic thoughts

Automatic thoughts form the constant stream of internal “background” communication which coexists in an individual’s mind with more “manifest” thought. Cognitive therapy speculates that a gap exists between the recognized, manifest thought of an individual and their emotional responses. They say it is in this gap where a barrage of automatic thoughts evaluate, interpret, and misinterpret external events.  This flow of automatic thought weaves between our experience of external events and the accompanying emotional reactions. The principle here is that there is a pre-conscious thought between an external event and a particular emotional response, so focusing on those automatic thoughts can start a reality-testing process that corrects erroneous impressions and changes emotional reaction and ultimately behavior. If fact, external events do not directly determine how people respond emotionally and behaviorally, but automatic thoughts and other cognitive functions govern emotion and behavior.

Cognitive therapy teaches human personality is formed by beliefs and assumptions which are held at the core of the personality and are generally unrecognized by the individual. While cognitive and psychodynamic thought differ over the conceptualization of the unconscious, this understanding of core beliefs held in the core of the personality outside the individual’s awareness provides a common understanding when it comes to spiritual bypass. Both schools of psychotherapy pose hypotheses that point to psychological material that a person does not recognize which can thwart adaptive growth and change.

Schemas

In cognitive theory the structures which house core beliefs are known as schemas which operate in the unattended processes of the mind. Core beliefs are the individual’s central conceptualizations about the self, others and the world. Cognitive theory differs from psychodynamic theory in that it does not regard the self-report of the client to be a diversion or defense against these hidden beliefs. Motivational constructs such as drives or unresolved childhood conflicts are not considered. Instead, the cognitive therapist focuses on a highly structured, generally short-term treatment that continually tests erroneous interpretations that are a result of the biased thinking which result from dysfunctional core beliefs about self and others. It is a surface-to-depth model of working with client cognitions. Erroneous interpretations of reality are repeatedly challenged with the aim that the unconscious schemas and core beliefs will be modified by the continual application of more adaptive cognitions.

One’s schema and core beliefs create assumptions or rules that people live by automatically without applying reasonable and adaptive cognitive evaluation. Another way to picture this is to see how from these assumptions flow “compensatory strategies” for dealing with experience based, not on reality, but on the client’s interpretation of reality biased by the maladaptive cognitive processes that have developed.  The flow of these strategies, and often the accompanying distress, begin in childhood. Our early experiences form the basis for core beliefs, which are generally global negative views of self, other, and the world. Out of core beliefs and assumptions we may create compensatory strategies which give us a way to cope with these beliefs rather than with reality. These compensatory strategies shape the individual’s constant flow of automatic thoughts. Cognitive therapy addresses this process by creating opportunities to challenge maladaptive thinking at all three levels: the automatic thought (surface); compensatory strategies (mid); and schema/core belief (depth). The practice of challenging maladaptive thinking, eventually leading to contradicting the schema, is the essence of cognitive therapy.

In cognitive theory, spiritual bypass is another form of maladaptive cognition. Transformation is thwarted by the faulty information processing of the client’s mind which has developed a bias connected to the individual’s spiritual beliefs or practices. Spiritual bypass is related to unreasonable assumptions held in place by a lack of reality testing. So in Judy’s case, a cognitive therapist would identify with her how her experience of sadness and anger is being supported by her negative beliefs about herself and how she selects information from her current interactions that reinforces these painful beliefs rather than allowing new information to influence her choices. Given her history of work and performance focus in her childhood, she is cutting off avenues of leisure and self fulfillment in her adult life and restricting her communications about her legitimate desires with those she interacts with daily. She has developed a biased view of her future and selects information from her environment that supports her negative mindset about it. This combination of a negative view of herself (worthy only in performance or unworthy at the schema level) and a negative view of her future (more of the same) holds her depression in place.

As previously noted, Interpersonal considerations affected all branches of psychology in the later part of the twentieth century, including cognitive/behavioral. In that modality theorists suggested people develop interpersonal schemas that are adaptive in their specific context because these schemas allow them to predict what will happen in  interactions with the caregivers who meet their needs. These schemas often do not change with one’s circumstances and development is required.

We not only react to our environments according to our schemas, we influence our environments to conform to them.   For instance, a person who believes sadness or anger is an unacceptable feeling, as Judy does, may interact with others in a manner that is emotionally flat, keeping their affect restricted due to the dictates of their schema. This flat affect causes others to feel distanced from the her. They pull away and she interprets their reaction as confirmation her feelings are, indeed, unacceptable.

A schema acts as a template for the appraisal of experience. Individuals begin to process information in a way that is consistent with these beliefs (often negative), readily incorporating data that confirm the schema/core belief but discounting, ignoring, or disregarding contradictory data. The proposed cycle goes like this: psychopathology begins with these core beliefs about self, other and the world that lead to dysfunctional rules or guidelines for coping with life and to narrow, rigid behavioral options that result in inaccurate appraisals of events and ultimately in emotional distress which reinforces patterns of maladaptive behaviors. Cognitive theory envisions a maladaptive cycle in the cognitive process that traps the client in a continual sequence that fortifies psychopathological thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

For the devout client, spiritual significance may be attached to dysfunctional cognitions that serve to block growth and change. Fundamental perceptions of God, of self and of others at the schema level may be linked to the client’s view of spiritual truth and therefore inhibit an evaluative process that would dislodge them. For example, in therapy Judy identified many automatic thoughts that bombarded her in her interactions with others. She evaluated her statements carefully to see if she was presenting a proper picture of her devotion to God and her duties as a wife, mother, worker, etc. Often these automatic thoughts were negative about herself and about others. She noted neglect from others often and began to be hyper-sensitive to her friend’s comments and how they  included or excluded her. She often coped with her feelings of inadequacy and loneliness by redoubling her efforts to perform her duties, leaving her exhausted and more isolated.

At the schema level she held a view of herself as a lazy person, who demanded too much attention, and was unworthy of love. This painful cognition was intolerable to her so she coped with it by continuing her patterns of overfunctioning in relationships, “doing the right things.”  But doing right things (never perfectly or effectively) only reinforced her deeper sense of herself as unworthy; she could not prioritize her own desire to be loved without performing. Her cycles kept her frozen in despair. Woven through this stream of faulty cognition was her interpretations of her religious duties as well. These obligations were formed around her schema rather than around a conscious embrace of theological truth. Judy’s compensatory strategies involved spiritual bypass.

The way forward

Spiritual bypass is defensive functioning in the human personality and compensatory strategies in dealing with life’s challenges. For a person like Judy, influences from within through her psychological structure and from without in her relational interactions reinforce her particular “use” of religion in ways that remain outside her awareness. She is defended against the desires that stir within her for autonomous, gratifying interactions in her life. She is coping with her turmoil by selecting information from her external environment that reinforces her negative view of herself and her future.

For Judy to mature she will need to focus on the internal stimuli occurring within her and on the external stimuli coming from her interactions with others (and Other). Health is an inside out and outside in process, including how the movements collide and interact. As Judy faced the challenges of her life with her young family, work, and church she became ensnared in internal conflict and lost the balance between an autonomous sense of her self as a valuable human being apart from what she produced and her interdependence with others. She only felt competition between her needs and the needs of others, and could find no compromise. She redoubled her efforts to “think good thoughts” but her feelings of sorrow and anger grew to the point where she could not control herself. She needed to change her psychological framework within the environment made up by relationships with her husband and friends to address her very real and very human needs.

She could not see any of this due to her psychological stagnation which was, unfortunately, strengthened by her faith practices and beliefs. She did not see the flawed thinking associated with her theology and only saw herself as “trying to be good for God.” Further, she could not identify her very real fear of God. “God was to be loved not feared,” she told herself. Her spiritualizing of her situations allowed her to continue in a rather conflict-free relationship with her husband (pleasing him in her estimation) whose neglect of his family was palpable. It also allowed her to see herself as the tireless, unappreciated worker, a role she had embraced in her original family.  These same patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving, however, also thwarted the development of intimacy in her marriage and intimacy in her relationship with God. She was left deeply depressed.

A confrontation of the inner world for the devout client must include a confrontation with inner models merged with faith beliefs and practices. A devout Christian like Judy unconsciously shapes  her interactions with God, with teachings of the Church, and with personal devotional practices, around patterns established within her personality and not around sound theology (even if she gives intellectual assent to such theology) and not around her own encounters with the Spirit of God. Until these practices and beliefs are examined consciously, they will continue to contribute to unhealthy psychological and religious practice.

Such confrontation is especially challenging when it comes to language referencing the self or desires. A devout person must confront words often seen as a negative (e.g. self and desire). They may hear a sermon or recall many which call them to extinguish selfishness, or joyfully practice self-denial (Matt. 16:24). For centuries Christians have been taught to put away their ego and deny their self. The famous Cloud of Unknowing from the 1300’s teaches us to “Make sure that there is nothing stirring in your mind and will but God alone., and often with killing the self so God reigns supreme.”

Discussing the self can trigger further use of spiritual bypass and the devout person may consciously defend how their faith teaches what the godless psychologists say is an  unhealthy treatment of the self. It may be more akin to self-annihilation than denial. This was true in Judy’s case. Her ability to recognize these dynamics was initially very limited. Like all devout clients, she derived comfort from her religious practice as well as experiencing the deeper, more hidden, difficult dynamics explored in this discussion. All devout clients face this paradoxical journey in self understanding. They must sort out their inner worlds with care in order to identify where spiritual bypass is blocking needed change and where their faith practices and beliefs are reinforcing healthy human relating and spiritual connection with God and others.

Spiritual bypass presents an unavoidable hazard for any spiritual journey. When spiritual practice is not integrated into the practical realm of the psyche a number of maladaptive habits result:

• abdication of personal responsibility,
• spiritual obsession,
• compulsive goodness,
• repression of undesirable emotions (including hiding normal emotions that are perceived as bad),
• spiritual narcissism (supporting a sense of self as superior/more holy/more favored),
• spiritual materialism (defined as continual experimentation with various practices of spirituality in order to produce peak experiences without sustained disciplined practice from any one spiritual path),
• blind faith in spiritual teachers,
• social isolation (detachment from the world to avoid unfinished psychological issues).

Given what we have observed and theorized about the structure of the human personality, any attempt at spiritual development could lead to the misuse of spiritual practice or belief to bypass deeper psychological challenge and the ongoing transformation to which Jesus followers are called. To move forward on the spiritual path, we all must accept the risk we feel when we are called to lose our life to find it. We must face the paradox we feel: every step we take toward what is good for us and good for our relationships, not only holds the  potential for growth, it also holds the possibility of misuse and spoiled good. Within the world as it is, this is unavoidable. Every day we study psychology, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we learn, over and over, how much we all need grace for the way forward.

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This article is a shortened form of a groundbreaking piece Dr. Gwen White wrote in 2005. Her update can be found at this link from CircleCounseling.com. In the original paper you will find the references and bibliography not included here.