Seeking a Spiritual Escape: Spiritual Bypass and Scrupulosity OCD
Brandi Roberts, MS, AMFT, of the OCD Center of Los Angeles, shares her personal experience and recovery from religious scrupulosity OCD and spiritual bypassing, as well as discusses the dynamics and treatment of this common OCD subtype.
I was 12 years old, curled up in the fetal position on my bed as my tears fell onto my bedspread. I felt a pit in my stomach, and the heat of guilt, heavy in my chest as I had a desperate urge to confess to my mom that I might have accidentally lied yesterday, and that I had an inappropriate thought today. I believed that if I felt guilty, I must have done something wrong, and if I didn’t confess my mistakes or my thoughts to my parents, God would punish me, and eventually send me to hell. I didn’t know how to manage the guilt and fear that I felt, so I was convinced I was being spiritually attacked by demons. Based on what I learned from church and my religious parents, I was convinced I was caught up in a battle between good and evil and if I prayed and read the Bible enough, I might be able to rise above my bad thoughts and my feelings of guilt. This belief is what caused me to pray a very specific prayer every night out of fear of punishment from God. It wasn’t until years later, as an adult, I found out I actually had scrupulosity obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and what I was doing to escape my uncomfortable feelings, was called spiritual bypassing.
What is Spiritual Bypassing?
Spiritual bypassing is a term created by psychologist John Welwood in 1984 to describe how religion and spirituality are used to bypass developmental needs and painful emotions (Stone, 2013). Many of us believe messages given to us by our families and religion or spirituality, that difficult emotions aren’t meant to be experienced and it becomes normalized to bypass emotions. This normalizing allows spiritual bypassing to go unnoticed because it’s not seen as a problem. Instead of working through difficult emotions or confronting internal conflicts by getting treatment for mental health, many people dismiss these emotions with spiritual explanations (Cherry, 2023). Spiritual bypass prevents emotional integration and keeps us from being immersed in the complex experience of being human. When we bypass our emotions, it impacts our mental health, including repression, emotional numbing, detachment, and developmental delays (Stone, 2013).
Three months into my first romantic relationship, I was on a date with my boyfriend, and suddenly I was hit with a tightness in my chest that felt unbearable, and a suffocating desire to end the relationship. I had no idea why I felt this sudden anxiety, because he was a sweet guy who treated me well. After a lot of tears and confusion I broke up with him. The only explanation I could give was that, “It just didn’t feel right.” My next few short relationships ended in the same way and I couldn’t figure out why dating caused me so much anxiety. It was so emotionally exhausting, I didn’t date for a long time. Many years later, I met someone I truly could see a future with, and although I was very emotionally vigilant and always waiting for the anxiety to show up, I didn’t feel it for a while. Shortly after a year of dating, I was experiencing many stressful events in my life, and my partner was my main source of comfort and security during that time.
