It’s worth expanding on a topic that came up in the previous post in this series. Spiritual bypassing is the idea that one’s religious adherence or spiritual practice can be used to sidestep personal responsibility. It can show up as assigning to the Divine something that is within your control. When we question the notion that everything always unfolds according to a preordained plan, we make space for personal growth and spiritual development.

Spiritual bypassing is often self-inflicted, but it can also be imposed on others as a form of spiritual abuse. Here’s an example from theology: I was raised Catholic and Protestant, and in the 1980s it was common to hear strong opinions that if someone wasn’t baptized Catholic before death, they could end up in limbo or hell. Or, from the evangelical perspective: if a person didn’t accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, the gates of Heaven would be closed forever.

It’s one thing to hold a strong theological conviction in line with tradition and scripture; it’s another to impose it on someone with different beliefs. That crosses into religious or spiritual abuse—no matter how well-intentioned. The same pattern appears when we apply spiritual principles to medicine and healing. When the expectation is that faith alone drives recovery, not healing can become grounds for blame and guilt—proof of one’s failings and diminished standing with the Divine.

This doesn’t only occur among adherents of fundamentalist beliefs. Agnostic and atheist medical providers are fully capable of perpetrating medical hexing when, to avoid giving false hope, they assert (via prognosis) the body’s inability to heal. Instead of leaving the door open to healing by other means, the authority of the high church of modern medicine can turn diagnostic proclamations into verdicts based on supposed genetic failings. It’s the same story of spiritual abuse in a secular setting.

Image by ChatGPT, OpenAI

The solution is to lead with compassion and stay open to possibility—without giving false hope or harboring misplaced belief in any one system of thought. That’s a razor’s edge to walk; fall to one side and you land in existential despair, to the other in spiritual crisis. The story then becomes: either modern medicine failed me, I failed myself, or the Divine (or my spiritual community) did not come to my aid in my time of need. All these thoughts lead to suffering.

So we return to the basics of spiritual medicine: compassion, forgiveness, empowerment. Which choice leads to the most movement toward those three virtues? That’s the path to follow, one decision at a time. If the diagnosis you’ve been given feels like damnation, tell a different story. Find the healers who can guide you along that razor’s edge. Conventional medical providers and holistic practitioners can be equally guilty of egotism and self-righteous thinking. Trust your intuition; listen to the inner voice that speaks of compassion, forgiveness, and empowerment.

How do you know you’re on the right track and cultivating those virtues? In one word: gratitude. You can be living with a chronic illness, having tried every modality available, and still feel whole because you are grateful to be alive. Show me someone who, despite their trials, radiates gratitude, and I’ll show you someone who also embodies compassion, forgiveness (of self and others), and empowerment.