Spiritual Bypass

It is the good people that get me

“Spiritual bypassing can be a tool to dismiss what others are feeling. At times, spiritual bypassing can be used as a tool to gaslight others into staying silent about things that have harmed them.

Rather than being allowed to express their pain, people who have been harmed are told by others that they are being a negative person. This tendency uses spirituality to reframe events in a way that lets people off the hook for the harm they may have caused.” -Spiritual Bypassing as a Defense Mechanism. By Kendra Cherry, MSEd

When I was 2 years old, my cousin Andrew committed suicide. I don’t remember much from that time as I was so young but the lesson of his death is something that imprinted on my soul and in my personality. I was told that the reason that Andrew killed himself is because he had done something that he felt would make everyone hate him. Death was preferable in his young mind over being hated. What had he done? Accidentally crashed the car of some people he was babysitting for (the kids were not in the car and no one was harmed). There was in fact no evidence that anyone hated him. But to my young mind, the experience taught me that being hated was something worse than death. Being hated might literally kill you.

When I was in high school and enduring the abuse at the hands of my basketball coach for years, the main manipulation that he used to keep me silent, small and in my place was that very fear. If I stood up to him or challenged him, he would tell me that “everyone will hate you” if I didn’t comply. He would make sure of it. And he was not in fact wrong. When I stood up against him, I lost everything and everyone I had. I was HATED with such a fierceness by “good people” who had once been my friends. I was hated so much that people went out of their way to say and write awful things in the media about me. “Good people” I had once known defended and supported my coach. It nearly killed me.

When he plead guilty and the extent of his abuse was made known, unsurprisingly, none of those “good people” ever apologized for the harm they caused me. Plenty of “good people” abandoned me to live in the devastating aftermath of all of that. I was left, alone, to survive when all of my worst fears had come true and my life was shattered into a million pieces. I had been treated like a villain when people didn’t want to believe me, but I was never treated like a hero later. I put an end to prolific abuse that irreparably harmed dozens of women. I brought national attention to the problem of girls being abused by their coaches. And I never got to feel good about it. In the aftermath, people stayed away from me because of their own discomfort with themselves. They could not reconcile their sense of themselves as “good people” with the idea that they had enabled, voiced support for, didn’t stand up against, left me for dead. I watched people, time and time again, let themselves off the hook for their unintentional harms using spiritual bypass. No one came to save me, no one came to help me. I just had to live with the hurt, the pain, the hate, the awful things that were done and said to me. I had changed the world by standing up (this included getting laws changed in the state of Washington) and for it, I was hated. It almost killed me.

I have worked so hard for over 20 years to not let that, or many of the other awful contributions to my c-ptsd and confusing way of operating in the world, destroy me. I have worked so hard to learn how to feel safe, how to feel ok, how to trust and not be triggered. For the fact that I have done a wildly imperfect job at it, it is nothing short of a miracle that I have actually fared as well as I have. I am not a little bird with a broken wing. I am strong but I can still be hurt. I can still be caught off guard and suddenly feel shattered.

I find myself feeling shattered as I write this. It is not because of being dropped. While that does hurt deeply, it is not triggering. It is that particular, familiar response that triggers me and unleashes an almost overwhelming feeling of hurt and loss and despair. A seemingly innocuous statement has done a little tap dance on top of a wound, that I thought was long repaired. It has pulled me back to that time in my life more than 20 years ago when I had lost everything and felt utterly alone.

“But they are good people”

“I just feel conflicted because they are good people”.

These types of phrases can be used as a form of spiritual bypass. When utilized, it can mean that good people should not be held responsible for the harm they cause, whether intentional or not. They should not be held to account. Or, it is used in a way of comparison. If they are good people, then anyone who says otherwise is not. It is coded language that is not benign. If it were meaningless, why go out of the way to invoke it? It serves a purpose to the people that use it, whether conscious or unconscious.

The problem is that people use “they are good people” as a get out of jail free card. Good people don’t have to be responsible for the harm they caused because “they didn’t mean to”. The insistence (by them) on making this a moral issue means that a person who has been harmed is put in the position of feeling like the bad guy if they have feelings about the harm. As it was not I who brought up the quality of character of individuals, the “good person” defense is incongruent. As I said in my last piece, it is actually quite the opposite: I am more hurt because I liked and cared for and thought highly of these people.

I use this example commonly to make this easily understandable. Imagine someone steps on your foot. “OUCH!” you say. And they say what?

“I am so sorry” (accepting responsibility that we can cause unintentional harm)

"I didn’t mean to!!” (spiritual bypassing of unintentional harm).

To me, in the context of people responding to my feelings about being dropped, lobbing the “but they are good people” into the conversation feels loaded. And it has indeed exploded deeply felt feelings of being hated, of being harmed by good people. It has rendered me immobile because it reminds me that there will be no culpability and any expectations of such make me a bad person.

I lost my basketball career and everything I worked for because of the abuse I suffered and my choice to stand up against my coach. The “good people” response played a large role in this. Why be a part of a community that did not stand by or come to your aid? Why stay in a place where the person who is hurt and broken (me) is constantly being asked to make other people feel better about what has happened?

I can feel a tug to leave the sport. It is not *just* this occurrence that makes it feel so. It is all of this happening layered on top of many years of frustration with certain aspects of the sport. Aspects that make me feel like I have arrived back in high school and am trying to navigate cool kids, in crowds and social politics that I can never seem to grasp. Made more complicated by the control that brands have over the sport.

Instead of quitting the sport, I decided to not run Black Canyon. It feels to me like the epitome of some of my most tender pressure points and I just do not have the mental fortitude right now to be in that environment. I have been acutely aware of how little support I’ve been given by many of my competitor peers, many of whom are racing Black Canyon. Why put myself into an environment where I do not feel understood or supported? I need some space from that and even though I HATE missing a race that I am fit and healthy for, I need to protect my mental health which feels fragile.

I am going to continue to run. Forever and always. And I am evaluating, experimenting and sorting through where this leaves me with the sport. I do not have answers yet, but I am determined to find my way back to peace and stability.