The Easy Way Out, Over, Under, Around
Roundabout or straight through? |
There are places we may never want to go, towns to which we may never want to return. We would drive 100 miles out of our way to avoid catching so much as a glimpse of the skyline. No matter how far, deep and wild our travels may be, these places follow us like specters, lurking just outside our consciousness waiting to visit us in sensitive triggers and haunted dreams. Our fear, trauma, anger and sadness have fiery homes in our bodies and minds, and as long as we build bypasses around them they remain in residence, smoldering and dictating our direction.
Bypasses look different for everyone. You'll know you're engaging in bypassing when you reach a difficult point where you cannot go any further without being truly vulnerable and veer sharply to the left. What comes after varies based on what your poison is and what you're avoiding by its usage. Sometimes these behaviors are called "coping mechanisms" or "self-medicating." When we hit the wall and retract from the challenge it presents, it is these tried-and-true methods we use to come back into our familiar equilibrium and feel good again.
Being vulnerable would allow us to ask the illuminating and therefore possibly frightening question, "Why?" Why am I doing this? Why am I so afraid? Why am I so angry? The right questions are an upsetting force to our equilibrium. They shift our perception of reality and allow us to see what clouds the lens with which we view the world. Sometimes we already know the answers to these questions without having to ask, which can make our challenges all the more formidable. We know exactly what we're avoiding and are sure that confronting it directly will crush us under its punishing weight. No one particularly enjoys discomfort, thus our creative tactics and tools for maintaining a sense of the rightness of things, even if it is illusory. Let's examine some of these facilitators of bypassing...
Spirituality
A couple of years ago my friend was kicked out of a hippie house for being too negative. In reality, she was going through an intensely difficult time and was being honest about her process. If she was having a bad day, she wouldn't pretend otherwise. In hippie-speak, she was being authentic. However, her housemates saw their own darkness mirrored in her and found this far too confrontational. So she was asked to leave and ended up moving into a grunge house where she was accused of being too sunny and positive, but was loved and accepted anyway.Spirituality is a tricky one because it usually looks healthy. If you're having a bad day, you throw on some uplifting worship music or take a yoga class. How is that a bad thing? Well, it's not unless these activities are band aids which get you out of asking the difficult but right questions. When bad days amass into a few bad months and you continue to feel the tidal pull of negative patterns, maybe it's time to examine the Why behind it all. This requires us to sit still in and learn from the "bad" feelings. If it supports this process, we should absolutely keep meditating, praying, reading scripture, going to temple, chanting or whatever else you like, but without fearless, stringently honest self-inquiry, none of it will assist in meaningful, long term change.
Spiritual practices can be a means of self-inquiry, but can also be used to achieve feel good feelings that are as temporary as the effects of any drug. It will leave you a mile wide and an inch deep- all smooth, glittering surface and lack of space to hold anything substantive. Learning to go deep gives us the gift of wisdom imbued by our heartaches and traumas, a gift which is only available if we look for it while grieving what happened. What we bring on to the mat, into church, up in our conversations with God is not meant to just be the parts of us that are neatly shined and pretty. We offer up everything, extending an open invitation into our light as well as our darkness. This is how we come to live as wholly whole, integrated human beings; we allow for the fullness of our experience, even if it makes us, or others, uncomfortable.
Busyness
Workaholics are particularly good at this and like spirituality, work is usually seen as healthy and normal, so no one will look down on you for working hard. It's a highly prized virtue. It may be an even better tool than spirituality because while that may be seen as frivolous, work is not. Depending on the work, it can be a wonderful way to improve our world, provide for our families and grow ourselves. It can also be a way to avoid ourselves and our families. You simply don't have the time to tend to your relationships or your inner work. You are just that busy.This is productive escapism. You may be getting something done, but it's not the something that needs to be addressed. There are many types of work, each possessing its own value. Being home with and raising children is just as valuable as going out in the world to earn a paycheck. The work we do internally provides for us in a way a paycheck cannot. Learning who we are and what we need enables us to make choices that better support our long term health and happiness. Successful businesses are built on strong foundations, and successful lives are no different. If our personal lives and our insides are a mess, we cannot hope to maintain a healthy professional life. There is a cost to ignoring self-care and introspection that will be paid out in all the areas of our lives if we ignore this vital work.
Noise, Drama and Chaos
Have you ever known someone who could not stop talking? It doesn't even seem to matter what they are saying, they will talk about anything to avoid the quiet that allows their thoughts room to speak. Inviting or creating trouble in our lives is a sneaky way to bypass our important inner work. If we make messes outside of ourselves, or focus on other people's messes, then there's no time to look within. (Focusing on other people and their needs to our own detriment can also be a symptom of codependency.)This is a much less productive version of Busyness that looks a lot like self-sabotage. Just when everything is peaceful, or you are right on the verge of greatness, BAM! You create or invite some obstacle in to block your way. To deflect responsibility, lovers of chaos and drama paint themselves as victims and offer up excuses. "I could've done that but this thing happened to me and there's nothing I could do about it." Sometimes things do happen that are out of our control, but if we respond well to the setback and keep moving, our progress will not be stalled.
Those who do not honestly wish to progress are ever on the lookout for moments or people who will upset the quiet. Peace and quiet are the enemy when one has something to avoid, for it is in peaceful, quiet spaces that our avoidances become all the more evident. So we talk and talk and talk and get too drunk and miss work and get fired and date inappropriate people and get in fights and invest in other people's problems, all in the quest to never look honestly at our own. This cycle will continue forever, unbroken by the advancement of age or passage of time, unless one becomes self-aware enough to see it. It requires that we give up the cheap attention we receive while in distress in favor of striving for the more meaningful, positive attention born of real achievement. It's much harder work, but we will have created something lasting with our efforts rather than just making a bunch of noise.
Romantic Relationships
There's nothing quite so intoxicating and enveloping as oxytocin surging through your veins as you fall in love. Perpetually being in or seeking out love and coupledom is a brilliant way to bypass learning several essential life skills, such as the abilities to be comfortably alone, to self-soothe and to self-approve. These are not easy skills to learn, though. The silence of aloneness is deafening to some, especially if you have something you're avoiding by being with someone else. Sometimes there is suffering in aloneness, and as vulnerable as it is to love another, there can be a distinct, sharp vulnerability to being alone. Being in partnership has much to teach, but aloneness is a space where you do work that cannot be done in the presence of a lover.If you are unhappy alone, you will remain unhappy in partnership. Your partner won't really change you. They will show you where you need to change and it's up to you to choose that for yourself. I, for one, would not want to be in a relationship for the purpose of filling my own or someone else's basic emotional needs. Of course we provide emotional support to one another in all kinds of relationships, but I want to know that my partner can stand on their own, as well. It puts tremendous stress on a relationship when one or both parties are relying on the other to provide them with their sense of self and stability. It is also unreliable, unsustainable, and ultimately, avoidant.
The inability to be happily, confidently alone can be crippling to ones freedom. It keeps people in relationships that are unhealthy and have long surpassed any usefulness. We must be able to do for ourselves so that our loved ones are not burdened with doing for us every day, lest we fall apart. The ability to function with emotional independence grants us unlimited movement and space. We can be anywhere and be fine because we have a solid base within. But first comes the honest answer to the Big Question: What am I avoiding by avoiding being alone?
Drugs and Drink
People can be unusually forthright about their vices, especially alcohol. Reliance on substances to moderate our emotional life has been normalized to the point where it's completely acceptable to be dependent, so long as its not perceived this way. Addiction is a sort of love that dare not speak its name. I have watched countless family and friend groups dance delicately around the truth of their loved one's addiction, laughing hollowly and nervously when they've had too much, suggesting with a forced joviality that maybe they should cut back. No one wants to talk openly about what's really there.There is great wisdom in the ancient Greek aphorism "Know Thyself." Honest self-knowledge and the exorcism of personal demons has the potential to pull addiction up from the roots. It is the inability to be honest with self and others that ushers us down the path of addiction. If we could boldly identify and examine that which haunts us, the need for the substance would diminish as the wound was healed and its power faded. With the right tools and support, there is a way out of anything.
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You will not feel the heat of the fire from 100 miles away. We fear the lick of the flames of our pain and anger, but if we continually bypass it and keep it at a distance, it will rage unchecked and burn us alive from the inside out. We are oftentimes not the only victims- our loved ones and our relationships suffer, as well.
We are meant to walk towards the light of these fires. Looking at them directly may sting, but it will illuminate all that we fear, all the ways in which we are wounded and limited. This process can be grueling and painful. We may be burned, but it will be a deliberate, controlled burning up and burning out of everything inside that hurts. And in the end we rise from this crucible as the phoenix- renewed, transformed and freer than ever before.
Freedom. This is the ultimate gift of bypassing the bypass, of getting to the heart of the matter. We can never be free if shackled by the fear of our own darkness. There is a way out, and it is almost never easy or around. The way around may cost us much more time and cause more pain. Our fear will burn us alive if we don't choose to bring it to light and burn it up ourselves.
With fear and courage in our hands, we walk straight into the fire.
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