What is Emotional Bypassing? The Shortcut to Feeling Less Alive
Are you regulating your nervous system, practising mindfulness, or just finding new ways to avoid feeling your emotions?
When you start learning practices to regulate your nervous system, relieve stress, release anger, and tap into beautiful states of meditative bliss, it can feel like you’ve unlocked superpowers.
“You’re telling me I can just, like, breathe differently and my anxiety will go away?”
It’s exciting, life-changing stuff.
But as I went deeper into practices to regulate my nervous system, calm my mind, and change my state, I noticed a worrying trend.
Yes, I had an impressive quiver of mind-altering tools and practices at my disposal:
- Breathwork for stress
- Meditation for anxiety
- Screaming for anger
- Shaking for tension
- NSDR for overwhelm
- Affirmations for self-doubt
But they’re all practices designed to override my physiology, alter my state, and bypass my emotions.
When the penny dropped, I could hardly believe it.
My newfound superpowers were also new ways to avoid feeling my feelings.
Emotional Bypassing: The Pitfall on the Path
Emotional bypassing is anything you do to avoid facing and feeling your emotions.
We all do this in so-called unhealthy ways, such as distracting ourselves with social media or Netflix, or numbing ourselves with alcohol or drugs.
However, we don’t often see so-called healthy practices, such as breathwork, meditation, or positive affirmations, as vehicles for avoiding emotions.
This is why emotional bypassing is a pitfall on the path of self-discovery — it’s a trap disguised as the way.
Let me give you a personal example.
Early in my meditation journey, I would meditate and breathe to ease feelings of anxiety.
I would sit down, slow my breathing, observe my thoughts, and before long I’d feel more calm and relaxed.
“That was a good meditation,” I would think.
But I never actually allowed myself to feel the emotion of anxiety.
I used meditation and breathing to take a shortcut around it.
My mind and body may have felt calmer, but the emotion remained unseen, unheard, and unfelt.
This is emotional bypassing.
I’m not discounting the many benefits of practices like meditation and breathwork, I’m simply saying they can also be used to bypass underlying emotions.
Like a couple of beers after a stressful day, meditation can be a short-term solution to a deeper problem.
Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with a cold beer to help you relax, or meditation to ease anxiety.
We can’t always be feeling and processing emotions. That would be boring and exhausting.
Emotional bypassing is a valid strategy for riding the rollercoaster of life, a survival instinct built into our DNA.
But — and this is a big but — you can’t bypass your emotions forever.
Eventually, you have to feel your feelings.
If you don’t, they’ll force their way into your life like a ragtag gang of rowdy gatecrashers.
The Cost of Emotional Bypassing
The famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung allegedly said,
“What you resist not only persists, but grows in size.”
Jung also said:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Applying Jung’s theories here, bypassing emotions doesn’t make them go away.
Rather, your emotions will grow in size and direct your life — often without you even realising it.
There is little concrete science on what actually happens to emotions when we refuse to feel them.
But there’s enough to know it’s not healthy.
Studies have found emotional suppression can make pain worse, increase risk for mental health disorders, cancers, and even contribute to earlier death.
Poor emotional regulation has also been linked to heart disease, digestive issues, higher inflammation and more.
According to the discipline of psychoneuroimmunology (a mouthful, I know), our emotions, nervous system, endocrine system, and immune system are all linked.
You suppress one, you suppress the others.
The idea supports the growing school of thought that says repressed emotions “live” in your body.
Beyond physical symptoms, emotional bypassing seeps into our relationships, work, and everyday life.
That’s because emotions are almost always intertwined with experience.
Say your partner did something that made you feel angry.
If you bypass or hide from that anger, you’re also avoiding the experience that triggered it.
By denying your emotion, you’re denying your experience.
This creates resentment, which has been called “the cancer of relationships”.
If you felt you were wronged, you need to be able to communicate that and share how you feel in order to heal and repair your relationship.
As you can see, the cost of emotional bypassing is significant.
Emotional bypassing isn’t just emotional avoidance, it’s life avoidance.
It’s particularly hard to see this when you’re using so-called awareness practices to bypass your emotions.
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Why’s it So Hard to Feel Emotions?
Emotions are hard to feel because they bring you face-to-face with who you are.
When you feel shame, for example, you’re not only feeling the flood of emotion in the moment, you’re reliving your entire history with shame.
The first time you felt ashamed as a 5-year-old child — and all of the times since — are suddenly coursing through your consciousness in the present moment.
It’s intense.
You may have noticed it’s hard to hold eye contact with others when you’re ashamed.
It’s no wonder it’s also hard to look within yourself and face your shame.
Sometimes you’re simply not in the right space to feel your emotions.
If you’re chronically stressed, depressed, or your nervous system is dysregulated, your emotions may feel like “too much”.
Attempting to process your emotions from a place of dysregulation may actually make things worse.
You may need to cultivate a sense of calm and safety in your body before your delving into big emotions.
There’s a high chance you’ve also been conditioned to believe some emotions aren’t OK.
If you were reprimanded for expressing anger or shamed for expressing sadness as a child, you may shut off access to those feelings as an adult.
The fear of judgement and rejection makes emotional bypassing seem like the lesser of two evils.
How to Feel Your Emotions
Not every emotion needs to be felt all the way through and the body is quite capable of processing some emotions subconsciously.
However, there are big emotions or recurring emotions that may warrant further exploration.
There are many roads into your emotions.
Every therapist, coach, or spiritual teacher will have their own techniques — from Internal Family Systems to Hakomi to conscious connected breathwork to psychedelic journeys.
I’m going to share a simple framework for feeling your emotions that doesn’t require a therapist or guide. It’s adapted from a few different frameworks, most notably Tara Brach’s RAIN practice.
I recommend approaching this as a meditation practice. Find a quiet place where you can be alone without distraction for 20-30 minutes.
Ideally, it should be a space where you feel safe to let go and express your emotions if necessary.
Cultivating Safety and Presence
If you sense you’re not in the right state of mind to face your big emotions, start with nervous system regulation practices.
I have a free online curriculum that will teach you the basics of nervous system regulation, but the general idea is to bring yourself into a state of balance.
Do you feel highly up-regulated (fight/flight) — anxious, stressed and agitated?
Or shutdown (freeze) — depressed, numb, dissociated and helpless?
It can be challenging and counterproductive to access your emotions from these states.
I recommend starting with regular practices that help to cultivate safety in your body.
Body-based awareness practices like simple breathwork exercises, yoga nidra or non-sleep deep rest, yin yoga, or qigong can all help with this.
Healthy sleep habits, good nutrition, reducing caffeine and alcohol, and having fun away from screens can all contribute to nervous system regulation.
Everyone’s situation is different, but everyone can benefit from making small changes.
If you’d like a more personalised approach to nervous system regulation, please get in touch about a 1:1 consultation and practice plan.
Recognise the Emotion
When you’re in the right frame of mind to feel your emotion, the first step is to recognise that you’re experiencing an emotion.
If you’ve spent years repressing or suppressing difficult emotions, this can be a profound step.
Simply say to yourself, “I’m feeling X.”
You may find this simple act of recognising, naming and acknowledging the emotion causes it to rise up to the surface of your awareness.
It may feel more intense, you may want to push it back down, which leads us to the next step.
Allow the Emotion
Let the emotion be whatever it needs to be.
Give yourself permission to feel it without any judgement.
This might be intense. It might be deeply cathartic. You may feel your shoulders drop, let out a sigh and think, “This isn’t so bad.”
The idea is to simply stop resisting.
You may feel like whispering, “It’s OK. I accept my [insert emotion]. My [insert emotion] is welcome here. I see you.”
Explore the Emotion
Once you feel you’re present with the emotion, you can start to explore it.
I find there are typically two planes on which to explore your emotions: Mind and body.
You may start with an intellectual exploration.
Where did this emotion come from? What triggered it? What story is attached to the emotion? Can you remember the first time you felt this emotion?
You can then explore the emotion in your body.
What are the physical sensations of the emotion? Where in the body is the emotion located? What happens when you place your awareness on what part of your body? Can you breathe into the area where the emotion is located? What if you place your hand there and feel into the physical experience of emotion?
As you’re doing this, continue to allow whatever is coming up without judgement.
You may find the emotion disappears or transmutes during this process. This has happened to me several times.
You may also find the emotional energy needs to be expressed in another way.
Express the Emotion
If the emotion still feels somewhat “stuck” in your body, you may need to express or release it.
Emotional expression can take many forms.
With anger, you may want to scream into a pillow, hammer your fists on the bed or hit a hard workout. With sadness or grief, you may want to cry. With shame or guilt, you may want to dance or write a love letter to yourself. With fear, you may want to shake.
If you are tuned in to your body, you should get a sense of how the emotion needs to be expressed.
It may be through a conversation, an apology, a hug, or baking a cake.
Emotion is a form of energy and it can be expressed or transmuted by any means.
Integrate the Emotion
With a clear mind and new perspective, you can integrate the emotional experience into your life.
By that I mean reflecting on where the emotion came from and how it influenced your behaviour.
What situations triggered the emotion?
What did you learn from the emotion?
How can you carry its teachings forward into new experiences?
Are you able to recognise, allow, explore and express this emotion more easily in future?
Having gone into your emotion and come out the other side, are you OK? Are you better for it?
Integration is a way of downloading the experience you’ve just been through so your operating system is up to date.
The Only Way Out is Through
We all use emotional bypassing as a coping mechanism to protect us from emotions we’re not ready to feel.
However, emotional bypassing is much less obvious when it takes the form of awareness practices like meditation, breathwork, or even talk therapy.
On one hand, emotional bypassing can be a useful coping mechanism. On the other hand, it can become a crutch.
People can go their whole lives without ever truly feeling or exploring their emotions, but this is no way to live.
The serious health risks and relationship problems associated with emotional suppression and repression are not to be taken lightly.
But one thing I think people overlook about emotions — both good and bad — is that they are part of the magic of being alive.
Anger, grief, sadness, shame, fear, joy, happiness, love, excitement — these are the flavours of living.
To bypass these feelings is to deny ourselves the full spectrum of human experience.
So use emotional bypassing as much as you need to, but don’t let yourself run and hide forever.
Have the courage to feel alive.
