what's wrong with ego?

beyond the guru complex: why spiritual bypassing breaks what it promises to heal

"Transcend your ego." "Get out of your own way." "The ego is the enemy of enlightenment."

If you've spent any time in spiritual wellness culture, you've heard these memes. They're the elevator music of the spiritual marketplace - a seductive promise that one can take an express journey from the messy, wounded humanity of our shadowy basements to a penthouse of spiritual perfection. But what if, at deeper levels of psyche, this rush to transcendence is precisely what keeps us trapped in the patterns we're trying to escape? And what if, in offering this express elevator, important elements of psyche, and therefore elements of our own potentials, healing and otherwise, remain trapped in that place the rest of our ego doesn’t want to be?

In my practice, I frequently see this promise at play: people who've done years of meditation or spiritual practice, or have had profound consciousness experiences, yet infantile states and attachment issues remain. Perhaps they’ve found compensation in external circumstances, or through relationships, or an ideal. Sometimes they speak the language of non-attachment or oneness, while remaining deeply attached to their spiritual identity. They might preach love and light while collective shadow territories - power, money, sex, and issues around difference - remain unexplored. This is not to shame or to pronounce myself as better-than, healing journeys are indeed complex and individual, rather, I wanted to look at ego, spiritual bypassing, and cast some light on this shadowy area – an area which if tackled, can lead to profound healing.

Side note: I’ve been drawn to work with collective shadow for some time and have recently been running a workshop (in London) on the Archetype of Money in Therapy. The feedback has been great and I wanted to let you know I have one space still available for the July workshop. Hope to see you there!

the seduction of spiritual bypassing

The spiritually materialist view might be that “ego is bad” or egoic material ought be cast off, in favour of more transcendent or non-attached ways of being. I disagree. First, egoic obstacles need to be processed, not ignored. They point to a necessary difficulty: problematic psychological structures and ego states which have come about as a response to developmental trauma and adversity. Trying to transcend something that was never properly formed is like trying to build a house without a foundation. The deficiencies of the house though, are easy to spot. If the house comes across as pristine, there might be inflation going on: fuelled by spiritual energies but which are a defence to the underlying wound. The house might be laced with anger or envy: which point to all manner of unresolved complexes, the envious attack a signal that the attacker has incomplete work which they can’t stand to see demonstrated in another. A house on a faulty foundation often creates a personality that is fragile, which dismisses challenge, and demands absolute power and admiration to prop things up.

We are then in the territory of the guru complex. A powerful archetypal configuration which not only compensates for an unresolved wound but also configures a system around it which attracts others who will feed into the illusion, while sacrificing their own maturation. We need not look very far on the stage of global leaders to see this psychology playing out, nor the catastrophic consequences when it does.

John Welwood, a psychologist and Buddhist practitioner, first introduced "spiritual bypassing" in the 1980s to describe the tendency to use spiritual ideas, practices, and experiences to avoid or prematurely transcend unresolved psychological development. He observed this pattern particularly in Western spiritual communities where Eastern non-dual teachings were being adopted without adequate attention to the depths of psychological foundation.

Like many psychological concepts, this is a matter of levels. Particularly as when we do some psychological transformation, spiritual experience can become more accessible. This can provide a sense that we have reached a state of transcendence, but that transcendent buzz can mask deeper complexes still needing aid. To use an Internal Family Systems (IFS) perspective, some exiles are still unfound and stuck in trauma, while protector strategies may still be at play, which make a spiritually grounded ego unavailable. Tell-tale signs of a spiritually developed ego are relational availability, genuine open heartedness, a grounded and purposeful potency and the capacity to contain difficult emotional states. To again borrow from IFS, such a personality is mostly living in Self.

But there’s also a more dangerous side to bypassing. For some, traumatised psyches combined with archetypal energies can be psychologically destabilising. For practitioners this presents a particular challenge: how can we work safely with such cases?

the eggshell ego

When I think of fragmented trauma states, I often think of the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme: enter Humpty, an egg-man who sat on the wall and had a great fall. When he shattered, "all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again." This is how we might be inclined to approach fragmented ego states: we try to reassemble the pieces through force, through masculine effort, through spiritual practices that promise to fix what's broken. But the wisdom of the fairy tale lies in its recognition of failure. The king's men - representing the approaches of force and control - cannot repair what has been fundamentally broken. The shell cannot simply be glued back together. What's needed isn't reassembly but rebirth. And rebirth requires something the king's men don't possess: the capacity to hold, dissolve, and incubate, and allow transformation to emerge from within.

This leads me to Wilfred Bion’s work Learning from Experience. In it, he transmits and explains a metabolic capacity to hold difficult experience. He is describing a developmental environment where the caregiver can receive and transform the infants’ raw emotional projections (beta elements) into more digested material (alpha elements), building the infants own capacity to contain. In this way, the depth relationship of a well contained therapy, through attunement and mentalisation, provides the incubation necessary for first, the dissolving of the old, and in time, the formation of a new shell. A shell which can contain the often very difficult material which spiritual bypassing seeks to avoid.

beyond inflation and collapse

In patients who are spiritually bypassing and also hold unprocessed developmental trauma, we’re likely to see an oscillation between inflation/avoidance and collapse/hopelessness. The alternative to these is to stand ground in the murkiness of our unprocessed material, so that a deeper process of transformation may occur. This sounds obvious on paper but requires an adept practitioner to contain.

In alchemical terms, what's required is a genuine nigredo - the blackening, the dark night that precedes any authentic transformation. This isn't a brief workshop experience, a transcendent escape, or a passing dark mood. We're talking about months, sometimes years, of deep reckoning with our shadow material. And for it to fully benefit ego development, it must be experienced through the attachment system and therefore through relationship.

This dissolution is terrifying for the part of us that has built its identity around being "spiritual" or "evolved." It means facing the shame filled and vulnerable places in our psyche, it might mean acknowledging relational inadequacies, when we’ve been dishonest, manipulative or power-hungry. In essence, it’s allowing for us to walk the earth along with all of humanity: characteristics which often don’t fit with an inflated spiritual self-image. It means looking into the taboos that our culture often begs us not to examine. It means acknowledging that our deepest gifts and our deepest wounds are two sides of the same coin.

allowing for archetypal experience to be grounded

A patient who is spiritually bypassing can be a confronting thing for a practitioner to sit with. But this is often a key part of the relational dynamic, hence the path to healing. In my experience, those who are spiritual bypassing often split off the parts that are terrified, furious or desperately malnourished, to continue their spiritual bypass path. Countertransference in the consulting room then becomes a key diagnostic tool. It’s our job to take that beta element on board, to think about it and hold it in mind, and when the time is right, bring it back to the patient in a more digested (alpha) form.

In complex presentations, this can be quite challenging. Narratives and trauma states can in themselves be highly complex, and ego defences (IFS protectors) can try very hard to keep therapeutic closeness at bay. Traditionally there can be a call to work very slowly with such defences. In my experience, IFS techniques such as un-burdening can transform these defences quickly. But there’s a catch: protective strategies often re-emerge or can elude the awareness of the therapy – but tend to again reveal themselves when the time is right.

Dissociative states are another “watch out”. These can be difficult to spot and can sometimes be confused with higher (healing) states of consciousness. Learning to discern the two is part of the art of psychospiritual practice. The key is to learn to recognise whether the numinous sensation emerging is part of an attunement which serves the healing of the ego-Self axis, or if it is doing the opposite: escaping a painful crack in ego’s shell.

the case for ego

The wellness culture's rush to eliminate ego misses a fundamental psychological truth: As Jung explained, consciousness is "the function or activity which maintains the relation of psychic contents to the ego," and "in practice we can only become aware of psychic contents by means of the ego." To say we need an ego is one thing, but to say we need a strong, flexible ego is also true if we are to survive in the world, look after ourselves and our loved ones, and to get the nourishment and resources that we need. This is especially true for those undertaking demanding healing work.

From a spiritual development perspective, we need ego to be healthy and nourished precisely so we can transcend it consciously rather than defensively. As Edinger says, we can follow the individuation urge, which “promotes a state in which the ego is related to the Self without being identified with it."

I’m all too aware that identification with Self is a seductive space, and that this attitude is often a defensive reaction to childhood adversity. I’m also aware of the deeply nourishing transformation of taking spiritual energies into psychic depths, so parts who once felt unworthy, are finally able to sit at the table of our egoic identity. In this sense, the most profound spiritual development may not look like transcendence at all, rather a human being who can show up and be fully present to whatever life brings. Carrying wounds and gifts with equal dignity. This sort of presence requires not the elimination of ego, but its careful cultivation in service of something larger than ourselves.

References:

Wilfred R. Bion, Learning from Experience (London: Heinemann, 1962).

Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), 96.

C.G. Jung, cited in "Carl Jung On Becoming Conscious," CW 6, par. 700