Overcoming the Intellectual Bypass by Getting Out of Your Head

The phenomenon of “spiritual bypass,” refers to using the connection with spirit additively to avoid dealing with the deep loneliness of the inner child. In this column, I want to address another, much more common addiction, the “intellectual bypass.” In the case of the spiritual bypass, the false belief is that with sufficient experiences of blissful connection with God, all woundedness and loneliness will automatically disappear. In the case of the “intellectual bypass,” the false belief is that with sufficient understand of the principles of Inner Bonding or other psychological healing modalities and sufficient understanding of the actions of the wounded ego self, healing will automatically occur. In both cases, there is a corollary. “If it is not working, do it more.”

Like all addictions, both of these are self-reinforcing. Connecting with spirit is blissful and finally understanding “why” is a huge relief. The problem is that both are dead ends. There is nothing wrong with trying to understand and there is certainly nothing wrong with connecting with spirit. What I had to learn is that the issue was “why” I was doing it. I had no idea that I was doing it to drown out my little girl. It took me a very, very long time to get this and I am writing this column in the hope of speeding this process up for someone.

The first time I was ever told that I was “in my head” was at my first Inner Bonding intensive. I remember clearly trying to have control over not being in my head (since people seemed to disapprove of it). I consciously tried to move my voice down into my body and keep it there. People seemed to like that better, but looking back, I was completely lost. Re-reading my journal, written at the time of my second intensive, was painful. I thought that I was doing Inner Bonding, learning to connect with my Inner Child, but I was completely in my head, using the protection that I had learned so well.

I was told that I was “in my head” in each of the many Inner Bonding intensives I attended in succeeding years. I kept trying not to be, but how can you get out of your head FROM your head? After awhile, every time I said that I “understood”something, Margaret Paul, who was leading the intensive,would wince because she knew that it was understanding it from my head only. People tried to make helpful suggestions but I could not get it from my head.

I don’t know how the shift finally occurred, but by the last intensive, I knew that it had. Suddenly, when someone was in their head, I knew it because I could fell the pain of their lonely child, as others had mine for so long.

So let me try to explain this. Being in your head is like having your left brain make a huge amount of noise. You are busy thinking away, making sense, explaining, cogitating. But, just like with a spiritual bypass, this intellectual bypass drowns out the other sounds inside you. It drowns out and disconnects you from the quieter sounds of your right brain, your feeling self, your inner child. Even though I had become quite capable of taking good care of my little girl when I could hear her, when she was triggered, when her cries were louder than my thoughts, without turning down the volume of my thoughts, without really listening, I was completely unable to hear her when I abandoned her by being in my head. I was also completely unable to hear her loneliness when someone else was doing the same thing.

What I want you to know is that when you are busy trying to solve everything by thinking about it, you are automatically tuning out your child. You might feel sort of good but your inner child is in agony. You cannot figure out how to “not” do this. You have to experience it. But I hope that if you know that there is something inside you that you need to listen for, something that is not a thought, something that you cannot hear by figuring it out, that maybe you can turn down the volume enough that maybe, just maybe, you can get out of your head and reconnect with your lonely inner child.

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Managing Need

We are born with the fundamental need to be loved. This need to be loved is so strongly tied with our survival that when it is not met we are programmed to respond with extreme distress. It is an emergency and the alarm bells go off. When the need for love is not met, the need does not go away, instead it becomes a problem, because the alarm bells keep on ringing long after we have forgotten why they are sounding. We find many solutions to the problem. One major one is to decide that it is the need itself, rather than the fact that was not met that is the problem. We try to solve this problem, then, by shaming and blaming ourselves for having needs, because facing the fact that we have these needs and that we cannot get them met is unbearable. We decide that if we only did not need love, paradoxically, we would be okay. We decide that love does not really exist anyway, so there is no use needing it. Depending on the level of deprivation, some of us, literally are starving inside. We try to fill the starving child in different ways, including stuffing him or her with food to try to make the starving feeling stop.

Children who are desperately hungry for love are extremely vulnerable. They are easy targets for wounded people who can exploit them for their own purposes by offering what looks like affection. This is the scenario for many cases of sexual abuse. The consequences are devastating because the child involved senses that this all happened because he or she needed love, that if he or she had not needed love, nothing would have happened. That this all happened because the child tried to get that need filled. Again, having the need becomes the problem, only this time the message is that having the need for love CAUSES people to do terrible things to you. So the child blames him or herself and resolves that needing love is the most dangerous thing there is. This is the deepest possible betrayal of the essence of a child.

The healing comes when we recognize that needing love is not a problem at all, that it is a beautiful part of being human. The healing comes when we realize that the child inside us whose alarm bells are still going off is not bad or wrong or even too much, that he or she is completely entitled to be loved. The healing comes when we realize that there is and always was a source of love, infinite and freely available and in realizing that we finally fill the unmet need. It is never too late to turn off the alarm bells.

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