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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Facing our Fundamental Lack of Control

The belief that if we face our total lack of control over others we will be devastated might need to be challenged by going to our guidance.  It was true once but is it still true?  What “hope” is for the ego/wounded self is the possibility that the same controlling behaviors will finally “work” to create the sense of safety and love that we all want.  Again, you might ask your guidance, “is this really true? Can this ever work?  Is it working now?” The bottom line for all of our attempts to control thru our different wounded ways is to avoid feeling our aloneness, avoid feeling on the inner level that no one cares, no one will ever love us.  These were realizations that we desperately needed to avoid.  At the same time, the truth is that now if we are not willing to take the job of caring about and loving ourselves, the inner reality that no one cares, or that everyone was too wounded to care, will continue but the reverse it true too.  So, when we stop trying to get what we need on the outside, we are faced with a child inside who is in terrible, terrible pain.  In my experience, being willing to let that child tell us how much pain he or she is in because no one cares (actually go to the crying and the physical/emotional pain) rather than do anything but acknowledge it can open the door to huge healing, but only if there is a part of you present that is willing to face what is happening and accept responsibility for it.  Otherwise, it is as if a real child is crying and you come into the room and immediately collapse on the floor and cry too instead of wanting to comfort and love that child.  This aloneness is happening now.  That is the important thing.  Yes, it happened when we were growing up, but it is the attempt to avoid feeling it, to avoid feeling how we are ignoring the lonely child inside, that actually creates it in the present.  This is fundamental and very deep work but the results are worth it.

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Avoiding Loneliness

 EVERYTHING is about not feeling the loneliness.  Beating yourself up was a way to distract from feeling lonely and feel like you had some control.  Loneliness, or aloneness, is the feeling that you are all alone in the world and no one cares.  Even telling yourself that others are not lonely is a distraction from the
loneliness.   Everything but feeling it is really a distraction.  It is  the bottom line feeling-that and that you were really helpless to do anything at all about this when you were a child.  Yes, you have to care.  If you do not, the loneliness and pain will continue and you will continue to keep yourself lonely, whether you block the pain from consciousness or not, it will continue.  So simple and so hard. You need to accepting that none of the strategies that you have tried is ever going to work.  It is the hope that they will work “this time” that diverts us from doing what your inner child needs you to do.

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