What Therapists Miss When Clients Bring the Sacred

This is Part 2 of a series about spiritual and psychological bypassing. Read Part 1 here.

In a previous post, I discussed how spiritual bypassing describes the use of transcendence to avoid psychological and emotional pain. I suggested that psychological bypassing is the reverse: the use of clinical or therapeutic language to avoid the sacred and numinous.

The question I ended on was not whether to psychologically interpret this, but whether the interpretation serves the person in front of us or protects the clinician from material they were not trained to hold.

Source: Clark University, 1909 / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

Where the Reflex Comes From

Jung wrote about how Freud once urged him to make a dogma of his sexual theory, as an unshakeable bulwark against what Freud called the "black tide of mud of occultism." Two of the founding figures of modern psychotherapy split, in part, over exactly this issue. Jung treated the numinous as material to be acknowledged, understood, and integrated; Freud treated spiritual explanations as a threat to the scientific standing of the entire psychological enterprise and something that ought to be dismissed.

The second view eventually won the institutions, and most clinicians were trained within its assumptions without ever being told they were, in fact, assumptions. That is worth knowing, because a reflex you can trace is a reflex you can compassionately change and work with.

What It Costs When the Spiritual Is Discredited

Clients learn quickly which parts of their lives are welcome in a therapy room, and which parts produce a certain stillness in the clinician's face. Most people route around the second category, and they do it without complaint or feedback; the therapist simply never hears about that part of their life again, and usually never finds out that they lost it.

The second cost is to the psyche itself. When someone's spiritual life becomes active, it is often a signal that something is moving, even when the presentation is painful. Material of this kind tends to arrive at thresholds: a death, diagnosis, relationship ending, or vocation collapsing.

The transpersonal psychologist Dr. David Lukoff describes mystical experiences as often involving ecstatic mood, a sense of enhanced understanding or connection, heightened sensitivity, perceptual change, and visions carrying mythological themes of death, rebirth, journey, or cosmic conflict. He also distinguishes these from classical schizophrenic delusions, where a person may believe their brain has been removed or that a stranger is impersonating their spouse.

Pinning an experience down too early is therefore risky: The psychological explanation may simply be wrong, and the person then carries that wrong formulation as though it were the only truth about themselves. Of course, mystical and psychotic features can also overlap, which is why assessing for risk and stabilization remains imperative.

The Opposite Error Is Also Real

I want to be careful here, because the mirror error can also be dangerous. Missing a first psychotic episode, an emerging mania, or a delirium with a medical cause can cost someone years of their life. A clinician who romanticizes every unusual experience is not practising depth or transpersonal psychology; they are arguably practising negligence with better vocabulary.

None of this calls for less assessment, but it does call for assessment that does not begin from the assumption that a spiritual or mystical experience is inherently pathological. Some mystical experiences, even when overlapping with psychotic features, can still offer unexpected opportunities for positive and long-lasting growth when worked with skillfully.

Source: Vitaly Gariev/Unsplash

Working With What Arrives

Discernment is the entire task. Four things I would offer to therapists and clinicians reading this:

1. Ask what it was like before asking what it means. Interpretation is not the problem; premature interpretation is. Staying with the texture of an experience for longer than feels comfortable often reveals whether it wants to be interpreted at all. It also shows you what the experience is doing in this person's life right now.

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2. Notice when the psychological reduction is protecting you. There is a difference between a formulation offered because it serves the person and one reached for because the material is unfamiliar. If you find yourself interpreting quickly, that is a red flag.

3. Let the category remain open. A dream, synchronicity, or a moment of spiritual contact does not have to be pinned down as a defence, symptom, or even a revelation. Some material asks to be held rather than settled, sometimes across many sessions. Clinicians are trained toward closure, and this is one of the places where premature closure costs more than it returns.

4. Assess context rather than leaning on reflex. Lukoff's work on distinguishing mystical experience from psychosis offers usable markers: assess functioning before the episode, whether onset was acute, and whether the person's orientation to the experience is exploratory rather than purely terrified. Alongside these, the ordinary clinical questions still apply. Is the person sleeping? Is functioning deteriorating? Is there a substance involved, a medical cause, or a risk to their safety, etc.?

None of this requires a clinician to hold any metaphysical beliefs, but it does require that we stop treating our own explanatory frame as the only floor of reality rather than one useful description of it. Curiosity, open-mindedness, and a willingness to build one's psycho-spiritual and mythopoetic literacy go a long way when working with spiritual and religious clients.

Some of what people bring us is genuinely a symptom or a survival defence, and that is exactly what makes this so hard. Some of it is also a psyche doing what psyches have done for as long as there have been people, which is to speak in symbol, image, and altered states of consciousness at the thresholds of transformation. Holding both possibilities open at once is uncomfortable, but it is the job of anyone who wishes to provide ethical and efficacious care.

For anyone who has had their own mystical experience handed back to them as a symptom: The caution you learned in that room was intelligent, and it does not have to be permanent. There really are clinicians in whose offices all of it is welcome, including a propensity for spiritual or mystical experiences.