Spiritual bypassing among Indian women: toward a culturally situated assessment framework

Abstract

Spiritual bypassing — using spirituality to avoid unresolved psychological difficulty — has been studied almost entirely in Western samples. This conceptual paper asks whether the construct travels to Indian contexts and proposes a culturally situated alternative. The method is immanent critique: existing formulations are examined against their own stated aims to identify the assumptions they must make; those assumptions are tested against evidence from Indian cultural psychology, gender socialization research, and the psychology of religion. Literature is identified through targeted searches across three domains and synthesized thematically. Three assumptions are problematic in this context: that spiritual practice is freely chosen, that the practitioner has an individuated self, and that bypassing is intrapsychic. Three structural mechanisms are proposed instead: mythological archetypal conditioning as collective bypass scripts; religious language (karma, sahana, nishkama karma) as a spiritualized affect-regulation mandate; and seva as spiritually sanctioned self-erasure. These inform a three-dimensional assessment framework: Agency Gradient, Functional Directionality, and Archetypal Identification versus Individuation, each with indicators and clinical questions, and distinguished from constructs such as self-silencing, experiential avoidance, and religious coping. Although the factor structure of the Spiritual Bypass Scale (SBS-13) has replicated in an Indian sample, the gap addressed here is theoretical rather than empirical: no culturally grounded account specifies what bypassing consists of in this context. The framework is restricted to Hindu women in urban, middle-class settings shaped by the Vaishnava pativrata ideal, treats the mechanisms as patriarchal readings of religious traditions rather than as properties of those traditions, and states its claims as testable propositions.