Huh? That was my first reaction when I heard this phrase. What the heck is positivity bypass and is it good or no? Right? The word positivity makes you believe this is a good thing, but bypass is very rarely good. It may have a good result, i.e. heart bypass; highway bypass. Both have good end results, saves your life and moves you around traffic; however the reason for both really isn’t good. To have bypass surgery means you have clogged arteries and a heart that isn’t working optimally. To bypass a portion of a highway usually means that you miss some part of the area that, who knows, could have been fun, filled with people, stuff to see and do. So what is positivity bypass?
This is when you decided that you aren’t going to feel the feelings that are haunting you, you are going to say “nope, I’m good, I am fine, no need to feel anything.” You bypass the feelings with so much positivity so you can convince yourself that you don’t need to feel those crummy feelings. But those feelings never really go away, you just hide them. You disallow yourself to feel the fullness of your emotions, to express yourself fully. Instead you act as if there is no pain, there is nothing to heal. That just makes the wound hurt more, yet we ignore it more.
We move from being able to truly heal and move on to bypassing the emotions, numbing our way through some other coping mechanism. Could be through food, alcohol, drugs, exercise, extreme sports, tv binging, staying busy. We may run ourselves ragged so as not to feel. We may dip into our addictions to not feel. We just don’t allow it to happen and think we are okay. We create the pollyanna facade and believe it. We believe it. It isn’t true, but we believe it. Just because I say I am not going to feel the feelings doesn’t mean they aren’t there. They are there, and they will come out in various ways. You may lose your shit over something that seems trivial. You may begin to isolate yourself and ignore signs that you are hurt. You may numb yourself to such a state that all of a sudden, you can’t really function normally.
You suppress your feelings. You decide they aren’t important enough to deal with. I did all of this at different points in my life. Back in college after a traumatic experience, I hid it all. I hid the feelings, I hid the pain. I hid the wound. I drank until I couldn’t stand. I did drugs to numb the pain. I had sex with anyone willing in order to numb the pain. All of the while, being Miss Positivity. “I’m good, I’m fine!” MY mantras. I’m find, I’m good. That got me to believe that I didn’t need to heal anything, I was fine.
Positivity bypass create 30 plus years of pain that I ignored a lot. I told myself so many stories about my bypass. When it finally came to a head, I hit rock bottom. I thought about suicide. I realized the pain was great. I decided not to kill myself and instead feel the pain. Deal with the issues. Unpack the feelings and face them all. Once and for all.
I no longer bypassed what I was feeling and instead shared a lot of it with my mom. Realizing that I needed her to understand where my pain came from, I also needed her to understand the lack of worthiness that went along with the wound. The fact that I saw myself as not worthy of love, of being loved, was a result of bypassing the pain so long ago. I never thought I was worthy, so feeling and healing were not worthy.
In order to be our truest selves and move through life continuing to heal, grow and expand, we need to feel and not bypass our emotions. We need to understand them, and move through them. Positivity bypass does not help us, ultimately. This bypass allows us to go about our day with very little discomfort however, discomfort is where the growth happens. And we are worthy of that growth.
Worthy of feeling our feelings, of understanding our feelings and moving through them with compassion and kindness. Positivity bypass doesn’t heal nor does it help us grow and expand. It just allows us to move, with very little choice of how.