Cross-Cultural Analysis of Spiritual Bypass: A Comparison Between Spain and Honduras

Abstract

Religion and spirituality (R/S) serve as coping mechanisms for circumstances that threaten people’s psychological well-being. However, using R/S inappropriately to deal with difficulties and problems in daily life may include the practice of Spiritual Bypass (SB). SB refers to avoiding addressing emotional problems and trauma, rather than healing and learning from them. On the other hand, coping strategies may be determined by the cultural context. This study aims to describe the presence of SB in individuals who may have experienced stressful situations and to understand the influence of culture on SB by comparing SB in two culturally different groups. The sample consists of a total of 435 people, 262 of Honduran nationality and 173 of Spanish nationality. Both groups are approximately equivalent in age and gender. The degree of SB, stressful events, perception of social support and spiritual well-being are examined, respectively, through the Spiritual Bypass Scale, and specific items and subscales from the Social Readjustment Rating Scale, Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, and the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy - Spiritual Wellbeing. The results showed a higher spiritual well-being and use of SB in the Honduran sample as compared to the Spanish sample, but similar social support and stressful events. Furthermore, some of the factors predicting SB were different between the two samples. While age and a greater number of R/S practices were important in both samples, for the Honduran sample the variables that best explained SB were being a Christian, having greater social support, fewer stressful events, and greater attendance at church or temple. For the Spanish sample, however, the variable that best explained SB was studying R/S texts. Therefore, SB must be understood within the culture in which it develops, since in different cultural contexts it appears to relate to differing factors. Thus, SB becomes a possible functional or dysfunctional coping strategy depending on the social context.

The Impact of Religion and Social Support on Self-Reported Happiness in Latin American Immigrants in Spain

“…It can be inferred from this result that using negative coping strategies risks people s perception of happiness and their own social support systems. In this study we did not study the effect of using religious practices to hide feelings (spiritual bypassing), but this particular finding might be related to it (Motiño et al 2021). Finally, it was found that positive religious coping mechanisms are greater in people whose religiosity is higher.…”

Religiosity, Emotions and Health: The Role of Trust/Mistrust in God in People Affected by Cancer

“…Even in the specific case of cancer, the religious/spiritual struggle was associated with greater symptom burden and poorer quality of life [ 90 ], as well as greater depression [ 91 ]. At this point, it is worth noting that there are other religious/spiritual constructs that, as in the case of spiritual struggles, have a negative impact on people’s psychological well-being, such as spiritual bypass [ 13 ] or guilt [ 92 ]. In any case, more research is needed on the serious consequences that mistrust in God may have on people’s health.…”

“…Specifically in Spain, interest in the field is not as broad, although there are researchers that have studied R/S in relation to various aspects of mental health [ 12 , 13 ], health behaviors [ 14 ] or physical health [ 15 , 16 ] in the Spanish context. The paucity of literature on these relationships in the context of this country may be surprising, given the deep-rooted Christian Catholic culture in Spain, whose values in many cases are closely related to health care.…”

Validation and test–retest reliability of the Spiritual Bypass Scale in Muslims and implications for psychological help-seeking attitudes and self-stigma.

“…The SBS-13 consists of two factors, Spiritualizing (i.e., overappraisals of difficulties as stemming from spiritual origins) and Psychological Avoidance (i.e., avoiding difficult emotions and experiences using spiritual means), that load onto a higher order factor of Spiritual Bypass. Studies have explored the factor structure (and/or translations) of the SBS-13 in Brazil (Picciotto et al, 2018), India (Toussaint et al, 2021), Spain, Honduras (Motiño et al, 2021), and a mixture of Korean Americans and Koreans living in Korea (Taylor et al, 2021). Results revealed that the psychometric properties of the SBS-13 are retained well across cultures, although an item (usually the reverse-coded Item 1) is often excluded due to a negative loading, errors in translation (Motiño et al, 2021; Picciotto et al, 2018) or a lack of fit (Taylor et al, 2021).…”