Lightwashing

On Spiritual Bypassing, The Problem with Synchronicity, and the Necessity for Sovereignty

With the beginning of fall, we are finding ourselves here in a sort of orbit of themes centering around boundaries for those of us who are highly attuned, and this includes the necessity for exceptional clarity in our understanding of energetic phenomena - be it in our families of origin, with our romantic partners or friends, colleagues and supervisors at work, and even beyond that, witnessing emergent events on the global scale. 

When I started working with highly sensitive people, empaths and intuitives - the small but mighty segment of our population possessing an exceptionally high level of attunement -, it very quickly became clear to me that the issue is not the high attunement. High attunement is a gift, and under ideal circumstances, that is, perfect control over our environment, will be enjoyed as such: inherently blissful, ever-enriching, cherishing the above as well as the below, the small and the grand, the individual as well as the universal. 

The issue with being highly attuned, instead, is the low-attuned environment we have to exist in and also the kinds of relationships that highly attuned people tend to get into.

Quick Terminology Recap

When I began this work some years ago now, astonishingly little was known about what we now widely refer to as “toxic” relationships - with the complementary part of the population, a small yet mighty segment with exceptionally low attunement: narcissists, sociopaths (the raging void) and psychopaths (the calculating void), and what Corporate would call the Machiavellian types (or in Instagram Speak, energy vampires).

Empathy becomes the currency in these relationships: one who is exceptionally good at giving is magnetically drawn to one exceptionally good at receiving - and vice versa. We can also call it magnetism for the force field that these pairings tend to build up between them. Because the process of giving is inherently joyful, the highly attuned person initially feels nourished through the transmission of energy itself, and then further through relational processes known as love-bombing and idealization (which comes before devaluation). The highly attuned person feels useful, feels seen and appreciated, valued even- they feel loved. 

The toll such relationships take tends to show over a period of time, with the deterioration of the giver often first noticed by friends and other outsiders. 

The Problem With Synchronicity

Highly attuned people often have a spiritual awareness, yet our spiritual education is severely lacking and rarely transcends platitudes of toxic positivism and bypassing. Synchronicity is such a favorite concept. In the new-age treatment, deep and complex topics are coopted and distorted to fit today’s spiritual market, where ideas are consumed (quickly and shallowly) rather than absorbed (slowly and deeply). To this end, the spiritual market demands abbreviation and shallow dialogue (watch for hashtags and social media movements here). The nuance that is lost in the process of shallowing and abbreviating is the essence necessary for the understanding of the true concept. 

It’s an easy enough idea to swallow that synchronicity abounds and secretly governs the doings of the universe. Who doesn’t love those moments when we think of a person and then they text us within that same minute (or five)? Akin to the Godly idea, who knows, synchronicity may just reign supreme and move the pieces on the board outside our control and the smartest thing we could do is to pay attention and surrender to those movements. Okay. With one exception:

It is a less convenient, and certainly less pleasant idea that not everything in existence is necessarily benevolent. Especially highly attuned people brisk at the idea of malignancy being an actual thing. This is a further mechanism of the new-age treatment of lightwashing. Wouldn’t we all want to live in a reality where even the ugliest of human encounters can still serve as a lesson? It is certainly preferable to our hurting egos after experiencing humiliation, energetic extraction, and downright devastation of our lives after encountering a true narcissist, sociopath, or psychopath.

Here is where our empathy gets the better part of us: Extractive relationships work through fear, obligation, and guilt (spelling FOG for your convenience) to maintain their onesidedness, which will decenter and destabilize and ultimately drain the highly attuned person. If this person is also spiritually aware, they may attach to the idea of synchronicity, and through this lens. perceive humanly arranged events as destiny, or worse. The danger of being an unconscious empath insufficiently educated in energetic phenomena and dynamics is that they make easy prey for those who require energetic supply through other humans in their lives. And very sadly, the world of healers, and that includes therapists, is full of them. Additionally, in the words of Brant Cortright, one of my own teachers: “Nowhere will you find more narcissists than in the field of healing and spirituality.”