Detachment Without Numbing: 🌹Beyond Spiritual Bypassing 🕯️

August 23, 2025

Detachment is having a moment in popular culture.

Yet I notice how easily it gets twisted into something else — avoidance of pain, withdrawal from life, or spiritual bypassing. 

These are not detachment; they are ways of numbing. 

Real detachment asks something much deeper of us.

What Detachment Is- 

Detachment, in its truest form, is practice of presence. 

It means being able to face reality as it is — joys, pains, unknowns — without clinging to outcomes or controlling every detail. 

Detachment allows us to dream without being ruled by our dreams, to love without losing ourselves, and to endure hardship without collapsing under it.

Detachment says, “ I will allow myself to dream, work hard & try my very best to achieve my dreams, and release the outcome. Whatever the outcome, I will learn from it. I am here to grow.”

Do all that is within your power, and surrender the rest. 

What is so beautiful about this theory to me is that it honors that part of you that has a vision for your life. 

Your musings, your hopes, your dreams, they matter. 

What this theory posits is that you get to sit, reflect on your values, DREAM, notice what you want more of in your life, what you don’t want. And then you get to work at these goals. 

And then- as life does- sometimes things don’t go your way. That is okay too. Humans are wired to endure hardship. We literally have brain neurocircuits that help us process grief. Because grief is so incredibly human. 

When this inevitably happens- we have a choice. This is where our mindset is so important to notice and work on. We have to be very truthful to ourselves. 

Do we derail into trying to control and then move farther from our dreams?

Or- 

Do we say “This hurt. This is difficult. Confusing. Unknown. But, I can learn from it. I surrender to the outcome. I can grow from this. Every time I grieve, I get to learn more.”

Ultimately, detachment is about humility: remembering we are human, do we really think we can control everything? 

And what does it do for us to approach it that way? 

What Detachment Isn’t- 

When we confuse detachment with avoidance, we miss the point. 

Avoidance is about shutting down — not feeling, not facing, not risking. 

Withdrawal pulls us away from truly living. 

Spiritual bypassing tries to skip the messy human work by pretending it’s all “above” us. Pretending that nothing is within our control. It is the other extreme of pretending that everything is in our control.

Nuance and discernment need to be present here. 

I think that the most heartbreaking consequence of this avoidance and bypassing is that it squashes the part of us that dreams. The part that hopes. The part that yearns. Loves. 

It hardens us. And if we are hardened, can we really be confused when we no longer have close and intimate connections that grow rather than stagnate? When our lives stagnate rather than getting more fulfilling? When we stay burnt out because we have not found a new way to operate? When we perpetually stay stuck because we don't know who we are and thus can't achieve our goals with courage and conviction?

Without this openness, our hearts stiffen, closing to vulnerability and the lessons life offers.

I recently was listening to a talk by Dr. Gabor Mate, and he brought to my attention that vulnerability comes from the latin word that means ‘the capacity to be harmed.’ Of course it is terrifying to open ourselves to being hurt- and yet, without vulnerability, we simply will not have the ability to be close to ourselves or others. That is a big cost. What is life if we are not close to ourselves? Close to our loved ones? Close meaning authentic, meaning honest, meaning growing.

Detachment requires steadiness. Not the cold steadiness of apathy, but the grounded steadiness of staying present with what is true. True detachment isn’t about flipping the switch to “I don’t care.” That’s just another disguise for avoidance. Steadiness means being able to stay with the truth of your own heart without fleeing from it or dramatizing it. Sure, we can moments of this- we are human. But do we stay there? Is that our life philosophy if we are being honest? These type of questions require very honest answers.

Let’s dive into an example. 

In moments of rejection or disappointment, our nervous systems often leap into fight-or-flight. 

We either bolt away (“I never liked them anyway”), or we collapse into despair (“If they don’t want me, I must not be worth anything”). Neither response is true detachment. They’re just survival strategies dressed up as strength. And in online culture, social media, and reality TV, I notice these concepts be praised and be seen as the norm. This type of does not lead to lasting love and connection. In couples therapy, we learn that these types of thought patterns lead to divorce, breakups, and unfulfilling relationships in the long term. Can they work in the short time? Absolutely! But many years in? Decades in? Absolutely not.

Detachment as steadiness sounds different: “I did like them. It hurts that they don’t feel the same. And still, I can honor the love in me. It means I am alive, capable of feeling, capable of caring.” This way, we don’t need to devalue the other person, find all of their faults, and find out “why it wouldn’t have worked anyway.”

This stance allows for more humanity. There isn’t a strict right and wrong. There is space for vulnerability, nuance, love, and compassion.

Bypassing pretends the darkness doesn’t exist; detachment learns to walk by candlelight through it. 🕯️

Let’s take the example of a Rose. 🌹

Avoidance plucks off the petals so you don’t have to see them wilt. Attachment clutches the bloom so tightly that the thorns cut you.

Detachment is gentler: holding the rose with open hands, breathing in its fragrance, and when the petals fall, honoring that too. The love was real. The beauty was real. The falling away does not erase it. Can we take lessons from it? Can we honor the innate beauty in all living things? 🌹

This steadiness gives us freedom without numbness. We don’t have to run, and we don’t have to crumble. We simply remain — honest, soft, intact. 

Avoidance buries the lesson; detachment stirs it into the cauldron until wisdom rises. The greatest alchemy happens when we are still, feeling, & honest in pursuit of growth. Not "being right/the only one who tried" and stagnating.

Why Detachment Matters-

When practiced honestly, detachment gives us freedom — not the cold freedom of indifference, but the spacious freedom of perspective.

Compassion is disarming: when we see the humanity in others, it becomes easier to see the humanity in ourselves. When we are compassionate, we see the truth easier. Rather than seeing through defensive filtered glasses.

Detachment opens us to life as it unfolds, rather than constantly battling against it. 

Surrendering to this freedom is not easy. In our culture, it can even be seen as weak — because the world often values strict right and wrong, winning over peace, and fighting over presence. But taking yourself out of the cycle of violence is also possible. And what does it do for your heart to do that? And then tend to the wound of not being perceived/understood in the way you wanted? This gives you a different type of power.

True detachment asks us to be okay with being misunderstood, to release the need for validation, and to trust our own heart even when the world doesn’t reflect it back. Because your inner knowing matters more than "being right"/"other people getting it." In the end, you live with you. Your thoughts, the way you speak to yourself/see yourself if your inner world. What type of place do you want it to be? Based on what premises/philosophies?

It’s like holding a candle in the dark: you feel the flicker, the fragility, the risk of it going out — and yet you neither snuff it nor clutch it so tightly that it burns you. 🕯️

This doesn’t mean we stop caring; it means we care from a place of strength rather than grasping. 

We can hold our love, our disappointment, and our joy without being swept away, standing steady in our own light.

An Invitation to Detachment-

Detachment is not a withdrawal from life, but a deeper presence within it. Acceptance of it. Existential acceptance. Existential action.

What would it do for you to notice that, in the end, we don’t have control over the world or its circumstances — only over how we meet them? Who we are is based on how we meet our circumstances. The Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre says, "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."

That you can do your best, tend your own candle, and leave the rest to life’s unfolding? Learn the lessons you need to learn based on the outcome? Know that the need for everything to be easy & known is really just modernity's curse. Humans have never really had it easy- ancient wisdom calls us to make meaning and find new ways to operate rather than get stuck in "why me? why this life?" This about it, which is a more powerful & authentic mindset? "why me" or "what now"?🕯️

How might you grow if you treat every challenge as stars in your own night sky — each one lighting a path for your inner guidance, like tending a candle that never goes out? 🕯️

Thanks for reading, 

Tara

photo from Wix