Navigating Mental Health Without Pseudoscience or Spiritual Bypassing | Dr. Alison Cook (Ep. 22)

 In today’s episode, I’m joined by Dr. Alison Cook, an Enneagram Three. We talk about why quick-fix solutions and spiritual bypassing can keep us from genuine healing, and how learning to honor difficult emotions can lead to greater emotional health. She also shares her practical framework of naming, framing, and braving our emotions so we can face hard situations with greater wisdom and courage.

Dr. Alison is a therapist and host of the top-ranked The Best of You podcast. She’s the bestselling author of I Shouldn’t Feel This Way and The Best of You, and co-author of Boundaries for Your Soul, which brings the popular Internal Family Systems model of therapy into a Christian framework. Widely recognized for her work at the intersection of faith and psychology, Dr. Alison helps people heal from past wounds, develop a strong sense of self, and build healthier relationships.

You can learn more about Dr. Alison Cook and get access to all her resources at https://www.dralisoncook.com/ 

0:00 Audio Intro

0:20 Welcome

2:11 Alison Cook's Enneagram Journey

6:31 The Enneagram & Internal Family Systems

9:01 The Problem with Quick Fixes

12:55 Name, Frame & Brave Your Emotions

22:02 What Is Spiritual Bypassing?

26:51 Honoring Difficult Emotions

28:56 Faith, Fear & Avoiding Pain

33:33 When Love Can't Fix Someone

37:35 Healing Takes Time

40:19 Resources from Alison Cook

43:01 Final Thoughts

Join the Mental Health ‘27 Summit Waitlist

Be the first to know when registration opens: typeish.com/summit/waitlist

Get FREE Enneagram Self-Typing Guide

Download here: https://www.typeish.com/free 

Read The Transcript

Tyler Zach (00:20)

Welcome to Typeish, an Enneagram podcast where we explore how your personality shows up in all of life. I'm your host, Tyler Zach, and in each episode I connect you with leading experts on how your personality impacts your relationships, mental health, spirituality, and everything in between. Last week we kicked off a brand new miniseries on the topic of mental health — episodes 21 through 29. In today's episode, I'm joined by Dr. Alison Cook, an Enneagram 3. We talk about why quick-fix solutions and spiritual bypassing can keep us from genuine healing, and how learning to honor difficult emotions can lead to greater emotional health. She also shares her practical framework for naming, framing, and braving our emotions so we can face hard situations with greater wisdom and courage. Dr. Alison is a therapist and host of The Best of You Podcast. She's the bestselling author of I Shouldn't Feel This Way and The Best of You, and co-author of Boundaries for Your Soul, which brings the Internal Family Systems model of therapy into a Christian framework. You can learn more about Dr. Alison and access all her resources at drallisoncook.com. Now, without further ado, let's jump in.

Tyler Zach (02:11)

Since this is a summit at the intersection of Enneagram and mental health — when did you first learn about the Enneagram, and as a psychologist, how did it compare to other tools you use in your work?

Dr. Alison Cook (02:29)

I first learned about the Enneagram maybe fifteen years ago. I was part of a spiritual formation group run by Leadership Transformations Inc. — LTI, based in New England, led by Steve Macchia. They used the Enneagram as part of a two-year spiritual formation certificate I was doing, with quarterly retreats. So it was woven into that whole process.

Initially, people had kind of typed me as a three — and I didn't like it. I think it was mostly based on external things: I had a PhD, I'd accomplished quite a bit. So I resisted it. When I took the test, I came out as a two — and I was very proud of that. As I'm sure you can already tell where this is going, as an Enneagram expert. I perceived twos as helpful and service-oriented, and that felt much more comfortable to me than three.

A few years later, I was part of a small group of women who talked a lot about the Enneagram as a way of understanding each other and ourselves. And slowly — as I was doing some deeper internal and spiritual work, thinking through the roots of things in my life — it became clearer. There was another woman in the group who was an Enneagram three, and a lot of what she described resonated with me. And a lot of what I was reading about twos felt like: those aren't really my core motivations. Through that group and just informally talking and thinking about internal drivers, what became clear to me was this: I don't present as the typical three who needs to be the center of attention or aggrandizes accomplishments. If anything, I minimized — I would shrink. But the group would say to me: isn't that also a form of managing your presentation? Especially as a woman, aren't you morphing, trying to make sure people don't see you in a certain way? Isn't that still image management? And that really, really landed. Through the context of that small group, it became clear. It's been a genuinely helpful framework both for my own life and for the work I do with clients.

Tyler Zach (05:49)

I'm more of an introverted three myself. When I took the test I came out tied between three and five, because I so wanted to be the intellectual, the competent five. I had to face the music about the image consciousness and the mask-wearing. I really resonate with that journey.

Dr. Alison Cook (06:31)

One thing that's been really helpful for me — and I don't want to take us too far off course, but it connects — is integrating the Enneagram with my work in Internal Family Systems. IFS operates on the idea that we're made up of different parts of ourselves. When I think of my Enneagram number as one part — not the whole of me — it helps me understand that I actually have a relationship to all the different numbers. I have a strong seven part, a strong five part, a strong two part. The three part is the closest to home. It's the one that sneaks in and is most primary. But that framing has been helpful when I feel the pull not to be pinned down as just one thing. We are complex. And yet those drivers behind the three orientation — that's usually where the invitation to growth lives for me.

Tyler Zach (07:23)

That's a beautiful way of putting it. I love finding your home base precisely because it puts the work in front of you. One pastor called it "sniper sanctification" — it puts the crosshairs right on the specific things that need attention. As a professional who has been helping people heal for decades, you've seen how quick-fix solutions and spiritual bypassing can become real barriers to growth. I want to talk about both — and even if you're not a person of faith, a lot of people in therapeutic settings come from spiritual communities, so spiritual bypassing needs to be on everyone's radar. Let's start with pseudo-solutions. What are some quick-fix messages the world is sending us — and why aren't they very helpful?

Dr. Alison Cook (09:01)

I call them pseudo-solutions — and social media really magnifies them through meme culture and one-line zingers that sound good in the moment but are nearly impossible to apply to complicated situations. Life is complicated. We're complicated. Our challenges are complicated.

Some examples: in positivity culture, you see a lot of "just think positively." That might be a valid path in certain situations — but in others, you actually need to sit with your sadness or your anger or the hard thing that happened. Flipping too quickly to the positive can bypass what needs to be processed. You hear a lot of quick-fix pseudo-solutions around boundaries too — "just leave that relationship" — when sometimes the right thing to do is sit with the hard stuff, get curious, figure out what the relationship actually needs. Things are rarely as binary as pseudo-solutions suggest.

You also hear this pull in both directions: on one side, "only trust yourself, listen to your inner wisdom." And there are real challenges where I journal and pray and reflect and still don't have clarity — and I genuinely need the wisdom of others. But on the flip side, in some faith-based circles, it's "never trust yourself, always look outside yourself for answers." That's not healthy either. Real emotional intelligence means learning to honor both your internal wisdom and the input of others — without blindly deferring to either. That's a more robust framework than most quick-fix solutions offer.

Tyler Zach (12:07)

The Enneagram maps onto this nicely — sevens, for example, default to "just think positively," and when that's unhealthy it becomes toxic positivity. And the invitation for a two might be to fortify that internal sense of self rather than always crowdsourcing the opinion. Whereas an eight might need to hear the wisdom in the room more.

Dr. Alison Cook (12:27)

Exactly — each pseudo-solution could map onto a different type. There's always a different invitation depending on who we're talking to.

Tyler Zach (12:55)

In your new book I Shouldn't Feel This Way, you lay out a three-step framework — plus dozens of tools — for moving from pseudo-solutions to a better path. Can you walk us through it?

Dr. Alison Cook (13:13)

The book is really about conflicting emotions — that tangled-up bundle we find ourselves carrying. A lot of us were conditioned that emotions are just bad — push them away, get rid of them. Most of us now understand that emotions are cues worth getting curious about. But then the question becomes: what do we actually do with them? Because often there's more than one emotion happening at once. I call them "truth pieces." I'm frustrated, but I feel guilty for being frustrated, and I think I shouldn't be frustrated — those are all different pieces of the same tangled ball.

So I lay out three practices in the book — and I call them practices, not steps, because they're ongoing. We're constantly in our day noticing: I just had a big reaction. What do I do?

The first is name it. I think of Dan Siegel's idea: name it to tame it. Just naming the experience — I'm activated, I'm confused, I wish I didn't feel this way — is in itself an honoring of a process happening inside your body. Naming doesn't mean you've gotten to the root of what you're feeling. It can take time to get there. But it stops the self-criticism. I'm just angry. And that's what's happening. We often want to jump from there straight to: what do I do about it? And this is where pseudo-solutions creep in. But almost always there's a step in between the naming and the doing.

That step is framing. Once we've named that something's going on, we frame it — we go a little deeper. Why am I angry? What happened? What's the situation and context? Did someone hurt me? Or did something trip over a wound inside me I haven't faced? The brave path is going to look different depending on the answer. So framing is really: give yourself a pause. I call it a "place in between" — between the emotional activation and the action. I provide a lot of self-inquiry tools in the book for how to do that work before moving to the third practice.

The third practice is braving. Now I'm going to do something. And braving usually has three options, depending on how the framing went. One is to fight for change — have a hard conversation, set a different boundary, make a courageous move. The second is to leave — sometimes after doing the framing work, you realize the situation is untenable and you need to go. But you've done the work. It's not a quick fix; you've earned that decision. And the third — the least popular, but I think the most important — is to suffer it wisely. This comes up a lot with people caring for aging parents, or co-parenting in a situation that won't change. You can't leave and the situation isn't going to change. Suffering it wisely isn't being a martyr or a doormat. It's saying: here are the things I can't change, so how do I honor the realities of this relationship while minimizing my exposure to harm and continuing to care for myself? That framing allows you to take a much more robust approach to actually braving a path through a complicated situation.

Tyler Zach (18:49)

As a type three I love the clarity — here's the path toward healing and wholeness, here are the obstacles. And I appreciate how you help people who aren't as practiced at conflict or confrontation with specific tools so they're not going in blind or becoming a doormat in the process.

Dr. Alison Cook (19:17)

That's where the three in me as a therapist comes out — I understand the client who, at the end of a session, says: okay, now what do I actually do? I've got to go have this conversation. I've got to be in this relationship. That's valid. We do need the practical next step. How do I have a hard conversation? What does that actually look like? Because a lot of us were never taught that skill. And that's partly why we default to pseudo-solutions or spiritual bypassing — we just don't know how to move forward, and it's scary and it takes vulnerability. But when we do that internal work well, when we show up differently in the situation — we're so much more effective, for our own good and for everyone around us.

Tyler Zach (20:33)

And knowing the other person's Enneagram type can help you frame the conversation itself — the language you use, how you communicate — in a way that actually resonates with their motivations and needs.

Dr. Alison Cook (21:21)

Absolutely. As a clinician, when I have a sense of a client's Enneagram type, I can use language that resonates more with their specific motivations and needs. That's been really valuable — and it's true for all of us going into hard conversations.

Tyler Zach (22:02)

So let's move into spiritual bypassing. What is it, and why is it so dangerous?

Dr. Alison Cook (22:30)

The term actually originated outside of Christian settings — the psychologist who coined it may have practiced as a Buddhist. What he noticed was that his clients would use spiritual platitudes to get around dealing honestly with painful situations. I read about it and started applying it within Christian settings — and every time I posted about it on Instagram, those posts would catch fire. It clearly resonated with people.

What I started noticing was the ways that folks would use spiritual clichés to bypass pain, wounds, or the honest work of processing emotions like anger, grief, loneliness, resentment, fear, or anxiety. So if you share in a small group, "I'm so angry," someone might say: "You just need to pray anger away." If you say, "I've been feeling really lonely," someone responds: "God would never want you to feel lonely — he's always with you." If you've heard those things, you know how much they minimize and invalidate the experience you're having — under the guise of "you're not being spiritual enough." It's really damaging.

Other big ones: "God wouldn't give you more than you can handle" — I work with people going through such extraordinarily hard things, and saying that to them is genuinely painful. "Just pray it away." "Let go and let God." "You just need to forgive." "Just have faith." There may be a grain of truth in some of these — and that's what makes them so hard to pushback on. But none of them account for the whole picture, or for the whole process we need to go through emotionally — honoring what we feel while also trying to make sense of what happened and figure out how to care for ourselves through it.

Tyler Zach (25:42)

"God wouldn't give you more than you can handle" is especially hard when it comes from someone who hasn't been through much themselves and just drops it on you. And I think about funerals — the pressure toward positivity, the clapping and celebrating that someone is in a better place — and how that can short-circuit the very human need to mourn. When I've presided at funerals, I've felt the pull to counterbalance that with some space to grieve, to sit with the loss. Maybe that was my four wing showing up — but I think we genuinely need that.

Dr. Alison Cook (26:51)

It really undercuts a very necessary human process — one we see honored in the life of Jesus himself. We see him honor deep human emotions: anguish, grief, anger, heartache. There's something deeply human about the need to do that. When we cut that off in the name of platitudes, I've learned to ask myself: what is it about that person that they can't go there? Often they haven't been able to go there themselves, so they can't tolerate someone else experiencing the fullness of these emotions.

And here's what's paradoxical: the more fully you experience emotions like grief — especially in community with someone who loves you and sees you — the more deeply intimate you become with other people. The more you honor anger, the more it leads you toward healthy boundaries, healthy leadership, healthy ways of showing up with others. When you silence anger, it comes out passively and sideways. When you honor it, it gives you wisdom. These emotions aren't trying to take you out. The more you work with them, the more you develop a radar for the relationships and spaces where there's room for that — and the ones where there isn't.

Tyler Zach (28:56)

As a three who wants to be positive and move forward, pain and suffering aren't aerodynamic — they slow you down. So I think intuitively, and maybe unconsciously, I've always tried to go around them. And I've convinced myself it was faith. That's the subtle deception — I told myself I had more faith because I wasn't worrying. I wish I'd understood this eighteen years ago when I married my wife. When we went through infertility, I was probably the biggest spiritual bypasser around. I kept telling her, "Don't worry, just trust God, he's going to come through for us." She's a six — she was already thinking worst-case scenario, wondering if this was ever going to happen for us. We were at complete opposite ends of the spectrum. And I just kept spiritualizing it. Thankfully, some guys in my community eventually said: you haven't done what David did — you haven't wrestled, you haven't poured out your heart, you haven't been brutally honest with God. And that broke something open in me. I realized weak faith is what tries to go around the pain. Real faith is what gives you the courage to walk into it.

Dr. Alison Cook (31:44)

I deeply respect that, Tyler. And I'm the same way — that propensity is in me too. In the book I use the term "inner gaslighting" — there's a fine line between spiritual bypassing and gaslighting yourself. Telling yourself: you don't really feel that way, you're stronger than that, you're tougher than that. As opposed to learning to say: actually, I do feel this.

For me it caught up in a series of panic attacks, about twenty years ago. I hadn't been honoring the really hard things in my life. I was shove-it-down, keep-going — and one of the most productive periods of my life was during my doctoral program. The more pain I was shutting down, the more productive I was — until the anxiety just started spilling out. I think of Anna Lembke's work in Dopamine Nation, where she talks about the importance of tending to pain before it becomes much bigger pain. That really stuck with me. The little anxieties, the little pains — if we tend to them, they don't build into something catastrophic. That's actually the path to emotional freedom. And it's powerful work. I have to really work at it, because like you, I'm wired to compartmentalize and move forward. But that doesn't work over the long haul — in relationships or in our own souls.

Tyler Zach (33:33)

You mentioned "your love can cure them" as another form of spiritual bypassing. Is that the idea that if I just give someone enough care or encouragement, it will fix their pain?

Dr. Alison Cook (33:55)

That one comes a little more from the Enneagram two space, I think. And I have some of that with my two wing. I remember having mutual friends who were really engaged in toxic behaviors, and thinking: I'll just love them into change. Versus learning to say: actually, I need to make it known that I can't tolerate that behavior. There's a way of spiritualizing service, spiritualizing generosity, spiritualizing "being the bigger person," that isn't always the right path. Sometimes the path is: I'm not going to let you treat me this way. And we see that in the life of Jesus too.

Tyler Zach (34:44)

What would the healthier alternative sound like — what do we say instead?

Dr. Alison Cook (34:50)

I like to show the contrary. Instead of "your love can cure them" — especially in a situation where someone has been giving and giving and received nothing in return and is now bitter and angry — the alternative is simply validating the emotion: I get that you're angry. Your anger makes sense. You're not telling them what to do. You're just saying: it makes sense that you're angry in this situation. This is hard.

We're often afraid to do that because we think we're giving the person a license to just go be mean. But what actually happens is that the part of them carrying that emotion feels validated — and the name-it-to-tame-it effect kicks in. The limbic system calms. The prefrontal cortex comes back online. And now they have a better perspective on what they actually need to do next.

Same thing instead of "God wouldn't give you more than you can handle" — just: what you're going through is hard. I wish you didn't have to go through it. I hate this for you. That simple statement of empathy, of honoring the emotion, tends to de-escalate the firing. The person feels seen. And that's often what we most need.

A couple of others: instead of "faith removes fear" or "starve your fear" — just say: it is scary. You're right. I'm with you. That has helped me so much personally. Learning not to talk myself out of my fears or invalidate them, but simply to say: yeah, that is scary. And just taking that deep breath — it soothes the nervous system and brings us back to: okay, what do I need to help me in the fear? That honoring of the genuine emotional experience is the first step. Then we frame and brave our way through. But step one is just: I see that. I get it. That makes sense. As humans, we need that from each other so much.

Tyler Zach (37:35)

Something becoming clear to me is that healing takes time. Grief takes time. When you're talking about trauma, spiritual abuse, infertility — it takes a lot of conversations over a long time. As a three who likes efficiency, that's a hard reality. But knowing my wife is grieving, being present with her pain, realizing we're going to have a lot of these conversations — why would I try to rush it or drop a spiritual bypass to fix it? That's not going to help anyone.

Dr. Alison Cook (38:28)

What you're saying reminds me of Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt's work with the Imago Dialogue — structuring these conversations with intentionality, honoring different bandwidths and personalities. There might be a day where you need to say: I can't show up the way I want to today, but can we set aside time for this? It doesn't have to be every conversation. What matters is knowing these are ongoing rhythms you'll have together as a couple, not a one-and-done problem to solve.

Tyler Zach (39:40)

And communicating bandwidth clearly — especially for fives who have less energy for sustained emotional conversation — just saying "I don't have the bandwidth for this right now, but I'm not going anywhere" is hugely helpful.

Dr. Alison Cook (40:01)

I love you, but I can't do this right now — can we talk later? I'm with you. And there are different ways of communicating to our loved ones that honor both the process and our individual capacities.

Tyler Zach (40:19)

For those watching who want to go deeper — what resources do you have for us?

Dr. Alison Cook (40:33)

You'll see the Enneagram woven into my books even where I don't name it explicitly. In Boundaries for Your Soul — the Christian adaptation of the IFS model — my co-author and I mapped the different types of internal parts onto the Enneagram, because what we feel inside often tracks with our Enneagram number. IFS is a really complementary approach to the Enneagram and I think the two work beautifully together. The Best of You goes deeper into what we talked about today — spiritual bypassing, reconnecting to the self. And I Shouldn't Feel This Way is the practical framework: naming, framing, and braving, with tools you can use on your own, with a loved one, or with a therapist.

I also have The Best of You Podcast, which drops every Thursday and features mental health experts on topics like what we've been discussing. You can find everything at drallisoncook.com.

Tyler Zach (41:41)

This is one of those conversations that doesn't need to go through all nine types — it applies to everyone. If you know your Enneagram type, you can intuitively take what Alison shared and apply it to yourself. And for Enneagram coaches and therapists, this is directly usable material. Thank you so much, Dr. Alison — this is a topic we couldn't afford to miss.

Dr. Alison Cook (42:33)

Thank you for what you're doing. I think it's a great service to people, and I appreciate the opportunity.