Oliver Burkemann on the "near enemy" :
One of the most insightful bits of Buddhist psychology has yet to reach a widespread modern audience: the notion of the "near enemy". According to this way of thinking, for every desirable habit or state of mind, there's a "far enemy", which is its obvious antithesis. Thus hatred, it won't surprise you to learn, is the far enemy of love. Near enemies, on the other hand, are much sneakier and harder to spot, because they so closely resemble the thing they're the enemy of. Needy, possessive co-dependency can look and feel a lot like love, when really it corrodes it.
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It's ironic that you're as likely to enounter near enemies in "spiritual" circles – including Buddhist ones – as anywhere else. Meditation can be a path to calm and clarity. But hang around meditators for a while and you're sure to run into a few who seem to be using it to smother issues they should probably see a therapist about; on closer inspection, what they exude isn't calm so much as an eerie sort of blankness. The American psychologist John Welwood called this "spiritual bypassing": the tendency "to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues". Not even the most apparently enlightened, it seems, are immune to confusing a fake for the real thing. All anyone can do is to be constantly aware of the risk.