Podblog: Dealing with a Spirit of Oppression
Is it just ordinary daily stress? Or could it be an spirit of oppression?
This post is all about oppressive spirits and how to identify whether you’re dealing with one. Any kind of activity from an evil spirit is going to be oppressive, but the particular kind of oppression we’re talking about is the type caused by spirits that bring fear, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and similar kinds of mental and emotional heaviness.
I’ll caveat that I am not a counselor. I’m not any kind of professional mental health practitioner. This is just a non-professional conversation about how spiritual things affect our mental and emotional state, because they certainly do. First, let’s talk about what spiritual oppression is not.
What Spiritual Oppression is Not
When we say oppression, we’re not talking about ordinary daily stressors. We can distinguish ordinary stress in a couple of ways. For one, it’s usually tied to a specific time frame and/or event. For example, you have a test coming up or a presentation or a speech you have to give, or some kind of activity you have to do that causes some stress.
Maybe you’re planning an event and there’s that low level of stress that has to do with taking care of all of those details. But once the event is passed, things go back to normal. Even if you didn’t do as well on the test as you wanted, or even if everything didn’t go quite perfectly, the tension drops off and we start processing everything that happened.
Of course, daily stress can be continuous if you have something that you are doing all the time that has a level of stress associated with it—like if you care for a lot of small children, that will have a certain level of stress all the time. Being very busy all the time can have the same effect, but you can still connect it to something that is real and tangible and currently happening. One major difference when dealing with an oppressive spirit is that the source of the stress or the anxiety is hypothetical. It’s an imagined future event that may not ever happen, and in all probability won’t happen. Yet it’s a constant presence on the mind.
It may link to a past event. PTSD is often described that way, where it’s a past event that is constantly in someone’s mind. But fear is always about the future. In this case, it’s a past traumatic event that is causing fear about the future, even though that fear may be undefined. It may just be an overall feeling of dread that isn’t tied to anything you can put your finger on. But you can feel the physical effects of that anxiety in your body. There’s no doubt in my mind that people who deal with panic attacks are dealing with an oppressive spirit, because evil spirits will work that way. They’re not active every second of every day. They come and they attack and they draw back, and it can happen quickly without warning. What I also believe is true is that the past traumatic event was the thing that allowed an evil spirit to attach itself to that person in the first place. Not that it was that person’s fault, but through observation and reading a lot of different deliverance stories, there’s something about the trauma that makes an opening.
Other Signs of Oppression
There’s a few other indicators that an oppressive spirit may be present. One is if you’re going through life and everything’s fine and normal, and then you wake up one morning and there is this anxiety on your mind that wasn’t there the night before. You went to bed, you weren’t even thinking about this thing, and then you wake up and suddenly you are super stressed about it. That is a huge giveaway, because evil spirits will be active when our minds are inactive, which means while we’re sleeping at night. And so you wake up, and suddenly this worry is there in front of you—again, with no tangible reason. You didn’t get a message on your phone, nobody called you, nothing happened. It’s just suddenly you’re thinking about this thing and you’re worried about it. That’s a huge sign that there’s something spiritual going on.
Sources of Oppression
Trauma isn’t the only way that spiritual oppression can happen. Spirits get attached to people in all kinds of ways. Sometimes it’s connected to something the person did that maybe caused them to feel shame or guilt—they compromised their moral code or their values. And maybe they shrug it off and keep going through life, and it seems like nothing in particular happens until one day they wake up and there’s this oppression on them.Sometimes a spirit will attach itself to a person and lie low for a while—for weeks, months, even years before it starts to do something active.
The Possession-Oppression Debate
Let’s pause here and just address something for the sake of clarity. I say a spirit “gets attached” to a person because I find that the most useful way to describe what’s happening. There are some Christians who believe that if you are born again, you can’t be possessed by an evil spirit because the Holy Spirit is there, which is true. And they’ll usually also say that you can be oppressed. I don’t have a problem with that description per se, but I don’t see much point in differentiating between possession and oppression—they’re both really bad experiences. I do believe that a Christian cannot have their spirit possessed by an evil spirit, but their spirit is the only part of them that’s been born again. Their body and mind, which is the soul, are not born again in the same way. The body has to be retrained, and the mind has to be renewed.
I believe it’s possible that an evil spirit can be in the mind or body of even a born-again person. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter—if there’s an evil spirit that is oppressing someone, regardless of the degree of the oppression, it should be gotten rid of. I think the only danger here is that Christians may assume, “Well, I can’t be possessed because I’m born again, therefore I don’t have to worry about evil spirits”—like they’re immune.
We’re definitely not immune to evil spirits. But if you think you are immune to something, you won’t guard against it, and that’s my only concern with the whole argument.
Oppressed to the Point of Action
To go back to our main topic, there’s one more characteristic that is common with oppressive spirits. When someone is being affected by such a spirit, it will usually compel them to take fear-based actions. This is especially true when the action is repetitive.
I think the strategy behind this has to do with that verse that says, “Faith without works is dead.” Well, in the opposite direction, fear without works is dead, in a sense. At least, it does seem true that if you don’t act on a fear, it is harder for that fear to remain a significant force in your life.
But on the flip side, if you act on the compelling pressure of an oppressive spirit, it’s like it gives them more fuel to keep bringing that oppression and those same fearful thoughts—like it strengthens their hold on a person. The kind of action I’m talking about is usually something small, but something the person wouldn’t normally do or doesn’t really want to do. It’s that feeling of being compelled, like they just have to do it. I believe OCD is related to this. I’ve heard that OCD is like a way for a person to feel like they’re in control of their environment, but it’s all fear connected.
There’s an example of this in the Bible, in the Book of Job. This is a paraphrase, but in Job Chapter 1, it says that Job was worried that maybe his children had sinned. They were adult children and they would have banquets, and he was thinking maybe they’d sinned while they were celebrating, so he would offer sacrifices for them just in case. He didn’t know that they’d done anything wrong, but he was under this fear that they had sinned, and so he kept offering these sacrifices.
It says that he would do this continually, and that Job said, “Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.” (Job 1:5) This is interesting, because later in the Book of Job, after some of the bad things have happened to them, his wife says, “Why don’t you curse God and die?”
There’s a link there, in their belief that if they cursed God, they would die. I think what Job was really afraid of, his root fear, was the death of his children. Not just that they had sinned, but really he was afraid they would die, and that was the root fear behind everything he was doing.
The action he was compelled to was a natural way to deal with the fear. He was afraid that they’d cursed God, but he did the sacrifices to make everything okay. He could relax until the next time he was afraid about the same thing. And that’s very much how it is with a spirit of oppression.
It’s the fear coming again and again. We develop ways to cope with this, and it comes out as these actions that we feel compelled to take in order to manage the fear. But it also perpetuates the hold that the spirit has on someone’s mind.
Getting Free from Oppression
Now we need to talk about the most important part of this whole thing, which is: if there is a spirit of oppression present, how do you get rid of it? Thankfully, it’s pretty simple to do. All it takes is the Word, and specifically, enforcing the Word with authority. What I like to use is a book by John Eckhardt, Prayers That Rout Demons and Break Curses. But he has a section in there titled “Prayers That Destroy Oppression.” It’s not a very long section, but it’s just a list of verses written as declarations. It takes less than five minutes to go through, and any time I’ve used it, it has never failed to remove whatever feeling of oppression I was under at the time
I use it regularly. If I feel even a little bit bothered and I suspect that it’s something spiritual going on, I’ll use those prayers because it’s so easy and quick to do, and it has been so effective.
I used it sometime last year because one day, I had this worrisome thought, and it hadn’t been there a few days prior. And by my body’s physiological response to it, I figured it must be a spiritual thing. So I used those prayers and the whole thing went away.
I will say it’s easier if you nip it in the bud. The longer that a spirit of oppression has been carrying out an active attack, it’s like the deeper a tree’s roots are, the harder it is to uproot it. Point being, if you use these particular verses and feel like you’re still under the same oppression, don’t give up. Just keep at it. There’s too many Christians dealing with anxiety. We have to become more capable and more knowledgeable about who we are and what that means when we’re dealing with spiritual things.
It is true that we have the Holy Spirit—our spirits can’t be taken over. So if we strengthen our spirit enough, it will straighten out whatever’s going on in our body or in our mind. It’s just taking that step of keeping the spirit strong. And as you become more adept at paying attention to your emotions and what might be influencing them, it’ll become easier to pick up on those clues that there’s something spiritual going on as opposed to just a natural circumstance.
Also, don’t assume that every thought you have is yours. Probably two-thirds of the thoughts you have came from somewhere else. Some come from the Holy Spirit, some come from another spirit, and the rest comprise our own thoughts. But they all feel like they’re ours, like they all came out of our own brain. So we have to get used to recognizing a certain kind of voice. The Holy Spirit will bring correction, but His correction is not oppressive. Instead, it brings relief when we yield to it. And the Holy Spirit will not beat you over the head about something. He doesn’t behave that way, but oppressive spirits certainly do.
Eye and Ear Gates
I said earlier that trauma isn’t the only way that oppressive spirits get involved in someone’s life. Sometimes it’s something kind of trivial, like a song or a movie. Once I was listening to a song mix, one of those YouTube compilations, and there was a song at the very end. I listened to it for the first time, and it had this dark, creepy feel to it, like, depressing creepy—like if Edgar Allan Poe wrote a song and also composed the music, that’s what this song sounded like. Afterwards, I noticed the way that I felt, and it was that same sort of mental heaviness. It wasn’t severe, but if you’re used to looking for it, it’s a lot easier to pick up on it when it happens. I just knew that somehow that song had connected me to something spiritual that wasn’t good. So, I just used the scriptures from that book and had no more issues.
But I haven’t listened to that song again. It’s good to be discerning about music and movies, and sometimes the problem comes from a place you wouldn’t expect. It’s almost a childhood joke that kids have nightmares if they watch a scary movie. But if you’re a parent and your children are having nightmares, don’t brush it off.
Nightmares, especially if they are continuous, are a sign that there’s something spiritual going on. The daughter of one of my colleagues was having nightmares because she had watched one of the Anakin Skywalker Star Wars movies. It was the scene where he goes to rescue his mom from the sand people, and then he doesn’t make it in time. You don’t see this happen in the movie, but he talks about it later that he killed all of the sand people in the village, even the women and the children. For her, it was the fact that he’d also killed the women and children that was giving her nightmares.
That movie is probably PG or PG-13. Most people wouldn’t consider it a scary movie, but it depends on the personality of the individual and how it connects emotionally to them. So if nightmares are happening, take it seriously. Pray with your kids, and if they say there are monsters under the bed, take that seriously. Kat Kerr talked about this once—children are very spiritually aware, and the younger they are, the more spiritually aware they are, because their minds are not built up. Their intellect isn’t built up like ours is as adults, so their spirits have more room to have a greater level of control.
When I was about 12, I saw a particular movie. It wasn’t considered a horror movie, but I’m sure it was rated R. It was bloody and was about lions attacking people. I couldn’t even finish it because I was already feeling bothered by part of the way through, so I left. But afterwards, I had this feeling of darkness that came over my whole world. I had nightmares about the movie, I had daymares about a lion walking around on the top of our house, and the psychological and emotional and even physical feeling of that was just so heavy. It was like this suffocating blanket had come down over me, and I hadn’t experienced anything like that. I didn’t really know what was going on, except I knew that obviously seeing the movie had bothered me.
This went on for weeks, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I was 12, I was just a kid. Eventually, my dad had me read through the four Gospels four times in 30 days, so it worked out to about 25 pages of Bible reading a day, which was a lot for me at that time. But I did that, and I remember going on this camping trip—there’s a picture another kid took of me, and I have my Bible open in my lap because I’m doing my reading. Even on that camping trip, we were staying in tents, and I would imagine a lion’s head tearing through the tent fabric above my head. I grew up in Pennsylvania. There are no lions in Pennsylvania. Maybe there’s some mountain lions, but again, the fear was not anything rational, but it was continuously present.
I go into all these details in case there’s someone else who has experienced something like this, to help you identify what’s going on. It was complete spiritual oppression, and if I’d known how to get out of it at that time, I would have saved myself a whole lot of suffering. Now, especially when it’s a childhood experience, eventually you mature and your mind changes so that things that used to bother you don’t anymore, because you’re older.
Eventually, I came out of that, and it didn’t take years. I believe the Bible reading helped me, but I didn’t know at that time how to pray with authority and use the Word to deliver myself. The crazy thing to me was my brother watched the same movie, and he liked it. He thought it was cool. It didn’t bother him at all.
The attacks of oppressive spirits or any evil spirit are very individually focused. They study humans and watch us from the time we’re born, and they figure out what buttons they need to push. The attack that works against one person won’t work against another person in the same way.
The worst part of it was, I didn’t have to watch that movie. I could have avoided the whole thing. But at least now I can look back and see what I can learn from that experience. I certainly remember how it felt, like being cold on the inside all the time. It was very strange, but that’s how spiritual things sometimes are.
Conclusion
I hope this gives you tools to use to deliver yourself or family members or friends, or whoever might need it. Check below for those references I mentioned from the John Eckhardt book.
Don’t give up, and stay dangerous!
Prayers that Rout Demons and Break Curses, by John Eckhardt — Prayers that Destroy Oppression
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/prayers-that-rout-demons-and-break-curses-john-eckhardt/1024256141
Job, Chapter 1
Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash