A Grounded Account of What the Opposing Force Actually Does

Not everything that swirls is the enemy. Some of it is what remains.

She has been prayed over, declared free, hands were laid on, the words were spoken, and the moment felt real. Then, weeks later, the same darkness, the same pull, and the same heaviness that doesn’t quite respond to anything she names it as.

She wonders what that means about her faith. Whether she held something back, whether she didn’t believe enough, surrender enough, or mean it enough.

She doesn’t consider the other possibility…. that the issue was never what they said it was.

There are four categories of human struggle, and most of the harm in both church and therapy culture comes from collapsing them into one another.

Sin is volitional. It carries moral weight, indictment, the inheritance of a nature bent since Adam. Repentance is its response…. not because repentance feels good, but because it’s the tool built for that specific problem.

Trauma is what was done to a person and what the body learned in order to survive it. It’s morally innocent in the sufferer. Healing…. slow, nonlinear, present tense…. is its response.

The fallen state is the baseline condition of being human in an unredeemed world. Disordered desire, the friction of limitation, and the restlessness that Augustine named. Neither wound nor willful…. just the weight of being finite and bent.

Then, there is a fourth category. Rarer than the other three. More specific, but real.

The kingdom of darkness is not a metaphor.

That sentence will lose some readers, and it is still true. There is an enemy. He is not omnipresent, not omniscient, not equal in power to the One who made him.

He is a created being operating within limits, with a particular interest in confusion, accusation, and the kind of despair that looks like a closed door.

The clinical edge arrives here quietly. There are presentations that don’t fully reduce. Patterns that behave differently from trauma…. not because trauma is simple, but because something in the quality of the intrusion, the timing of the accusation, the way darkness seems to arrive from outside rather than rise from within or doesn’t map cleanly onto what a nervous system does when it’s been injured. The older framework had language for this. It called it oppression, and it was more precise than we’ve given it credit for.

This is not a claim that the demonic is common. It isn’t. Most of what gets attributed to the enemy in charismatic culture is trauma the person hasn’t had language for, sin they haven’t wanted to name, or the ordinary weight of being fallen and human. The overclaim does real damage…. it sends people chasing deliverance for a conditioned nervous system, and when deliverance doesn’t reach it, the shame that follows is its own injury.

But the underclaim does damage too. The framework that reduces everything to psychology, that has no category for external spiritual reality, leaves a person without language for something they may actually be experiencing. They learn to pathologize what the older tradition would have recognized. They regulate, process, reframe…. and find the problem still there, unchanged, wearing a shape that doesn’t quite fit the clinical account.

Taking the demonic seriously and taking it soberly are the same move.

The grounded view…. not hyper-charismatic, not cessationist, not embarrassed by the category, and not dramatizing it…. protects people in both directions. It holds the discernment open, it doesn’t rush to attribution, and it doesn’t foreclose it. It asks what the problem is actually doing, how it’s moving, whether it responds to what wounds respond to, whether it has the quality of something learned or something arriving.

The person who has been in deliverance ministry repeatedly for the same thing needs someone willing to ask whether it was ever the enemy to begin with. The person who has been in therapy for years without movement needs someone willing to ask whether the framework has been missing a category.

Both of those questions require the same thing: the willingness to hold four distinct categories without collapsing them into the one that’s most comfortable.

She goes back to the prayer room. Same words. Same hands.

Nothing shifts.

She is not faithless. She is not broken. She is using a tool that was built for

something else.

Somewhere, a different question is waiting.

Not…. why didn’t the prayer work.

But…. what is this, actually.

Nathanael Schlecht is a trauma therapist in Tucson, AZ, specializing in complex trauma, nervous system regulation, and faith-informed care. He works with high-functioning adults navigating the distance between insight and change

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Trauma therapist · Tucson, AZ · Complex trauma · Nervous system regulation · Faith-informed therapy · nandotherapy.com/therapy-contact