A second major doorway is the area of traumatic experiences - trauma, or traumatic experiences. A trauma is an emotionally painful or shocking experience. It could be an accident, it could be a frightening experience, or it could be a long period of stress. So, a trauma has an emotional and physical impact in a person’s life; and demons use it to ride into the person’s life. Sometimes when you are trying to help a person, you’ll find there’s a traumatic experience with pictures and memories, and the demon is locked in on that.
Then a third major area is personal reactions to trauma and pain. When a person is hurt, they usually react, and try to control the pain. They try to control their life; and in attempting to control their life, often they create legal grounds for demons to come in.
So my experience in working with people indicates that all of these are connected. Legal rights, trauma, reactions. When we’re working with a person, working with a problem in their life, we need to be thinking of: the legal rights; the traumatic experiences; and the internal reactions. We’ll talk a bit more about these, and then I’ll give you a step-by-step way you’d look at a person’s problem, to try and analyse what the issues are.
Now, when demons get into a person, they create a number of problems inside them; and they tend to affect different areas of a person’s life. These are the areas that get affected:
1.) They may experience spiritual manifestations. So, if a person has got, for example, bad dreams, tormenting nightmares, spiritual manifestations that are obviously wrong, you know it’s occultic, or there’s a spiritual root.
2.) Evil spirits also affect the mind, the thought life, with thoughts that keep prevailing.
3.) Evil spirits affect the emotions, with emotions that rise up, that can’t seem to be managed.
4.) Evil spirits affect the body, with sicknesses that don’t seem to be able to respond.
5.) Evil spirits affect a person’s life, with cycles or patterns of failure.
Now, how does this work in a person’s life? I want to just explain, and help you understand the dynamic of it. We’ll just look at just a few scriptures; and we’ll start off first of all with Ephesians 3:20. The working or operation of demonic spirits in strongholds creates energy inside people; but the Holy Spirit also creates energy in us.
Let me just give an example – here’s an example. When a person gets angry, you feel angry. It’s like this enormous energy inside you; and it’s a negative energy. When a person is depressed, they feel this pressure and energy around their life which is quite negative. When a person is being tempted to sexual sin, they feel this passion of energy inside them. I want to show you just two sides of the coin here.
The first one, we find in Ephesians 2:1-2. It says: “And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, 2 in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience”. Notice what it says here – spirits work in people. The word ‘work’ is the greek word ‘energaio’, from which we get the word ‘energise’. So, when a demonic spirit is inside a person, it releases strong negative energy into them; strong spiritual pressure. Demonic spirits release a strong energy into people. It pressures them. It pushes on them; pushes on their mind, pushes on their emotions, pushes on their will. So, when a demonic spirit is operating, there’s literally a flow of energy.