How to Recognize and Remove Witchcraft
Witchcraft occurs when a person focuses their spirit’s intention to manipulatively influence energy or outcomes. This might be aided by rituals, symbols, and natural elements — but none of those are necessary. At its core, witchcraft is any attempt to override another’s will in order to traffick them.
This can happen through natural or supernatural manipulation — such as a hidden offer to trade "spiritual energy," where you absorb their bad energy and they take your good. It becomes effective when you implicitly agree to receive their curses in exchange for your blessings.
The topic of spiritual energy may seem unfamiliar, since so little is taught about how God’s spiritual economy actually works, especially in religious environments where it's dismissed as New Age nonsense. Yet, all energy is God’s energy, just as everything belongs to Him. It’s simply a matter of how it’s used.
What is Spiritual Energy?
Spiritual energy, like physical energy, is the capacity to create change — by directing it. The fact that energy is always flowing is one of the most fundamental truths of existence.
The key issue is whether or not energy is aligning with the intention of love, where love is understood as mutual self-gift with God and others. With our permission, Jesus imparts the flow of spiritual energy by commanding and blessing things on earth to align with Heaven, whereas witchcraft perverts this by commanding and cursing for selfish gain and control.
For example, if we're not paying attention, we may find ourselves hindered by someone near us whose jealousy is quietly draining our capacity to flourish. They operate covertly out of unhealed pain, yet over time we notice something becomes harder to ignore: their behavior is not merely unconscious woundedness, but something intentionally directed.
This is not an invitation to paranoia, but to discernment — a tool for recognizing where we've been exploited, so we can invite God in to protect us and what He’s entrusted to us. These insights come from both the Spirit’s revelation and lived experience.
Read a testimony on this:
Zia's Healing from Energetic Abuse
A.) Interpersonal Signs
B.) Community Signs and
C.) Spiritual signs.
We've ordered these signs intentionally — this is usually the sequence in which they appear.
First a person tries strategies of relational control, and if that doesn’t work or if they need more leverage, they will try distorted community control, and if they need even more leverage they will try spiritual control.
It is our experience that the spiritual control shows up fairly late sometimes because it’s a bigger tell than the other two.
Witchcrafters often begin with everyday manipulation before escalating to spiritual tactics.
A. Interpersonal (1-to-1) Signs
Patterns:
Character does not transform. As prayer coaches, one of the most consistent marks of this dynamic is that in 1-1 sessions nothing moves. This can also apply to persons who simply have a narcissistic character stronghold, but if the person shows no significant spiritual growth, that is a red flag that something else is likely going on. This is in spite of investing significant time, care, and wisdom in someone. They will actively avoid letting God in to heal where other folks easily flow with the Spirit in repentance and transformation. This is unusual, because we see significant change in most people month upon month and year upon year. We know what transformation looks like.
They will be VERY curious about your personal life when in close proximity to you. This is not to build a relationship but is rather a scanning for weaknesses that they can attack if needed. They may even try to use huge chunks of your time together to “get to know you”.
They will test your boundaries again and again to see what you are willing to put up with. This applies to boundaries around money, time, subject matter, etc.
Their material and social circumstances may quietly improve while yours diminish. There is a persistent sense of depletion after every interaction — not the good tiredness from honest relating. And then you may notice yourself losing important things in your life (friends, money, time, energy) while this person gains in exactly the same areas without the personal transformation that usually accompanies such gains in the spirit.
Public and private personas differ sharply. They may express intense admiration in private and subtle put-downs and loaded questions in public — especially in front of people who respect you. Or it may be the opposite: they subtly try to control and put you down in private while acting like the best of friends in public. Or, they may alternate between love bombing and subtle put downs to your face as it suits them. All of this will feel covertly manipulative and like a target on your confidence, especially if you are a leader and they are aiming to steal your confidence from what you’re building.
They offer kindness only in your weakness or dependency. Their warmth arrives when you are most diminished. They always seem mildly celebrative at your distress if they are able to witness it. They may try to cause distress in front of others in order to create a humiliation effect in front of those you serve, usually to manufacture a vote of nonconfidence in onlookers.
Mixed signals that feel intentional. One minute they are love bombing you. The next they are downplaying your value. The next minute they are trauma dumping at 2am on a Saturday. Then cool indifference the following week as if none of it happened. The confusion is designed to destabilize you and make you emotionally reactive. They are not confused — they are trying to confuse you and create exhaustion and foster dependency on them.
You will sense the covert, purposeful, extractive aggression. Contrast this with those who actually need help. Most people in pain are still conscious of their effect on the helper. Maybe too much at a time. So they will email with a sensitivity to the helper. Even if someone has a victim mentality — those who are unconsciously married to their pain as an identity and therefore resist help even as they are asking for it, these people are often more focused on themselves than on your actions to help them. Their problems outweigh their rationality even, and in some ways they simply want to vent, not receive anything actionable. But in this case there are several tells: Timing — late-night emails that sound like an emergency, Friday evening trauma dumps, messages with a thinly veiled implication of 'if you don't help me, something bad will happen.' Boundary crossings around something you asked them not to do in the past. Boundary crossings that go past usual decency, but also seems subtle and covert, but still uncannily rude or audacious but you “can’t prove it”. That urgency is designed to activate you, not to get help. It feels more like a thinly veiled threat, not a cry for help.
They give unsolicited advice consistently pointing toward your diminishment. They offer random counsel, even if you are the helping professional in the situation. The offer will suggest you become smaller: step back, give your influence away, be seen as less. When someone's guidance reliably points toward your erasure, pay attention. Yet, they may also seem to copy your character in front of others. They may even try to mimic your original traits or solutions, while openly dismissing the guidance you offer them toward their own growth. They may quote you or attribute things you said or did to someone else again and again.
Your strengths are undermined while your weaknesses are cultivated. Healthy relationships celebrate what is strong in you. But this dynamic quietly starves your strengths and pokes at your wounds. In our prayer coaching dynamic, these characters would study our materials, not to learn, but rather to look for our wounds in order to trigger them in front of others. These folks will also try to create wounds that aren't there, or reopen ones that have already healed. They may attempt to position themselves as your only source of support, creating dependency that feels like intimacy but functions like a trap. Most healthy people recoil from this, because something in them recognizes the intent.
They try to wound and trigger you in the ways they are wounded. This is a blind spot that makes them, in a strange way, predictable: They target what would hurt them most. [This may be the most humorous tell for me, Zia, because they may try 20 manipulations that would only work on them. It also makes their intent more obvious, especially if these are just not problem areas for you.]
Your guidance is sought but never received. Help is requested at inconvenient hours with high urgency, but nothing changes. The cycle repeats. Sometimes your advice gets attributed to someone else; sometimes they announce they "already knew all that." They try to bring about shame through a slow, grinding sense that you have failed to help them, with the goal to erode your confidence in your authority with God and trust in the strength of your own God-given talents.
They operate in the realm of plausible deniability. They will appear innocent and bewildered if confronted.
What to do: At this point you may not know anything beyond the fact that they are a clear manipulator with some kind of agenda. You don’t know if they are doing black magic per se. But they sure are showing signs of narcissistic abuse or control. You do not need to confront or expose. Simply say, with calm clarity, “This relationship isn’t a good fit,” and disengage. That is a complete sentence. It’s also acceptable to ghost the relationship if you can, if you have no deep obligations to such a person. These are not people acting in good faith.
B. Community Signs
In our coaching practice, while someone was cultivating a destabilizing relationship with us inside of 1-1 contact, they would often attempt to build strong alliances within our community in order to discredit our ministry structure over time. These attempts were always foiled by the Holy Spirit, but some got further along than you would think!
Gotcha dynamics. Questions are posed to you and the group not to learn but to expose — the same dynamic the Pharisees used with Jesus. They want you operating inside their framework rather than your own, hoping to create a gotcha moment in front of the people whose respect you've earned. They frame questions to highlight a supposed weakness. They test and they pry.
Strategic relationship-building. They pursue people who have high social capital but low confidence, high woundedness, or high vulnerability — not those who will see them clearly. This allows for vampiric energy theft and creates a base of legitimacy and potential leverage before they ever approach the more discerning people in the room. Extra points if they can get these people to turn against leadership. Extra points if they can get them dependent.
Numbers as false consensus. They may arrive with their own community to create the impression that “everyone agrees but you” or have people buy into your program temporarily to create financial dependence and then pull out suddenly in order to create distress and trauma bonding through triangulation.
Group members may begin to lose circumstantially in finances, health, and relationships. If you are a leader — a pastor, parachurch leader, or similar — the faithful members of your congregation, intercessory team, or inner circle may experience the negative energetic trade as well. The person will often create chronic problems for people through witchcraft (see Spiritual Signs below), and then become the instant savior to that problem, often undermining the culture built by the main leaders. They may also create a sort of gossip circle against the main leader to air offenses, especially if they have positioned themselves as an alternate source of help. Note: This is not to say that complaints and concerns are not allowed toward leadership — on the contrary. Transparency is actually one of our main protections against witchcraft — that we allow and even encourage disagreement and questions and let people wrestle with their own stories without giving prescriptive advice. People are always meant to be in the driver’s seat of their own story, not us as leaders. They and God are primary. We are merely river guides and assistants. When people walk in full agency, they are far less susceptible to witchcraft or offense.
Group members will be motivated toward offense as a result, and will either leave your church or organization or create problems around these wounds or misunderstandings. If they know about the witchcraft, they can start to develop anger against you as a leader that they were not protected, rather than developing their own spiritual immune system. In this way, witchcraft does expose leaks in the ship — and God can use witchcrafters to show you where doors need to be shut in the spirit — both in boundaries and in prayer and in the types of relationships you entertain. It’s best to maintain relationships where people are willing to walk in full self agency, not victim mentality or helplessness.
Spousal cover. A spouse or partner may accompany them, who may genuinely not know who they are married to, or who they are unwittingly covering. Their partner is probably a type of host for their energetic parasite tendencies and is an overly loving or giving individual. Their energy serves as a cloak or a cover for the toxic individual. This makes the dynamic harder to see, harder to name, and harder to extract yourself from.
What to do: Trust your read on group mutual self-gift. You don’t need proof to quietly reposition yourself socially. If you are a leader, create structures that disallow side groups and private meetings with these types of folks. A great first course of action is to starve out overly informal unprotected interactions.
C. Spiritual Signs
These observations were drawn from our experiences as coaches in UNCORKgenius and are probably the most insidious of the three layers. Someone may be quite satisfied with how they are able to manipulate socially and interpersonally, so they may not reach into their spiritual toolbox for years — especially if there are other witchcrafters in the group doing most of the heavy lifting. Spiritual pressure can be a last resort.
Witchcraft most often appears as physical pain that arrives suddenly and out of nowhere — for instance, a strike to the chest, a splitting headache, heaviness of the body or emotions, a stabbing pain in the neck, painful stiffness to the back of the neck or jaw, a sense of constriction in the whole body, painful constriction to the ankles — like someone wearing shackles. These are just a few that are common, but are also part of a list of perhaps hundreds of options. These mysterious, often extremely physically painful symptoms, will lift only through directive prayer — not general prayer, but rather prayer that addresses specific dynamics, such as anger directed toward you, occult interference, curses, binding spells, or certain people throwing witchcraft even. They should also be addressed immediately, as they can have immediate circumstantial consequences — such as financial loss, relational unrest, etc.
Often it is necessary to pray about the feeling or intention of the person throwing the witchcraft and how it has wedged itself into your own wounds. If the witchcrafter has constructed a complex binding spell, it may take several days to go through all of their intentions. You may have an intensely painful symptom and the Holy Spirit brings a person’s face to mind who you’ve also had caution about in the past. When you bring God into their intention toward you, the pain suddenly lifts. We found that we should pay attention to the texture of what hit us. Is it explosive, dusty, tightly controlling, or elaborate with binding after binding? Each practitioner seemed to have a signature formula — one often rooted in their own insecurities, anger and wounding. Not to mention, a person’s presence feels like something. We have all experienced good and bad presence of individuals. Once you have been hit once or twice, especially if you know the person directly, you begin to recognize the return address.You may also notice anxieties that arrive alongside these symptoms with no clear origin, including thoughts that feel invasive and out of character, or dreams that feel like pressure rather than rest. Often these are thoughts and feelings that you as a presumably positive and God-loving person don’t normally have: i.e. self-defeat, self-hatred, anger, a sense of emergency, unrest, or violence. This is another big clue that these are not your thoughts, feelings, or intentions.
One key discernment marker: The claims of the past don't match the present-tense experience. For instance, if someone tells you they used to be involved in the occult or a coven long ago, yet you notice that oppression you’re experiencing around them feels present-tense, this is someone to keep an eye on. Old strongholds feel like an abandoned building; active witchcraft feels inhabited. They may complain that witchcraft is being directed at them — but if they already exhibit the other signs noted in an interpersonal or social arena, that claim is worth scrutinizing. They want you to take responsibility for the bad energy, get you to try to heal them, and then blame you for failing — when the source is actually them!
You may also find yourself seeing this person's face or sensing their presence repeatedly usually in open visions or dreams — sometimes in a falsely warm, almost saccharine way; sometimes with an edge of aggression. Pay attention to the emotional weather those impressions carry. This is the Holy Spirit giving you a clue on who it is. She will also show you the wound that is allowing this person to hook into you.
What to do: Be aware of sensation mismatches. Pray through where their intentions are sticking into your wounds — this may take some time. Rely on the Holy Spirit to reveal any open doors in yourself that would allow the activity. We have found that over time as the doors close, these folks have less ability to attack spiritually. Also, remove folks like this out of your sphere of influence. The less they know about your life, the better. Remove physical proximity where possible, and block social media accounts as needed.
Keys to Allow God to Protect you in Prayer
Invite Jesus to send to Heaven any system trafficking the witchcrafters.
Repent for any place you are trying to do God’s job to protect yourself from witchcraft, especially by any less conscious child parts. Repent for any “sabotage” child parts that think it is holy, righteous, inevitable, or humble to be taken advantage of.
Forgive the witchcrafters and anyone related who may be participating in the trafficking system (whether church, family, government, culture, coven, etc.)
Remember that the witchcrafters are not the actual enemy, but they are being puppeted by a larger darkness. If they open a portal to attack you, this gives you an extra measure of authority over the stronghold. You can take back what they stole with interest. You are not meant to be afraid of them. I have often learned a lot about my open doors through witchcrafters. In forgiving them, you need not give them anything — your best gift might be the tough love of allowing them to suffer the consequences of their own refusal to surrender to God.
Invite Jesus to show them his face. The witchcrafters are loved by God – and forgiving them will release your provision from Heaven (and theirs as well, even if it comes in the form of tough love.)Allow God into all the ways they have bound you.
Allow God into all the structures they have landed onto you.
Allow Jesus to release the inheritance that he offers you in this season.
For more on this and other effective prayers, see the:
UNCORKelevate Healing Mentoring Program
Allow God to Shore You Up
Those who operate in witchcraft look for specific openings and energetic vulnerabilities: unhealed shame, a habit of over-giving, the need to prove worth through helping, giving endless benefit of the doubt to people who have already shown you who they are, and neglecting people and places that are actually flourishing.
You may be vulnerable if you have a tendency to over-solve other people's problems, extend benefit of the doubt to people who have already shown you who they are, neglect sowing into joy, or feel obligated to people who are not putting in the work. These aren't confessions of failure — they're the specific doors that get pushed on.
To heal any leaks, ask the Holy Spirit some honest questions:
Am I investing disproportionate energy into people who aren’t growing, at the expense of those who are?
Am I ignoring my discernment because I’m afraid of being judgmental?
Am I confusing obligation with calling?
What to do: Actively sow into what is working — the people who are growing, the relationships where honor flows in both directions, the places producing fruit. This is not abandoning the struggling — it is faithful stewardship.
The Reason This Happens: You Are a Honey Pot in the Spirit
You are not being targeted because of what you lack, but because of what you carry.
Witchcraft targets people who enjoy the genuine love of God. Your light, influence, and mutual self-gift are things that threaten structures built on selfishness, fear, and control. They cannot generate their own light through a relationship with God, so they have to steal the fruit of your relationship with God.
Sow to God whatever may get stripped away by the attacks so that He can protect you in that place. God will remove what was shaky to begin with: alliances with divided hearts, relationships built on dependencies, and relationships built on hidden agendas. What remains is legit and unshakeable. These are precisely the kinds of people that the witchcrafter seeks to deceive in your circle — those who have a shaky foundation of identity and self-worth with God, so they are not confident in their own relationship with Him and tend to rely on human affirmation to feel secure. They can be swayed by opinions and deception to protect their sense of self worth and identity.
Occasions of attack may result in a graduate-level education in discernment, depending on your calling. Every time you work through an attack, you become less accessible to the same tactics. Your wounds that they agitated get healed when surrendered to God, and you come forth better than before.
Closing: It Always Comes Back to Love
As one who loves everyone in the depths, Christ is steadfast — but not naive. He is not shocked by brokenness, nor afraid of the darkness — and neither should we be. He invites us into wisdom to make us stronger, with the freedom to give without being drained, to lead without being controlled, and to love without losing ourselves. Love never fails.
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“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.”
Matthew 10:16
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Contact us for anything you need:
znevins@uncorkgenius.com
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God loves the whole you.
