Unseen Battles: What If the Battle Isn’t Just in Your Mind?

Narcissism, trauma, spiritual warfare — different maps of the same territory. The real fight is for your freedom.

This essay was first shared in Uncaged. It’s about the unseen battles that shape our nervous systems, families, and spirits. Whether you call it trauma, programming, or spiritual warfare, the effect is the same: truth gets replaced by distortion, love by control, and freedom by fear.

After Wired for War

After I wrote Wired for War, readers reached out to say they felt seen. They recognized the cold rooms. The shifting eyes. The way safety gets withheld in narcissistic dynamics.

But that was only part of the story. There was another battle I hadn’t named — one not just emotional or psychological, but one that operates in the unseen.

Because not all battles are fought in words or visible wounds. Some live in the energy around us — and in us.

✦ The Blindness Inside the Stronghold

Pastor Tony Evans calls it a stronghold — a mindset or environment so entrenched in distortion it becomes your normal. A stronghold convinces you that what’s contrary to truth is unchangeable.

When you’re in a stronghold, you’re often as sick as the environment itself — and you don’t even know it. You adapt until distortion feels normal. You excuse it. You protect it. You even defend the very thing that’s breaking you.

Clarity comes when you finally allow yourself to see it for what it is.

Stepping out is almost unbearable at first. Colors feel sharper. Silence feels alive.

You look back and wonder: How did I not see this before?

But clarity has a cost. You start noticing captivity everywhere — in workplaces, in family traditions, in relationships you once romanticized. You realize just how much of your life was shaped by the air you were breathing.

✦ The Science and the Spirit

Live in constant stress or trauma, and your nervous system locks into survival. Thought loops become identity. Your energy field becomes vulnerable.

From my time with healers in shamanic traditions, I’ve carried this truth:

“Some wounds leave the door open for energies that were never meant to live here.”

Across lineages, the teaching is the same: if that door stays open, pain doesn’t remain a memory — it becomes a portal. Distortion moves in.

Rage.

Control.

Vanity.

An emptiness that demands constant feeding.

Scripture calls this the enemy’s strategy — lies, fear, and division designed to keep you bound.

Science calls it programming.

Spirit calls it warfare.

They’re not opposites — just different maps of the same territory.

Either way, the result is the same: truth is replaced by distortion, love by control, freedom by fear.

✦ Is This Spiritual Warfare?

Here’s the question burning in me: Could narcissism — at least in some cases — be more than a trauma response? Could it be part of a larger energetic battle?

Dr. Joe Dispenza suggests that when we disconnect from the heart, we’re more susceptible to being “run” by old programs — or in spiritual language, by forces that don’t have our wholeness at heart.

Evans calls it “the enemy’s strategy” — lies, fear, and division designed to keep people locked in cycles they can’t see, let alone break.

Not all narcissism grows from the same soil:

• Some is learned — shaped by control, scarcity, or silence.

• Some echoes unhealed wounds passed through families — what many traditions call ancestral or karmic trauma.

• Some is forged in early childhood through real and lasting harm.

  
  

Research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) shows that profound harm in childhood rewires a child’s sense of safety and self-worth. This can include:

• Chronic neglect or physical/sexual abuse

• Being used as a pawn in parental conflict

• Growing up with a parent who has untreated mental illness or substance dependence

Unaddressed, these wounds wire the body into survival mode. Thought patterns become identity. The armor a child builds to survive is sometimes what we later label as narcissism.

Not everyone responds this way — but for some, the pattern becomes a way of relating to the world.

Naming these roots isn’t about judgment. It’s about freedom. Healing begins when we tell the truth without shame and without defending the harm it caused.

✦ Breaking the Stronghold

Pain that is never named calcifies — hardening into personality, into culture, into “just how things are.” Over time, it becomes collective shadow, passed generation to generation.

Awareness is what transforms that shadow into light.

Evans teaches that strongholds can’t be dismantled by willpower alone. You fight a spiritual battle with spiritual weapons: truth, authority, alignment with God’s heart.

Breaking free starts with truth-telling — even if you only speak it to yourself at first. It’s reclaiming the part of you that was silenced inside.

✦ A Practice for Today

• Find stillness. Sit where you feel safest.

• Place your hand on your heart.

• Speak one truth you’ve been afraid to name about the person, pattern, or place that feels “off.”

• Notice what shifts in your body when you say it.

Evans says, “Truth destabilizes strongholds. Silence feeds them.”

You may not be able to change the room, the person, or the past — but you can choose your alignment today.

✦ A Release Ritual

• Light a single candle.

• Write down one truth you’ve been holding back.

• Read it aloud — whisper if you must.

• Burn it in a fire-safe bowl. Watch the smoke rise.

Close with this blessing:

I release the war that was never mine.

I return to the still point of my being.

I step forward in truth — aligned with love.

With love and light, always,

~ Regina

✦ Read Next

➡️ Wired for War — the dark frequency of narcissism, and the holy return to your own voice.

✨ This way:

Every story spoken becomes lighter for all of us.

If something in you stirred while reading, leave a note — your words might be the ones another reader needs today.

This essay first appeared in Uncaged, my Substack community.

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