You finally decided to do the work. You went to therapy, cried the ugly cry, laid it all at God’s feet, and started becoming the woman you prayed to be. The silence was intentional. The boundaries were necessary. The peace you built? Hard earned.
And then … out of nowhere … your phone buzzes.
“Hey big head! Long time! I’ve been thinking about you.”
Or maybe it’s a DM from someone you haven’t spoken to in two years right after you posted something that’s doing numbers. Or a family member who went quiet when you were struggling suddenly showing back up now that you’re glowing.
Sound familiar?
I refuse to believe I’m the only one. So let’s break down this phenomenon spiritually, psychologically, and practically because lady, you deserve to understand exactly what’s happening and why your healing is going to keep calling things out of the shadows.
PART ONE
What Is a Monitoring Spirit? The Spiritual Definition
In many African Pentecostal, Charismatic, and diaspora faith traditions, a monitoring spirit is understood as a spiritual entity or more often, a spiritually influenced human assigned to observe, report, and sabotage the progress of someone walking in purpose.
Whether you interpret this literally or metaphorically, the concept names something very real: there are forces seen and unseen that have a vested interest in your setback.
The biblical framework is grounded in Ephesians 6:12, which reminds us that our battle is not ultimately against flesh and blood, but against principalities and spiritual forces. What this means practically is that when someone keeps showing up in your life to destabilize your peace, the issue isn’t always personal …it’s spiritual.
“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
A monitoring spirit, in its most accessible definition, is not just a demon in the traditional sense. Theologian and author Tippi Cogen describes it plainly: a monitoring spirit is a toxic hoverer someone who lingers in your orbit, not to support you, but to keep tabs. They’re watching to see when you’ll fall, when you’ll crack, when you’ll give them confirmation that you haven’t changed.
The sobering truth? Sometimes monitoring spirits don’t look like enemies. They look like old friends, distant cousins, or people from your past who show up with perfectly timed affection right when you’re winning.
PART TWO
The Psychology Behind It: Schadenfreude & Envy
Let’s get clinical for a second because understanding the psychology doesn’t dismiss the spiritual reality, it deepens it.
What drives a monitoring spirit’s behavior in human form? Psychologists call it schadenfreude (pronounced SHAH-den-froy-duh) a German term meaning pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune. Research published by the National Institutes of Health found that individuals with low self-esteem and threatened self-worth experience heightened schadenfreude when someone they envy faces a setback. In other words, your healing makes them uncomfortable. Your stability destabilizes them.
“Schadenfreude occurs when upward social comparison leads to malicious envy that is resolved by a misfortune that pulls down the envied person.”
— Frontiers in Psychology, NIH Research on Schadenfreude (2024)
Social media has made this phenomenon digital. Those silent viewers on your stories? Some of them aren’t lurking in support … they’re watching for confirmation that you haven’t changed, that life still has you bent over, that they’re still ahead of you in some imagined race.
A 2021 study on digital emotions found that the majority of social media users admitted to feeling pleasure when others they follow face public backlash or setbacks. The reward centers of the brain the same regions activated by food and pleasure light up when the person we envy stumbles. This isn’t a character flaw unique to bad people. It’s a deeply human, deeply broken response to unresolved insecurity.
The real question becomes: who are the people watching your account not to celebrate you, but to catalogue your missteps? And more importantly why does your glow-up feel like a threat to them?
PART THREE
When Hatred Disguises Itself as Concern
Black theologian and mystic Dr. Howard Thurman wrote one of the most profound texts in American religious history, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) and it remains searingly relevant to our healing journeys today.
Thurman wrote extensively about how communities under pressure often turn on their own through deception, fear, and hatred that masquerades as familiarity. He identified hatred as something that arises specifically “in situations where there is contact without fellowship.” That’s a powerful way to describe monitoring spirits: people who maintain contact with you not for genuine relationship, but for reconnaissance.
“Fear, hypocrisy, and hatred the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited l need have no dominion over them.”
— Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)
Thurman also understood that “hatred tends to dry up the springs of creative thought in the life of the hater” meaning the very people watching your comeback are being harmed by their own envy. Their fixation on your potential failure is actually stunting their own growth. You are living in their heads, rent-free, while they convince themselves they’re monitoring you.
And Thurman’s most personal call? “There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have.”
Healing women, that sound is what monitoring spirits are trying to drown out. Your inner knowing. Your genuine self. The woman God built before the world got its hands on her.
PART FOUR
Crisis, Community, and Who Shows Up in the Wound
Dr. Barbara A. Holmes theologian, ethicist, and scholar of African American religious studies has spent decades studying how Black communities process healing, crisis, and collective trauma. In her work Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village (CAC, 2021), she explores how trauma doesn’t just live in individuals it lives in communities, and those communities can either resource your healing or resist it.
Holmes’ concept of the “Village Response” is particularly relevant here. She writes that healing is never just personal it ripples outward, and that ripple unsettles people who have built their identity on your being stuck. When you heal, you change the ecosystem. You shift the relational dynamics. And not everyone is prepared for that shift or wants it.
“In the beginning there is darkness. It is the womb out of which we are born… a mothering darkness that nurses its offspring. In this state of trusting refuge, the light of divine revelation may finally be seen.”
— Dr. Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church (2017)
In Joy Unspeakable, Holmes draws on the contemplative traditions of the Black church to argue that deep healing requires spaces of genuine sanctuary not performing peace for an audience, but retreating into sacred darkness where transformation actually happens. Monitoring spirits are drawn to the performance. They have no access to the sanctuary.
This is why your silence season was so productive. They couldn’t follow you there.
PART FIVE
The Joseph Principle: Why Your Dreams Attract Watchers
Long before social media, there was Joseph. Genesis 37 tells us that when Joseph shared his dreams visions of elevation, purpose, and divine assignment his own brothers reacted with envy and hatred that escalated into a plot against his life.
The text says plainly: they hated him because of his dreams. Not because of anything he did wrong. Not because he was arrogant. But because his anointing made them uncomfortable with their own.
Sound familiar? When you share your vision, your growth, your healing and the very people who should celebrate you start keeping score, it’s a Joseph moment. You didn’t do anything wrong. You simply refused to shrink.
Not everyone who was with you at your lowest will be healthy enough to celebrate your highest.
Monitoring spirits often existed in relationship with you when you were in your breaking point. They knew the broken version. They got comfortable with her. Your healing rewrites a story they’d already finished , and some people don’t like being wrong about who you are.
Joseph was betrayed, sold, imprisoned , and still became everything God said he would be. His elevation was not contingent on his brothers’ approval. And neither is yours.
PART SIX
5 Signs You’re Dealing with a Monitoring Spirit
Not every re-emerging relationship is a threat. Some people genuinely want to reconnect. But here are signs worth paying attention to on your healing journey:
• They resurface only when you post wins or move in silence never when you were actually struggling and could have used the support.
• Their energy when you share good news feels performative the “oh wooow” that doesn’t quite reach their eyes, even through a text.
• They ask questions framed around knowing your business rather than investing in your growth. “So what are you doing now?” with no genuine follow-through.
• They use old narratives about you to others “yeah, she always been like that” because your change threatens a story they’ve told about you.
• You feel a subtle but persistent unsettledness after interacting with them, even when nothing overtly harmful was said.
Your discernment is a gift. Trust it.
PART SEVEN
Protecting Your Healing: What Wisdom Looks Like
Here’s what I’ve learned and what I want you to hold:
Protection is not paranoia. Wisdom is not walls. There is a difference between building a fortress out of trauma and building a gate out of discernment.
Dr. Holmes teaches that true contemplative healing requires what she calls “a space of trusting refuge” a place where the divine light can reach you without interference. You are allowed to be selective about who has access to your sanctuary season.
Thurman reminds us that the goal is not to hate those who monitor us. He calls us toward love not naive love, but a love rooted in seeing the other person’s humanity even as you refuse to let their insecurity become your assignment. You can pray for someone and keep them at a distance. Forgiveness and proximity are not the same thing.
And spiritually, Proverbs 4:23 is your anchor: Guard your heart with all diligence, for from it spring the issues of life. Your healing is a garden. Not everyone gets a key to the gate.
Forgiveness is the gift you give yourself. Proximity is something you get to choose.
A FINAL WORD
You Are the Threat They Didn’t Expect
I want to leave you with this, when people re enter your life right when things are going good when you’ve done the quiet work, done the healing, done the shedding what they’re responding to is your anointing. That glow didn’t come from nowhere. It came from nights of crying out, from the therapy sessions, from the boundaries you finally held, from the Bible you cracked open when you had nothing left.
Monitoring spirits don’t come for the ordinary. They come for the purposeful. If they’re watching let them watch you become everything God declared over your life before you even understood it yourself.
Your healing is not a performance for anyone’s validation. It is holy. It is intentional. And it is protected.
Keep becoming.
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited. Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1949. Beacon Press reprint, 1976.
Holmes, Barbara A. Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church. 2nd ed. Fortress Press, 2017.
Holmes, Barbara A. Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village. Center for Action and Contemplation, 2021.
van Dijk, W.W. et al. “Schadenfreude and Low Self-Esteem.” Frontiers in Psychology, NIH, 2024.
Holy Bible, New International Version. Ephesians 6:12; Genesis 37:5–8; Proverbs 4:23.
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