When Desperation Meets Manipulation
By Ayoposi Ojelabi · Published: 1 August 2026
Before I became sick, I never believed I could fall victim to spiritual manipulation. I thought I was too rational, too grounded. I had seen others go down that road and quietly judged them for it. I told myself I was different.
Illness has a way of correcting that kind of arrogance.
When your body is failing and your future feels uncertain, your confidence changes in ways you do not expect. The clarity you once relied on begins to weaken. You stop trusting your own judgement. And in that vulnerability, the wrong voices can enter very easily.
When my body first began to fail and nothing made sense medically, I began reaching out to people who offered spiritual guidance. Each person I spoke to seemed certain they understood the cause of my problem and how to solve it. In every case, the solution came with a cost.
In total, I paid at least seven different so called spiritual advisors. Not one offered counsel freely. Every revelation came with a price tag.
The first told me I had been tied down in the spiritual realm and that intense prayers were needed to release me. In my desperation, I paid a significant sum. He gave me a timeline for my miracle.
It never came.
But I did not stop there. I moved from one spiritual voice to another. Each one collected their share, feeding on my fear and the hope that maybe someone would finally be right.
The worst moment came when I was admitted at a specialist neurological hospital in London. A healthcare assistant approached me and said she knew someone who could heal me within a week.
After everything I had already lost, you would think I would know better. But desperation had clouded my judgement completely. I paid another significant sum for a promised miracle.
The moment I spoke to the pastor she recommended, I sensed the manipulation immediately. But the money was already gone. Even worse, she returned again after the one week miracle failed, suggesting I might need to pay more.
That was when something in me finally stopped cooperating with the fear.
I refused.
I had hidden all of this from my wife because I knew she would challenge me, and I was not ready to face the shame of my own decisions. That shame sat heavily. I had always considered myself a careful person. A rational person. And yet here I was, lying in a hospital bed, having paid seven different people for miracles that never arrived.
One of them instructed me to do a dry fast even though I was on medication. And I actually stopped my medication to obey him.
Looking back now, that decision still unsettles me. It showed me how far illness can push a person away from their own instincts when fear takes control.
They all used similar tactics. Dramatic revelations. Urgent timelines. Promises that a dream would reveal both the cause and the cure. And always, the price.
That dream never came.
I see more clearly now how this works. Illness strips away certainty. When medicine offers slow answers and no guarantees, a confident voice offering a definite explanation feels like relief. Manipulation rarely introduces itself as manipulation. It arrives dressed as faith. It speaks the language of urgency and uses fear as its currency.
Let me be clear. I still believe strongly in God.
God worked through the doctors who stayed late reviewing my scans. Through the nurses who came at 3am when an alarm sounded. Through the physiotherapists who showed up every morning even on my worst days. Through the medical science that kept my lungs functioning when they could not do it alone. Through the quiet persistence of a wife who never stepped away.
These are miracles too. They are simply less dramatic than what desperate people are often taught to look for.
What I survived was not the result of any prophet’s intervention. It was God working quietly through people who laboured day and night to treat me, care for me, and help me breathe again.
This chapter of my life taught me to separate God from noise. To separate faith from fear. To distinguish trust from pressure. It taught me that genuine spirituality does not demand money, urgency, or theatrics. It taught me that wisdom itself is a form of faith.
Yes, I was exploited. Yes, I was ashamed.
But I also learned something I would not have learned any other way.
My faith did not disappear. It became clearer.
And that clarity stayed with me long after the fear was gone.
Desperation makes people vulnerable in ways that have nothing to do with medicine. This is an honest account of what that vulnerability cost me, and what I understood afterward.
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