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It is an essential part of our healing, whether physical, emotional, and/or spiritual, to be able to believe that God wants our lives to be well.

I mention in various articles on this site how our view of God can either aid or hinder our healing. If we doubt God’s love for us, feel unworthy of His goodness, or struggle with poor childhood teaching which portrayed God as evil and vindictive, such ideas actually affect our ability to receive good from God. It is much like the psychological concept of projection. I’ll just briefly touch on it here; a person is hindered from good, positive progress in life with regards to jobs, relationships, etc. because he/she projects negative feelings and perceptions from past experiences into present job situations and relationships. Without realizing he/she is doing this, the person actually recreates a constant cycle of problems in the present situations similar to ones in the past. To put it in simplest form, a negative view of how others want to act toward you can cause people to “treat you poorly” and create more negative experiences; however, it is your own response and actions based on your negative perceptions from the past that make people again react negatively toward you.

In a similar way, our projection of negative feelings or actions onto God which do not exist in His person affect our receptibility to healing and other good from Him.

As I cover our own perceptions more in other articles, my purpose here is to briefly provide some comforting, health-giving passages about God’s activity in our environment that relay how much God desires that our lives be safe, well, happy, Immerse Yourself in the Full Healing Contemplation Here »

Reading Level: Leisurely

It is an essential part of our healing, whether physical, emotional, and/or spiritual, to be able to believe that God wants our lives to be well.

I mention in various articles on this site how our view of God can either aid or hinder our healing. If we doubt God’s love for us, feel unworthy of His goodness, or struggle with poor childhood teaching which portrayed God as evil and vindictive, such ideas actually affect our ability to receive good from God. It is much like the psychological concept of projection. I’ll just briefly touch on it here; a person is hindered from good, positive progress in life with regards to jobs, relationships, etc. because he/she projects negative feelings and perceptions from past experiences into present job situations and relationships. Without realizing he/she is doing this, the person actually recreates a constant cycle of problems in the present situations similar to ones in the past. To put it in simplest form, a negative view of how others want to act toward you can cause people to “treat you poorly” and create more negative experiences; however, it is your own response and actions based on your negative perceptions from the past that make people again react negatively toward you.

In a similar way, our projection of negative feelings or actions onto God that do not exist in His person affect our receptibility to healing and other good from Him.

As I covered our own perceptions more in other articles, my purpose here is to briefly provide some comforting, health-giving passages about God’s activity in our environment that relay how much God desires that our lives be safe, well, happy, and whole.I’ll put the Immerse Yourself in the Full Healing Contemplation Here »

Reading Level: Impassioned

How much does guilt and self rejection hold you back from what is most important to you in life?

Do guilty feelings keep you from confidence, happiness, and success? Feelings of guilt or self rejection will usually hold you back from most of what you desire out of life unless you choose to change those mindsets, restoring your confidence and self esteem.

I have been enjoying a book by Brennan Manning called, Abba’s Child; it was a recent gift from a friend. In the beginning of the book, he discusses his own path to overcoming shame and self rejection. He is aware that his own past experiences are so common in the human experience that many people will benefit from the results of his journey to self acceptance and value.

One of the main behaviors that cause a person to live with guilt and self rejection is the habit of projecting his or her feelings of self onto God.

The emotional weight is great when one feels shame or self disapproval of past choices, decisions, or just the person that you are. How much greater is that weight when one convinces himself that his Heavenly Father, his Creator, the most phenomenal being in the universe thinks all the same negative, condemning thoughts about him? Yet, this is a typical thought pattern in the human experience, though we are usually unaware that this is what we are doing.

Usually included in these projected thoughts is the idea that life’s good and bad times signal God’s approval or rejection.

As Manning says, it is easy to feel loved by God when life is going well, all your support systems are in place Immerse Yourself in the Full Healing Contemplation Here »

Changing the often un-noticed habit of projection makes your life more receptive to the abundance that would otherwise come to you through your relationships with other people and God.

This post is Part 2 of 2. If you missed the first post, Clearing the Path to Attract Abundance, please read that first as it explains how we project past experiences into our relationships and ways to implement change.

I was reading a passage the other day which was the source of inspiration for these 2 posts. It clearly portrays an attitude of abundance, of clearing the path to attract and receive abundance based on believing good will come to you.

This passage speaks of many types of abundance that you can expect to receive from your interaction with God. However, there are several key points of benefit for you to keep in mind as you read it to change your habit of projection with God or people:

1. Notice the overwhelmingly positive description of God’s love and compassion and the resulting abundance that comes to you from them.

2. If you realize after reading Part 1 that you are projecting past negative experiences onto God and need to change, the main way to overcome those negative thoughts is by replacing them with these truths He speaks of Himself.

3. If you have been projecting past negative experiences onto people, hindering your job and personal relationships, use this example of the overwhelmingly positive thoughts of abundance coming to you from God to pattern your own expectations of good coming to you on a daily basis with your job interactions and personal life. Immerse Yourself in the Full Healing Contemplation Here »

We each desire good to come to us in our relationships with other people and with God. Sometimes it is necessary to clear the path for abundance by evaluating the views we automatically project onto others and God.

Each of us have ideas of how other people will respond to us based on past experiences. There may be certain personality types which don’t mesh well with our own, so we immediately assume anyone with one of those personality types will not like us and will not bring good into our lives. Or, some have a more extreme view, going through life assuming that it is most likely that any person will not like them. Obviously, past negative experiences tend to leave a deeper mark than positive ones. It is beneficial to clear the path for abundance by evaluating and altering negative views from past experiences that we project onto people as projection repels, rather than attracts, whatever good they may bring into our lives.

Projection is the opposite of the Law of Attraction.

For those who haven’t read about projection before, it is a term from psychology which basically is the opposite of the Law of Attraction, repelling good instead of attracting it. In the Law of Attraction, no matter how bad your life has been up to that point, you choose to change and believe that your life is destined for good purposes and good results; you choose to believe that abundance will come to you. This causes you to be looking for, and eventually see, the right openings and beneficial connections which you otherwise would have missed if you had a defeatist attitude.

With projection, a person projects negative feelings and perceptions from past experiences into present job situations and relationships. He or she expects the same past bad scenarios to repeat themselves, or is afraid that they will. The person may frequently change jobs or change relationships due to this unrecognized habit of projection. Completely unaware, the person now interprets people’s responses on the new job or in the new personal life in light of those past experiences; Immerse Yourself in the Full Healing Contemplation Here »

Reading Level: Gratifying

The first matter to overcome regarding a fear of God’s rejection is a concrete decision to replace feelings with truth.

Negative feelings about God most often stem from harmful relationships with authority figures in one’s past, such as parents, or from improper religious education during childhood. Authority figures may have misused their authority or shown a harsh form of discipline that was lacking in love and security. Or, some religious leaders present God has a harsh, unforgiving, unreachable person due to, not only some distortions regarding the character of God, but a failure to teach the full scope of God’s character. Contrary to such a presentation of God, His love and sense of justice are perfectly balanced. He does discipline us at times, but in ways that lovingly bring about our healing and restoration!

Negative feelings from childhood can be overcome, but accept the fact that it will take consistent effort since usually you are trying to correct decades of negative thought patterns.

When faced with certain situations that spur your desire to seek God, your mind will automatically follow the negative pattern of thoughts, fearing God’s rejection, as it has always done. You will need to be consistent in interrupting those automatic negative thought processes by repeatedly speaking truth to yourself and refusing to allow the emotions that are associated with those old thoughts until your present feelings line up with truth. Immerse Yourself in the Full Healing Contemplation Here »

Reading Level: Leisurely

It is an essential part of our healing, whether physical, emotional, and/or spiritual, to be able to believe that God wants our lives to be well.

I mention in various articles on this site how our view of God can either aid or hinder our healing. If we doubt God’s love for us, feel unworthy of His goodness, or struggle with poor childhood teaching which portrayed God as evil and vindictive, such ideas actually affect our ability to receive good from God. It is much like the psychological concept of projection. I’ll just briefly touch on it here; a person is hindered from good, positive progress in life with regards to jobs, relationships, etc. because he/she projects negative feelings and perceptions from past experiences into present job situations and relationships. Without realizing he/she is doing this, the person actually recreates a constant cycle of problems in the present situations similar to ones in the past. To put it in simplest form, a negative view of how others want to act toward you can cause people to “treat you poorly” and create more negative experiences; however, it is your own response and actions based on your negative perceptions from the past that make people again react negatively toward you.

In a similar way, our projection of negative feelings or actions onto God that do not exist in His person affect our receptibility to healing and other good from Him.

As I cover our own perceptions more in other articles, my purpose here is to briefly provide some comforting, health-giving passages about God’s activity in our environment that relay how much God desires that our lives be safe, well, happy, and whole. Immerse Yourself in the Full Healing Contemplation Here »

Reading Level: Impassioned

In my life experience of working with people who are seeking after God, there has been a noticeable characteristic of people’s responses to God being affected by past parental relationships.

I have seen children from abusive family situations that felt great apprehension at the thought of even talking to God, fearful of His rejection or of some sort of mistreatment by Him. I have known women who were making an effort to seek after God, but because of past abusive relationships with fathers and ex-husbands, could not emotionally handle the intended positive analogy in Scripture of paternal characteristics in God. Though Scripture makes clear that spiritual beings are neither male or female, since God often uses the analogy of a Father to illustrate to us certain positive characteristics that can be seen in earthly fathers, people can, without being aware of it, project bad attributes particularly from fathers (but also mothers and any other person seen as an authority figure) onto God. Throughout my career, I have made it a point to remind people that God’s fatherly characteristics are those of, not just a good father but, a perfect one, since God is perfect and that concept has been helpful to them.

There is a term in psychology when dealing with boundary violations that is called a withdrawal of love. An example of this emotional violation is when a parent who is displeased with the child, whether for poor behavior or even just behavior against the parent’s personal preferences, responds with anger.

Even if the child’s behavior was ethically unacceptable and needed some form of discipline, the discipline included more than just corrective action; it was carried out with types angry behaviors which portrayed that the parent no longer loved the child due to his behavior. Parents like this, often unintentionally, also display behavior that conveys to the child that his actions were a personal insult to the parent. This results in a performance-based relationship. “If you do what I like, I’ll love you. Immerse Yourself in the Full Healing Contemplation Here »