This feels so hard to talk about because so many of us women on this journey have to deal with one thing... disappointing our parents. If you're drawn to this kind of work, you're most likely not the type to follow your family's expectations, culture, interpretation of religion that you grew up with, or even religion at all.
I've worked with enough women to know that it doesn't matter what they believe in or where they come from; they've attributed this wounded shadow version of masculinity to the way the universe works. This can be through having a wounded perception of God, it can be through viewing the universe as an unstable man who doesn't like to see the sacred feminine thrive, or it could be through the shadow side of their own father.
Allah the Almighty said: I am as My servant thinks I am. I am with him when he makes mention of Me. If he makes mention of Me to himself, I make mention of him to Myself; and if he makes mention of Me in an assembly, I make mention of him in an assembly better than it. And if he draws near to Me an arm's length, I draw near to him a cubit, and if he draws near to Me a cubit, I draw near to him a fathom. And if he comes to Me walking, I go to him at speed.
The real issue here is who we think God is and how we think the universe works. This is mirrored through our earliest memories of our caregivers. What was their attachment style in relation to you? What was their attachment style in relation to each other as partners?
Remember, when we're young, we view our parents as an extension of ourselves. Our auras haven't yet separated, so when we watch them, our subconscious minds feel as if we're watching ourselves. With the brain as a sponge, this is what forms our ego and our relationships with ourselves, our peers, our partners and strangely enough, God.
So when we ask for things in prayer, or try to manifest with whatever method we're using, if we haven't healed the foundation of viewing God from the authoritative 'you can't have this because I said so', 'it goes against your tradition to ask for this so don't even dream about it', your prayer is filled with shame, guilt and fear. These are amongst the lowest forms of consciousness we can arrive at, and no wonder that when we go to God with this energy and try to manifest through this state, things don't work. It's like trying to make a lego building with sand.
How to stop subconsciously relating God to your father
The work I do exists for this exact moment. In a hypnotherapy session, the part of you that learned "no" from your father's face doesn't stay in childhood. It moves into your body, into your beliefs, into the version of God you carry without ever choosing it. When I take a client back to find where their resistance to receiving lives, it's almost never about money or love or the thing they say they want. It's about a much earlier moment when wanting something out loud got them a look, a punishment, a silence. The subconscious doesn't forget that. It just relabels it "the way things are" and hands it to God to enforce.
And in family constellations, it gets even clearer. You're not just carrying your own wound. You're standing in for your mother's relationship to authority, your grandmother's relationship to her husband, your great-grandmother's relationship to a God she was taught to fear rather than know. You inherited a script you never auditioned for. You've just been performing it so well, for so long, that it started to feel like your personality.
Owning your power starts the moment you stop asking permission from a force you've made in the image of a disappointed parent. Power isn't loud. It isn't punishment. It isn't withheld until you've proven yourself worthy in someone else's currency. Real power is quiet enough to trust itself without applause. If your idea of power still has a tone of voice that scares you, it's not power you're picturing. It's authority. Those are not the same thing, and most of us were never taught the difference.
Owning your desire is harder, because desire is the first thing punished out of a girl. Want too much and you're greedy. Want a man and you're loose. Want money and you're shallow. Want to be seen and you're attention-seeking. So we learn to want quietly, or not at all, and then we wonder why our prayers feel hollow. You cannot manifest from a desire you've spent your whole life apologising for. The work isn't to want less. It's to stop flinching every time you want something.
Disengaging from your family's story will likely come with pushback, and I won't soften that for you. By their standards, the ones you were raised inside and lived by for years, you probably are betraying them. Call it what it is instead of dressing it up as something gentler. The difference is you're betraying for the right reason. You're choosing yourself over a script that was never yours to begin with, and that is not a small thing to the people who handed you that script. They may call it selfish. They may call it disrespectful, or ungrateful, or a phase. Stay grounded anyway. You are not required to win their approval to know you're walking towards your own life. Don't let their no become your answer. Their fear of losing the version of you that made them comfortable is not your responsibility to manage.
Which brings us back to the only thing that actually matters here. God is not your father. God is not your mother either, or your culture, or the version of religion that was handed to you alongside a list of what you're not allowed to want. God, if we go back to that hadith, meets you exactly where you bring yourself. Not where your lineage left off. Not where your trauma assumes it should be standing. Where you actually are, the second you decide to show up honestly.
A blank slate with God isn't a metaphor. It's available to you right now, in this sentence. You get to meet God without your father's temper, without your mother's anxiety, without the version of faith that was used to keep you small. Not because you're rewriting scripture, but because you were never actually given the original. You were given someone's interpretation, filtered through someone's wound, mistaken for the whole truth.
So if you walk towards this God an inch, this God runs towards you a mile. Not because you've finally proven yourself worthy. Because you stopped projecting a parent onto a presence that never once required you to earn its closeness.