Godmindfamily: Part 1, Intro and Chapter 1
- May 6
- 14 min read
Updated: Jul 29
Godmindfamily: Human Behaviour, Symptoms, The Family, Society, Politics and God’s Kingdom Explained
By Robert Ensor
Copyright © 2026 Robert Ensor
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.The author’s moral rights have been asserted. First Published May 2026.
All Bible quotations, unless otherwise stated or referenced, are taken from the online World English Bible, which is in the public domain. It is available at the following link: https://ebible.org/eng-web/index.htm. English language Bibles are translated from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. I am no linguist, and I don’t know any linguists, so I have had to rely on others’ translations and romanizations of the Hebrew and Greek texts. Occasionally, I have examined the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek of the Bible, zeroing in on key words where the received English translation is debatable or misses the full meaning of the original.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or a therapist and nothing in this book should be considered medical advice. Nor should it be considered a substitute for diagnoses, prescriptions and treatments from qualified doctors. If you have symptoms, I recommend that you see a doctor to rule out anything serious and get proper care.
Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of its trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse for impossibility, for it thinks all things are lawful for itself, and all things are possible– Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
This book is dedicated to God the Father, Jesus Christ, my mother, and the Archangel Michael.
Acknowledgements
I must acknowledge the immense help that Jesus has given me in writing this book. There is absolutely no way I could have written this alone, and the truths and insights come from him. I also acknowledge my mother for her constant support.
Table of Contents
Chapter 2: Doctor Sarno, TMS (The Mindbody Syndrome), Placebos, Nocebos, Conditioning and Godmindbody 15
Chapter 10: Bible Prophecies of The Tribulation, The Rapture, The Second Coming and God’s Kingdom 129
Appendix 2: The Big Picture (Endtribulation Premillennialism) Taken from Godmindbody: The Bible, Prophecy, Miracles and TMS Healing Explained. 184
Appendix 3: Chronological Sequence of End Times Events in my book, Operation Wrath of God: The Rapture, The Second Coming, The Campaign of Armageddon and the Kingdom of God. 185
Introduction: A Model of Human Behaviour, Symptoms and Relationships This book builds on Godmindbody (GMB), which presented an individual psychological model and method for resolving symptoms, by refining and expanding that model to relationships between people within the family, outside of the family, and on the macro societal scale. It is also about how people have poisoned and corrupted those relationships, and how God will restore them. Godmindfamily is a theory to explain human behaviour, a psychological system outlining the problems facing humanity, and how they will be solved. The book begins with a potted history of psychology that explores key ideas, including Freud’s model of the psyche and Jung’s concepts of archetypes and differentiation. Then we proceed to an analysis of Doctor Sarno’s work on TMS (The Mindbody Syndrome), introducing central concepts such as conditioning and the power of belief, that will be expanded upon later. The next chapter is on Bowen Theory, which views the family as an interconnected emotional system. Bowen Family Systems Theory is the best prior paradigm for family psychology, and a good framework for understanding human relationships in general. Murray Bowen’s core concept, differentiation of self, is analysed.
This is followed by a Godmindbody perspective on Bowen Theory’s approach to symptoms and healing, before proceeding to outline a model of human psychology, Godmindfamily, rooted in Scripture, with a focus on how core beliefs and anxiety shape people’s thinking, behaviour and relationships. Chapter 6, the knowledge of God and prayer, provides knowledge capable of inspiring the faith necessary for successful prayer, the best method for addressing problems, including symptoms, dysfunctional relationships and behaviours. I proceed to evaluate the Bowen Family Systems Theory perspective of relationship systems on a societal level before outlining the various problems in the world today.
Christ is not only the Son of God, and a spiritual teacher, he is the king, in a very real, political sense. The king is coming, and his kingdom will be on the ‘earth’ (Revelation 5:10; Daniel 2:35). This book describes what God’s kingdom will look like, how it will operate, and how it will solve the world’s problems, which are ultimately by-products of fallen human nature. So if you’re interested in how everything can be put right on the macro and micro levels, read on…
Part 1: The Family
Chapter 1: Foundational Concepts in Individual and Family Psychology The family is a hugely important part of the human condition and even the divine condition, since the Father is in a family relationship with his Son, through whom humanity is invited to partake in the divine family as children of God. The family is in fact part of the structure of existence.
When it comes to ‘psychology’, defined as the study of the mind, the first psyche was the ever-present mind of God. Yahweh. Hebrew for ‘I AM WHO I AM’ (Exodus 3:14). The bedrock of existence. Existence itself. With Yahweh, and also called Yahweh in the Bible, is the Logos, translated as ‘the Word’ in English Bibles. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…’(John 1:1). Logos can also be translated as meaning, divine wisdom, and order.
Outside of the Bible, attempts to understand the human mind, behaviour and relationships began in earnest with Plato, who believed humanity had immortal, rational souls temporarily imprisoned in, and distracted by the appetites of mortal bodies. He outlined a model of the psyche, in which human nature was divided into three parts: Logistikon, which seeks truth and wisdom and is located in the head; Thymoeides, encompassing emotions like pride, anger, and courage, situated in the chest; and Epithymetikon, basic desires for food, sex and money, originating from the stomach. He believed these drives conflicted with one another and saw justice as the proper balance of the drives, under the direction of Logistikon.[i]Aristotle famously saw the human being as zoon politikon, the political animal. He wrote that only gods or animals could live without society, and that humans were inherently sociable, with an innate need for contact with others.[ii]
Like Plato, Aristotle believed that human nature was comprised of rational, irrational/animal, and vegetative components. Aristotle saw the soul as the vitalising force that animated the body, and body and soul as united, with the possible exception of the rational intellect (Nous), which he thought might survive the death of the body.[iii]The English natural philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was the founder of empirical science. He posited that knowledge is obtained through sensory experience and observation. He believed that generalizations could then be made on the basis of a meticulous body of observations, which was the best proof against the various biases that distort human thinking.[iv]Following in the Baconian empiricist tradition, the British philosophers John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume conceived of the human mind as a blank slate (tabula rasa), rejecting the notion that the mind had innate ideas or structure.[v] Locke thought the personality and knowledge were formed by experience and education.
The French philosopher René Descartes believed that the immaterial mind and material body were separate and that the mind can exist apart from the body.[vi] This led to the mind-body problem and the study of biology as distinct from psychology, a rift which has had a huge, lasting and largely negative impact.[vii]
Psychology has its origins in these philosophers, and in German philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries, notably that of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant believed the human mind had an innate structure, including concepts like space and time, that shaped our understanding. According to Kant, the consequence of this mental filter is that we can only know the outward appearance (the phenomenon) not the noumenon, the thing-in-itself, the true nature of reality.[viii]
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) later argued that the world is made up of our perception (the representation or idea), and the underlying will, an irrational, instinctive longing that goes beyond mere human nature, and is fundamental to existence itself.[ix]
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was in a sense the first modern psychologist. He saw man as filled with conflicting instincts, most of which are unconscious. He particularly highlighted the competition between the Apollonian – the love of order and rationality – and the wild, instinctive Dionysian principle.[x] Nietzsche thought the fundamental instinct was the will to power, a drive not merely to live but to overcome resistance, gain resources, express oneself creatively and dominate.[xi] He viewed morality, especially Judeo-Christian morality, as repressing this will to power in ways that were harmful and injurious to humanity, by intensifying the self-conflict.[xii] The fields of family therapy, family psychology and individual psychology effectively began with psychoanalysis, popularised by Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century.
The term self-fulfilling prophecy was coined by the sociologist Robert K Merton in 1948. He defined it as ‘a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour, which makes the originally false conception come true.’[xiii] I define it more broadly as a prediction that results in its own manifestation because it was believed. [xiv] An Inadvertently Fulfilled Prophecy (IFP) is a prediction that is fulfilled because people seek to avert the forecasted outcome. An IFP is thus a subtype of the Self-fulfilling prophecy (SFP).
I will provide an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pilgrims visited the Oracle of Apollo at the shrine of Delphi, high in the mountains of southern Greece. There, they made a sacrifice to Apollo and a payment to the temple. In exchange, they could ask the oracle a question. The Oracle of Apollo was delivered by the Pythia, a young woman who inhaled vapours from a fissure at Delphi and entered a trance state. The Pythia’s cryptic utterances were interpreted by priests of Apollo. The ‘gods’ of ancient Greece, including Apollo, were demons. Saint Paul wrote the following in Greek, in the context of ancient Greece: ‘But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and I don’t desire that you would have fellowship with demons’ (1 Corinthians 10:20). Apollo is the form of the deceiver, the label that culture assigned to the demon that made those predictions. Many of the Oracle of Apollo’s historical prophecies did in fact come true, and while demons as spiritual-psychological factors may possess some limited extra-sensory perception, and the Pythia’s utterances were notoriously vague, the oracle’s accuracy can largely be attributed to the power of the visitor’s belief in and fear of her prophecies.
The Oracle of Apollo predicted that if King Croesus of Lydia went to war with Persia, he would destroy a great empire. He believed that meant he would destroy the Persian empire, went to war, and his own Lydian empire was destroyed by the Persian King Cyrus. This prophecy fulfilled itself because Croesus believed it.
Self-fulfilling prophecies cannot always make a false idea true, however. Sometimes the idea is just so wrong that it remains false. For example, no matter how many people believe in a flat earth (and at one point almost everyone did), the globe remains stubbornly round.
Freud saw the psyche as composed of three parts, the ego, the id and the superego. The ego is the conscious personality, which Freud rather naively believed was characterised by reason and common sense.[xvi] By contrast, the id is comprised of the passions, especially sexual ones. The superego is the conscience and generates a lot of guilt. The id and the superego were only partly conscious, with the other parts being repressed into the unconscious.[xvii] Freud likened the relations between ego and id to a rider on horseback – the rider steers the more powerful animal, but to stay in the saddle, sometimes he has to go where the horse wants to go.[xviii]
Psychoanalytic family therapy focussed on analysing the psyches of individuals and providing insight into the unconscious motives of their behaviour, rather than viewing the family as a system.
In his seminal 1901 classic, the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud argued that forgetting and misremembering were rarely random, but were instead motivated by an unconscious wish to avoid unpleasant or conflicting memories. A classic example was the hysteria patient with repressed memories of sexual abuse.
Projection is another key psychoanalytic idea. Projection is basically seeing oneself in other people. It’s the pot calling the kettle black. Or as Jesus put it: ‘Why do you see the speck that is in your brothers eye, but do not consider the beam that is in your own eye!’ (Matthew 7:4). People hate themselves and take it out on others. The concept of transference, developed by Freud, described how patients transferred feelings toward their parents, especially their fathers, onto the therapist. This was a key part of early psychoanalytic therapy. For their part, analysts had to beware of the countertransference, a therapist’s unconscious reaction to a patient, driven by their own past.
Needless to say, Freud’s theories were hard to stomach and highly flawed, though they do contain some truth – for example, the unconscious mind definitely exists, experiencing buried feelings can be cathartic, and sexuality is a very large part of human psychology, but not the only part, as Freud himself later admitted.
Indeed, Freud’s best idea was the death instinct (later known as Thanatos), the urge for destruction and self-destruction inherent in all human beings.[xxviii] Freud believed Thanatos was roughly as strong as eros, the sex drive, and that the two drives pulled people in opposing directions, the one towards hatred and death, the other towards propagation, but that they were regularly mingled. Lust is obviously destructive if it is not properly controlled, and a large part of sexual desire and behaviour is actually a form of Thanatos in disguise.
Thanatos was rejected by many of Freud’s followers because it supposedly conflicted with the ‘survival of the fittest’ aspect of evolutionary theory, which posited strong survival instincts honed by millions of years of natural selection.[xxix] The Thanatos concept was therefore viewed as ‘unscientific.’ In Thanatos, Freud’s psychological insight had conflicted with his scientism. This is a recurring theme in the history of psychology.
The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was Freud’s onetime protégé. Jung broke with his mentor in the early 20th century because he did not agree with Freud that all behaviour was motivated by sexual desire, he believed there were also spiritual components to the psyche. There was also a related personality clash and power struggle for the control and future direction of the psychoanalytic movement; Freud and Jung had a weird father-son like relationship.[xxx] The centrality of sexuality in Freud’s conception of the psyche, and his rejection of Jung’s openness to the paranormal, was a result of Freud’s desire to establish psychoanalysis as a science, grounded in biology and Darwinian evolution, particularly Darwin’s theory of sexual selection.[xxxi]
One of Jung’s key concepts was archetypes. Archetypes are innate inner images or personalities that are projected outward, that is, seen externally in objects and other people. Examples of archetypes are the shadow, the anima, the animus, the wise old man, the wise old woman, the child, the trickster and the self.[xxxii] Jung believed it was possible for people to be possessed by an archetype, which resulted in neuroses and irrational behaviour. Jung talked to his archetypes, made them conscious and learned from them.[xxxiii]
In the context of families and relationships, the shadow and the anima are among the most important Jungian archetypes. Jung defined the shadow as the part of the psyche that is rejected from the ego as unacceptable and inferior. It is then repressed or suppressed into the unconscious and is often symbolized in dreams as various animals or antagonistic same sex figures. It is projected onto people we dislike.
Jung defined the anima as the female part of a man’s personality, and the animus as the male part of a woman’s personality[xxxiv]. He believed these archetypes were often unconscious to varying degrees. When that is the case, they appear in dreams as opposite sex figures and are projected onto others. Attraction often ensues. Indeed, we often love and desire those with whom we have an unconscious similarity, even if they seem opposite to us in character.[xxxv] People who are attractive, unattainable, powerful, ‘hard to get’, mysterious or vague, are prime targets for projection. This is because the anima/animus are powerful and, as figments of the unconscious, inherently elusive, so an affinity arises between the inner image and an outer person. Hence celebrities, being romantically unattainable to the majority of people, inspire wild obsessive devotion in their fans. Sometimes, the very blankness of the canvas enables us to paint – or project – whatever we like onto it, resulting in the strange situation wherein the bland seem endlessly fascinating.
This concept evokes the Greek myth of Narcissus, a vain young man who rejected the nymph Echo. His punishment was to fall in love with his own reflection, thinking it was another person. The truth is, those with whom we have nothing in common tend to leave us psychologically indifferent and fail to arouse strong emotions of any kind. It is human nature to be self-obsessed and not without reason; one of our tasks is to learn about ourselves and projection makes for many valuable lessons.
Realising the projection, then integrating and differentiating themselves from the anima/animus, helped many of Jung’s patients to improve their mental health.[xxxvi] He believed much domestic tension was caused by repression and projection of the anima and animus. Jung gives the example of the husband who may be a strong man at work but is easily dominated by his wife in a domestic context.[xxxvii] The anima, Jung wrote, could lead a man to his greatest adventure or a terrible folly.[xxxviii] Jung called this process of integration and differentiation of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, individuation: becoming a unique individual self.
Jung’s insights make a lot more sense when we posit a metaphysics in which the mind – including the unconscious – plays some role in generating reality. It would certainly explain why we are forever encountering different aspects of ourselves in everyone we meet – especially psychologically important figures such as family members, children, lovers, enemies, close friends and even pets.
Jung understood symptoms such as dyspepsia were psychosomatic but did not elaborate much on this theme in his work. Freud and his mentor Breuer described ‘conversion disorder’ (also known as hysteria), in which patients converted psychological conflicts and unconscious emotions into physical symptoms.[xxxix] Freud was however reluctant to apply the label conversion disorder to other diseases and symptoms. That task was left to others, notably Doctor Sarno, who adapted many Freudian concepts.
[i] Plato. Lane, M. Lee, H.D.P. 2007. The Republic. Penguin Classics.
[ii] Aristotle. 2000. The Politics. Penguin.
[iii] Aristotle. Lawson-Tancred H (Trans.). 1987. De Anima. Penguin Classics.
[iv] Bacon, F. Novum Organum.
[v] Locke, J. 1690. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Hume, D. Selby-Bigge L.A. 2012. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
[vi] Descartes, R. 1641. Meditation on First Philosophy.
[vii] Damasio, A. 2006. Descartes Error. Vintage.
[viii] Kant, I. 2011. J.M.D (Trans.). The Critique of Pure Reason.
[ix] Schopenhauer, A. 2012. The World as Will and Idea.
[x] Nietzsche, F. Tanner, M. Whiteside, S. 2003. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Penguin.
[xi] Nietzsche, F. Scarpitti, M. Hill R K. 2018. The Will To Power. Jovian Press.
[xii] Nietzsche, F. Holub, R, Scarpitti, M (Trans.). 2013. On The Genealogy of Morals. Penguin Classics.
[xiii] Merton, Robert K. (1948), "The Self Fulfilling Prophecy", Antioch Review, 8 (2): 193–210
[xiv] Of course, not all predictions work in this way; some are self-defeating prophecies (also coined by Merton), which do not come true precisely because they are broadcast and are thereby averted by provoking a change in behaviour.
[xv] Such as her prediction that if King Croesus went to war with Persia, he would destroy a great empire (his own Lydian empire was destroyed by the Persian King Cyrus). Source: Herodotus, Histories.
[xvi] Freud, S. 2023. The Ego and the Id. Digital Fire.
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Ibid.
[xix] Freud, S. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams.
[xx] Freud, S. 2023. The Ego and the Id. Digital Fire.
[xxi] Ibid.
[xxii] Freud, S. 1931. Female Sexuality.
[xxiii] Jung CG. 1913. Attempt at a Representation of Psychoanalytic Theory. Jahrbüch.
[xxiv] Sophocles, Hall, E, Kitto H.D.F. 1994. The World’s Classics: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Electra. OUP Oxford.
[xxv] Freud, S. 2023. The Ego and the Id. Digital Fire.
[xxvi] Masson, J. 1984. The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
[xxvii] Ibid.
[xxviii] Freud, S. 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
[xxix] Tallis, F. 2025. Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the Discovery of the Modern Mind. Abacus.
[xxx] Kerr, J. 2018. A Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein. Atlantic Books.
[xxxi] Ibid.
[xxxii] Jung, C G HG Baynes Cary Baynes trans. 2014. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Martino Fine Books; illustrated edition.
[xxxiii] Jung CG Jaffe A 2019. Memories, Dreams, Reflections: An Autobiography. William Collins.
[xxxiv] Jung, C G HG Baynes Cary Baynes trans. 2014. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Martino Fine Books; illustrated edition.
[xxxv] Ibid.
[xxxvi] Ibid.
[xxxvii] Ibid.
[xxxviii] Jung, Carl. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Routledge Classics. 1st edition.
[xxxix] Freud, S. Breuer, J. 1894. Studies on Hysteria.
Read the next chapter: https://www.robertensor.com/post/chapter-2-doctor-sarno-tms-the-mindbody-syndrome-placebos-nocebos-conditioning-and-godmindbod
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