Many people stall on the first word of the Lord's Prayer. Jesus taught his disciples, "After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name" (Matthew 6:9). For someone whose father was absent, addicted or frightening, that opening can press on a bruise before it offers any comfort. That reaction is not a lack of faith, and it is not something to correct with a quick reminder that God is good. Before anything else is said, the bruise deserves to be taken seriously. The path toward trusting God as Father does not start with pretending your father was safe.
The reason for that caution is concrete. In a conversation with Dr. Sarita Lyons, Lisa Fields described a counselor who kept assuring a young woman that God was her father and that he loved her. The young woman screamed. When he asked why, she told him her father had raped her. The title meant to comfort her named the man who had violated her. Any honest account of God as Father has to be able to stand in that room. So the word will not be pressed on anyone here as a cure. It will be read slowly. Scripture turns out to run the comparison between God and human fathers in the opposite direction from the way a wound reads it, and that difference can, over time, loosen the wound's grip on how a person prays.
Three witnesses help along the way. Dr. Sarita Lyons is a counselor in private practice with a PhD in clinical and forensic psychology, and she describes how trauma bends a person's picture of God. Dr. Paul Vitz is a psychologist trained at Stanford and a former atheist who traced a similar pattern through the lives of famous unbelievers and through his own. Dr. Esau McCaulley is a biblical scholar at Wheaton College and an Anglican priest whose father suffered from drug addiction and could turn violent, and whose story runs the other way. The course moves through four connected stages: noticing what the word Father already carries for you, reading which way Scripture's comparison runs, setting two different life stories side by side, and then the slow work of facing what happened. None of the three witnesses promises that the wound disappears on a schedule, and neither does anything that follows.