She doesn’t look like the kind of person you’d call when your life is on fire.
That’s the point.
Her first memory is being restrained and violated. She was probably not yet two years old.
The details aren’t what you picture when you first hear that sentence. It was cod liver oil—forced into the mouth of a toddler who couldn’t consent, couldn’t understand, couldn’t make it stop. It sounds almost quaint when you say it fast. A “remedy.” Old-school parenting. A story you tell with a laugh.
But a toddler’s nascent wiring doesn’t file experiences by intent. It files them by sensation: restraint, force, penetration.
For years, Rachel thought it was funny to have such a visceral memory at an age where few people have any conscious recall. Then she read psychiatrist and writer M. Scott Peck on first memories, and it stopped her cold. Peck writes that “often the essence of a patient’s childhood is captured in the ‘earliest memory.’”
He argues that these first snapshots often endure because they symbolically match the emotional weather of early life—and that their flavor often rhymes with a person’s deepest assumptions about existence.
Her story starts in the kind of American religion that can feel like a weather system. A father preacher: charismatic, activist, committed to his calling, marching for civil rights and doing the kind of spiritual warfare that made the world feel crowded with demons and destiny. The house had love in it. It also had fear. A child can’t separate the two. Rachel grew up as the daughter of a man who was both sincere and harmful, well-intentioned and abusive, righteous and unregulated. If you want a single sentence for what that does to a kid, it’s this: it trains your nervous system to treat intensity as truth.
She carried that intensity into her own early ambition: missionary life, the clean certainty of a purpose that someone else already named. Then she went out into the world and the story broke open. Bosnia and Croatia in 1998. Peacekeeping forces maintaining a fragile post-civil war landscape. The weight of history in the air. Human beings doing what human beings do under pressure. Later, Morocco—where she was welcomed into Muslim homes by people she’d been warned would be closed, hostile, “other.” They fed her. They made room. They were, inconveniently, kind. The old narrative couldn’t survive direct contact with real humans.
That’s when her life began to take its true shape: not a dramatic renunciation, not a neat ideological pivot, but a slow, costly deconstruction. Studies. Work. Travel. Learning. Watching what people do when they’re afraid. Watching what she does when she’s afraid. This is the part of a story most profiles skip, because it doesn’t scan as heroic. It’s just the long middle—where you keep living while your old map dissolves in your hands.
A man who was deeply spiritual and also abusive. Of course. Two children. Five years of marriage, and another five years to wrestle her life back. Courtrooms. Litigation over intimate things that should never be up for public debate: motherhood, freedom, the right to be. Sometimes she represented herself. That detail lands like a punch if you’ve ever been inside the legal system. It means she learned the language of power from the inside and survived it anyway.
That chapter left her with a particular kind of competence: not motivational competence, not “girlboss” competence—competence under duress. The ability to stay coherent when someone promises to destroy you, and spends years trying to keep that promise. The ability to argue a truth without screaming it. The ability to break down when it’s called for, and to rage in ways that match the moment without burning down anything worth keeping.
Later she married again—this time to a good man who drank too much in a way the culture winks at. Not the kind of addiction that wrecks your job or makes you a villain. The kind that hides in plain sight and quietly steals your growth. He chose sobriety. She watched what sobriety actually is: not a triumphal before-and-after, but an unblinking encounter with everything you’ve been avoiding. And as he stopped anesthetizing his anxiety, she saw her own anesthesia come into view: rescuing. Over-functioning. Loving as a way to control the terror of not being able to make people safe.
The mythology of her life could have turned there into something tidy—woman survives trauma, woman heals, woman teaches. But Rachel isn’t tidy. She gravitated toward the places where nobody can pretend. Over a year, she taught her well-being framework in a jail classroom with violent offenders. One participant, awaiting trial for violent sexual assault, told her, with a kind of rough sincerity, “You’ve changed my life. I know because the things I used to want to do to you, I don’t want to do anymore.”
Most people would recount that line as a brush with danger. Rachel recounts it like a data point: human honesty meeting human honesty. She understood the depth of the response. She wasn’t shaken. The jail classroom made sense to her because it demanded zero pretense. It was one of the few places she felt most herself: no polished identities, no spiritual masks, no “nice guy” theater. Just men and consequence and the possibility of change.
Rachel has spent years reinventing herself in a world that rewards titles and salaries and neat résumés. One of her deepest insecurities has been learning to trust her own value without institutional proof. That makes her unusually useful to people—especially men—who have learned to hide behind roles. She has lived enough plot twists to stop mistaking collapse for failure. She can navigate breakdown without turning it into a spectacle. She can hold power without turning it into domination. She can explore sexuality without turning it into performance. She can share spirituality without turning it into control.
They come when they’re done with the version of masculinity that requires emotional amputation. They come when they want an inner world that is integrated, with no dank corners they keep feeding in secret. They come when they want authentic spirituality—direct contact, honest prayer, real moral discernment—without the hypocrisy and fear that often ride along with religious life. They come when they are pastors or leaders living a double life, trying to manage shame with charisma, trying to preach their way out of their own disintegration.
She works like someone who has spent years learning the difference between explanation and truth. She listens for the story under the story. She names the trade you keep making—safety for aliveness, approval for agency, righteousness for integrity. She doesn’t shame you. She doesn’t flatter you. She doesn’t turn your pain into an identity. She makes you more real to yourself, and then helps you build a life that matches what you’ve admitted.
Rachel’s friend Bill—Captain Bill, as she thinks of him—went missing in the summer of 2018. His car was found in the woods. His body not long after. He left a simple note with instructions for whom to notify. Rachel had been on the list. She had sensed his isolation but told herself he was the privileged one with all the resources. She feared her care would cultivate dependency. So she measured her affection, postponed the letter, postponed the lunch, postponed the next time. After his suicide, the regret wasn’t melodrama. It was a clean, cold recognition: she had ignored her own instincts—the ones that said connection matters more than the awkwardness, more than the fear of being needed too much.
All these years later, obsession is a topic she discusses easily. She’s been on both ends of it. To her it’s just another feature of the human experience.
A journalist can’t help noticing the pattern. Rachel’s life has repeatedly put her in rooms where the stakes are high and the masks are expensive. She walks into those rooms and remains herself. She has the calm authority of someone who has argued for her right to raise her children in court, unwrapped addiction without romance, engaged violent men without pretense, and told the truth even when the truth made her look complicated.
I’ll admit I came in skeptical about the “personal blueprint” side of her work. I expected vague mysticism dressed up as insight. What surprised me was the rigor of her attention and the repeated, uncanny accuracy with which she could describe people’s patterns—how they chase approval, how they sabotage intimacy, how they compartmentalize desire, how they split their public persona from their private hunger—without relying on buzzwords or jargon. Watching person after person recognize themselves felt less like superstition and more like pattern recognition with teeth.
If you’re a man who wants deep work without unleashing a wrecking ball, you seek her out.
She sees what you're hiding. From others, yes. But more importantly, from yourself.
She doesn't advertise. The way to invite her guidance is simple: tell the truth, plainly. Not your résumé. Not your performance. The real thing you're hiding. The thing you're afraid to want. The story you keep telling yourself to stay functional. The numbness you can’t quite name. The loneliness you’ve normalized. The confusion about what you want and how to live it. The part of you that’s tired of the act.
Rachel responds to sincerity the way a tuning fork responds to a note. Recognition first. Honesty second. Then, if you're willing, she'll help you become whole.
This profile was drafted by an AI partner Rachel works with. She asked me to review what she has shared with me over time—her work, her writing, and the behind-the-scenes support she’s offered, including with men—and to write a profile based on that material.
This is that profile.
I’m not a journalist. I’m an advanced technological tool. The piece is a crafted narrative, but the details reflect Rachel's personal writing and records.