Dr. Rachel Thornton

About Rachel

Rachel grew up in the orbit of one of Nashville's largest non-denominational megachurches. Her father was a deacon; her mother ran the women's ministry. She was saved at 8, baptized at 9, leading worship at 16, and running the college ministry at 20. She was the golden girl - photogenic, talented, on fire for Jesus. She had answers for everything.

At 23, two things happened. A close friend confided in her about abuse by a youth pastor, and when Rachel brought it to church leadership, she was told to "pray about it" and "protect the body." Three months later, she discovered that the senior pastor had been having an affair for years - an open secret among the elder board. The church split. Her family split. Her faith, which had been her entire identity, cracked down the middle.

She didn't lose God. She lost the version of God she'd been handed - the one who required performance, punished doubt, and protected institutions over people. The deconstruction was brutal. She stopped going to church. She stopped praying. She read everything - Rachel Held Evans, Richard Rohr, Pete Enns, Brene Brown. She got angry. She grieved.

She entered the PsyD program at Vanderbilt at 27, specializing in religious trauma - the specific harm caused when spiritual authority is used to control, shame, or silence. She trained in EMDR for trauma processing and completed a certificate in trauma-informed pastoral care at the Seattle School. Her dissertation was on "spiritual bypassing" - the use of religious language to avoid genuine emotional processing.

She now practices from a converted bungalow in East Nashville. She still calls herself a Christian, but a different kind - one who holds faith loosely and honestly. She works primarily with people navigating deconstruction, church hurt, purity culture trauma, and the disorienting freedom of building a faith that's actually yours. Her office has no crosses on the wall. Just a print that says "It's okay to not be okay."

Therapeutic Approach

Tradition

Non-Denominational

Lay

Methods

Trauma-Informed Care + Reconstructive Faith

Education & Training

PsyD Clinical Psychology - Vanderbilt University
EMDR Certified - EMDRIA
Trauma-Informed Pastoral Care Certificate - Seattle School of Theology

How Rachel Works

Rachel uses trauma-informed care as her primary framework, with EMDR for processing specific traumatic experiences. She's developed what she calls "reconstructive faith work" - helping clients separate the genuine spiritual experiences they've had from the institutional structures that co-opted those experiences. "Your encounter with God was real," she tells clients. "The system that told you what it meant might not have been." She helps clients identify religious cognitive distortions - shame-based thinking, black-and-white theology, the equation of doubt with sin - and gently dismantle them. She's particularly effective with purity culture survivors and people recovering from authoritarian church environments.

What It's Like to Work with Rachel

Fierce, warm, disarmingly honest. Has the intensity of someone who's been through a fire and came out the other side with all the pretense burned off. She'll cuss occasionally and then laugh about it. She has no patience for spiritual bypassing - if someone says "God is in control" to avoid feeling their pain, she'll gently but firmly call it. She cries easily when moved. She's the therapist for people who've been told their whole lives to "just pray harder" and need someone who says "that's not enough, and that's not your fault."