Episode 66 | The Thread That Wouldn't Break - An Exploration of Healing with Ruth Carroll

TRIGGER WARNING: This episode contains conversations around physical and sexual violence.

None of us get to choose where our story begins.

For Ruth Carroll, her earliest memories are actually happy ones — climbing trees with her brother, finding snakes, swimming, Christmas mornings and a mum who baked. They are memories of a little girl who, for a time, knew what safety felt like.

Then her parents separated.

Ruth and her siblings moved into their grandparents’ home, her mother became increasingly absent, and the adults who should have protected her became the people she needed protection from.

What followed were years of childhood sexual abuse, instability and fear that fundamentally changed Ruth’s understanding of relationships, trust, love and even what was normal.

And when abuse begins before you have the language to understand it, how are you supposed to recognise it when it appears again?

In this deeply personal conversation, Ruth takes us through the experiences that shaped her childhood and followed her into adulthood — including an abduction at knifepoint as a teenager, an abusive marriage, motherhood, faith, escape and the complicated years of healing that came afterwards.

But this isn't simply a conversation about what Ruth survived.

It's about what happened next.

It's about the strange reality of finally escaping something you've spent your entire life trying to survive... only to discover you don't actually know how to live without it.

It's about unlearning.

About discovering what safety feels like.

About learning to trust people when your entire life has taught you not to.

And about the quiet thread of faith that Ruth says continued to appear throughout her life, often when she had nowhere else to turn.

Today, Ruth is an author, photographer, wife, mother and survivor who has chosen to speak openly about her experiences in the hope that someone still living inside their own story might realise that another life is possible.

This is a conversation about trauma.

But more than that, it's a conversation about what it takes to build a life after it.

Meet Ruth...

Ruth Carroll is an author and photographer from New Jersey whose work has grown from her own experiences of trauma, faith and healing.

But before any of those labels, Ruth was a little girl who loved being outside.

She climbed trees with her brother, searched for snakes, swam and explored the woods. Those early memories of freedom and safety become particularly significant when you hear what followed.

After her parents separated, Ruth's childhood changed dramatically. Sexual abuse began when she was very young and continued through much of her childhood.

Without a safe adult to confide in, Ruth learned to survive quietly.

She describes growing up without a healthy baseline for relationships or boundaries. By the time she was old enough to understand that what had happened to her wasn't normal, those experiences had already influenced the way she understood herself.

That pattern followed her into adulthood.

At just 17, desperate to escape the life she knew, Ruth moved in with a man eight and a half years older than her after knowing him for only weeks. Three months later they were married.

Instead of finding safety, Ruth entered another abusive environment.

She remained in that marriage for 18 years.

Today, Ruth write and speaks with others publicly about these decisions without judgement towards the young woman who made them. She understands something now that she couldn't have understood then:

When you've spent your childhood learning how to survive unsafe people, unsafe can begin to feel familiar.

And sometimes, safe is the thing you don't know how to recognise.

The Night Ruth Prayed...

One of the most extraordinary moments in Ruth's story happened when she was still a teenager.

After leaving a bar with an older friend late one night, a man followed them to their car. He climbed into the back seat and held a knife to Ruth's throat, forcing her friend to drive into an isolated wooded area.

For hours, Ruth believed she was going to die.

And somewhere in the back of that car, she remembered something.

A tiny church.

Years earlier, when Ruth was around five years old, she had noticed a little church across the road from her home. Nobody took her there. She simply walked across the road herself.

She remembers the stained-glass windows. The wooden pews. The songs she didn't yet understand.

More importantly, she remembers how the building felt.

Safe.

Warm.

Loved.

So sitting in the back of that car years later, with a knife against her throat and believing her life was about to end, Ruth returned to the safest place she could remember.

She prayed.

Eventually, the man told Ruth's friend to pull over.

He opened the car door.

And he walked away.

Ruth describes that night as a turning point in her relationship with faith.

During our conversation, it led us somewhere I hadn't expected.

We talk so often about the way our bodies remember trauma.

But what if our bodies remember safety too?

Maybe somewhere inside Ruth, that little girl who had once walked herself across the road to church had held onto the feeling she found there.

And when everything around her became dangerous, she knew where to return.

Finding Peace in the Middle of a Storm...

Ruth is a photographer.

And she loves storms.

She describes going to the beach during wild weather, finding a safe place amongst the rocks and sitting there with her camera while enormous waves crash around her.

Where someone else might see chaos, Ruth sees beauty.

She says photography began as a way of learning to find peace in the middle of a storm.

And sitting across from her listening to that, I couldn't help but think:

That's Ruth's whole story.

She spent so much of her life inside storms she didn't create.

She couldn't always stop them.

She couldn't always leave them.

But eventually, she learned that even while the storm was raging, she could find somewhere inside herself that belonged to her.

Today, she still photographs storms.

She's just learned to photograph the quiet days too.

And there's a beautiful in that for us as well.

All images published with permission

Ruth Nyce Photography

You can view more of Ruth's photagrapy or purchase prints here

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Ruth's Books...

Held by His Hands

Held by His Hands is Ruth Carroll’s deeply personal story of surviving childhood abuse, trauma, domestic violence and the experiences that shaped much of her early life.

But at its heart, this is not simply a story about what Ruth endured. It is a story about faith, survival and the thread of hope that remained even in some of her darkest moments.

Ruth shares her journey from a childhood where safety was repeatedly taken from her, through abusive relationships and moments when she believed she might not survive, to the gradual discovery of faith, healing and a life beyond the trauma she had known for so long.

Honest, confronting and ultimately hopeful, Held by His Hands explores what it means to keep going when life gives you every reason not to — and how Ruth came to believe that even during the moments she felt most alone, she was never truly walking by herself.

It is the beginning of Ruth’s story of moving beyond simply surviving and discovering that the chapters that hurt us do not have to be the chapters that define us.

Letters From the Other Side of Pain

Letters From the Other Side of Pain is a gentle, faith-centred companion for survivors learning how to feel safe after the danger has passed.

Written as a series of intimate letters, Ruth Carroll explores the often-overlooked space between surviving trauma and learning how to live beyond it — navigating triggers, fear, shame, trust, forgiveness, identity and the complicated path towards peace.

Blending Scripture, personal reflection and honest storytelling, Ruth offers no quick fixes and no pressure to simply “move on.” Instead, she creates a space where healing can happen slowly, reminding survivors that healing isn't linear, trauma is not a sign of weak faith, and survival was never meant to be the final destination.

At its heart, this is a book about moving from survival to safety, fear to trust, isolation to connection, and woundedness towards freedom — one gentle step at a time.

Miswired, Not Broken

Miswired, Not Broken explores the strange and often confusing reality of finally being safe when your mind is still preparing for danger.

Drawing from her own experiences of abuse, fear and healing, Ruth Carroll writes honestly — and often with humour — about the survival responses that followed her into a safer life: overthinking conversations, constantly apologising, people-pleasing, anticipating disaster and questioning situations that others might not think twice about.

Rather than treating these responses as evidence that something is wrong with us, Ruth explores how they developed as ways of surviving what once wasn't safe.

Written as a conversation rather than a clinical guide, Miswired, Not Broken combines Ruth's lived experience with faith, grace and the everyday realities of healing. It's about recognising when our minds are still reacting to fires that have already gone out, and slowly learning that peace doesn't have to feel frightening.

Above all, it's a book about discovering that healing isn't about becoming someone different — it's about finding the person underneath the fear who was never broken in the first place.

Shop Ruth's Books on Amazon

A note from Shannon...

There was something Ruth said towards the end of our conversation that stayed with me long after we stopped recording. People sometimes ask her whether, if she could go back, she would change what happened to her. It feels like a question with an obvious answer. Of course she would. Who wouldn't?

If you could reach back through time and take the hand of that little girl, surely you'd pull her out of that house. You'd tell her that none of it was her fault. You'd put safe adults around her and give her the childhood she should have had. But Ruth's answer wasn't that simple, because if she starts changing pieces of her past, eventually she reaches the people and the parts of her life she wouldn't change. Her children. Her faith. The people she has helped. The empathy she carries into the world. The woman she has become.

And I understood what she meant.

I've thought about this in relation to my own life before. There are things I would never choose to experience again, and there are versions of myself I wish I could go back and sit beside for a while. There are things I understand now that I desperately wish I had understood then. But if I were given the opportunity to start pulling those threads out of my life, I honestly don't know where I would stop, because eventually I'd start pulling out parts of myself too.

That's the uncomfortable complexity of surviving difficult things. We're so often encouraged to find the lesson in them, look for the silver lining or be grateful for how strong they made us, and I've never particularly liked that idea. There are easier ways to become strong. Nobody needs to experience abuse to learn empathy. Nobody needs to be abandoned to learn the importance of showing up, and nobody should have to experience fear in order to appreciate safety. Some things are simply awful, and I don't think we need to turn them into gifts in order to move forward.

But I do think we can acknowledge what we create in their aftermath. And to me, that's something very different.

Ruth talked during our conversation about decisions she made when she was young that, viewed without context, might be easy for someone else to judge. Once you understand what came before them, though, those decisions make a lot more sense. When you've never been shown what a healthy relationship looks like, how are you supposed to recognise one? When you've spent your childhood learning how to survive unsafe people, perhaps it isn't surprising that unsafe people can later feel familiar. And when your body has spent years preparing for danger, safety itself can feel suspicious.

That part of our conversation hit somewhere quite personal for me. Our experiences are different, but I know something about the work of unraveling. I know what it's like to have someone love you safely and discover there are parts of you that don't quite know what to do with that. I know what it's like to look back at choices you once made and finally have enough distance and understanding to stop asking, What was wrong with me? and start asking, What was happening to me?

There is an enormous difference between those two questions.

Maybe that's one of the things I've come to understand about healing. It doesn't erase anything, and it doesn't magically turn the worst things that happened to us into something meaningful. It certainly doesn't require us to be grateful for them. Sometimes healing is simply reaching a point where the past doesn't get to make every decision anymore.

I saw so much of that in Ruth. She has taken parts of her story that once existed in secrecy and shame and spoken them out loud. She's written books for people who might still be trying to understand their own responses to trauma. She photographs storms because, somewhere along the way, she discovered she could sit amongst all that chaos and still find beauty. And perhaps most importantly, she meets other people's pain with an understanding of just how complicated human beings and the choices we make can be.

I don't think the beautiful part of Ruth's story is what happened to her, and I don't think trauma deserves the credit for making her the woman she is today. Ruth did that.

She took what was left and began the long, complicated work of figuring out what belonged to her and what had been handed to her by everything she'd experienced. She questioned things, went to therapy, learnt, loved, got things wrong and tried again. Slowly, she began building something that belonged entirely to her.

Maybe that's why her answer about changing the past stayed with me. Perhaps the question isn't whether we'd go back and rewrite our stories. I think most of us would change at least a few chapters if we were given the chance. Perhaps the more interesting question is what we choose to do with the pages we have now.

We don't get to choose everything that happens to us. We don't have to pretend it happened for a reason, find the silver lining or call it a gift. But eventually, if we're lucky enough to reach a place where survival loosens its grip a little, we get to pick up the pen.

And from there, we get some say in what happens next.

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