What if the parts of your story you want to hide are the very places God wants to use to bring healing and purpose?

In this deeply honest and hope-filled conversation, Willow sits down with author and speaker Mary DeMuth to talk about what it means to “re-story” your life.

Mary shares her personal journey of walking through trauma, healing, and ultimately discovering that God doesn’t waste our pain - He transforms it. Together, they unpack the powerful truth that an untold story cannot be healed, and how bringing our stories into the light is the first step toward freedom.

You’ll hear practical ways to begin processing your story, how to recognize the “footprints of God” in your past, and why healing is not a one-time moment but a layered journey. Mary also speaks to the fear many of us carry about reopening wounds and how to do so safely, with support and grace.

This episode is an invitation to stop believing the lies that have kept you silent and instead step into a new chapter, one where your story becomes a source of healing, not just for you, but for others.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why “an untold story will never heal.”
• What it means to reframe (or “re-story”) your life
• How to begin processing your story in safe and healthy ways
• The role of community and vulnerability in healing
• Why forgiveness is a repeated, layered journey—not a one-time decision
• How to identify God’s presence in your past, even when it felt silent
• Practical steps to move forward and create a different ending to your story

Your past may shape your story—but it doesn’t have to define your future. With God, even the most painful chapters can be rewritten into something beautiful, meaningful, and full of purpose.

Connect with Mary DeMuth on social media: @marydemuth

Visit her website: marydemuth.com

Check out her book: Restory Your Life

https://wecollide.net/books/collide/

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Links referenced in this episode:

• marydemuth.com

Mentioned in this episode:

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Hey there. Welcome to the Collide Podcast. I'm so glad you hopped on. I know that you could be. I don't know, what could you be doing?

You could be binging the Kardashians. You could be taking a nap. You could be watching and scrolling more. You could be listening to the news, scaring the heck out of you.

But instead, you're here on the Collide Podcast, and the hope is, is that you would hear stories of God alive and well, showing up in people's lives and bringing about hope and healing and purpose. And so today is no different. I'm super excited to hand you this interview that I just did with Mary DeMuth. She has written 50 books. That's crazy.

Books like We Too, and the Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible. In her latest book, Restore youe Life. And so today, her and I had this great conversation on this idea that you can't actually change your past.

You can't go back into your story and change it, but you can purpose it now. You can restory it for a different present and future.

So I hope that this conversation encourages you in the midst of the chapter that you're in right now. Take a listen. Mary, it's so fun to have you on the podcast.

Good to be here. So glad to see you.

Yeah, you've been on before, and I just loved our conversation. Love having you on again to talk about your new book. This is what number 50? I mean, how many books have you written?

I need to look back. I think it's 52 maybe. I'm not sure.

That's crazy.

It could be 50, I'm not sure. Somewhere around. I know it is crazy. I'm crazy. I'm totally crazy.

Did you write as a child?

I did. It was a way to process my trauma. But it was in journals only, like, just writing in diaries. Dear Diary, this was a bad day. That kind of stuff.

Right? Right. That's so funny. My diary as a child, I also did that, but I named it after the boy I had a crush on.

And so I would write to him, which is really weird. Anyways, when was the moment where you were like, I think I want to write for other people?

That happened. I was an English major in college, but I thought, well, I've got to get a real job.

So I was a junior high teacher, which was its own form of purgatory. And then I started having children.

And the moment I had my first child, my daughter, I don't know, there was just something that happened once she was birthed. The moment she came out. One of my first thoughts, of course, was, she's beautiful and I love her. But the other one was, I need to write a book.

And so that began my 10 year journey of not instant success, but writing in complete obscurity. And then only started realizing that dream about 12 years after I had started writing.

Wow. Crazy. Wild. Well, I want to talk to you about this new birth, this new birth of a new book, and it's called Restory youy Life. Why did you write this?

You know, the Lord dropped that term into my head about eight years ago because I had gone through so much healing in my life, which was lovely and took an exceptionally long period of time. But I began to feel restless. Like there's more to life than just healing from your sad story.

There's actually an entering into other people's stories to help them. And that's where Restory came out. I had a podcast called the Restory Show.

I did a Restory conference for two years, and so it's been around for a while, and thankfully we were able to finally shop it and sell it, but it just took a long time to sell. And the central message is basically just the beauty of God using our own stories to give us a so what to the next chapter of our lives.

Hmm. People listening are thinking, what does that mean, Restory? I mean, I can't go back and change my story, so what can we do?

If we can't go back and change the way it's gone, what do we have the power to do?

Yeah. Another good word is reframing. So, you know, I. For so long, I lived in this mentality of, look at all these terrible things that happened to me.

And there was plenty of terrible things. That was part of my identity. As I've been healed. And I'm reframing it, I'm realizing that, was it bad? Yeah, it was bad. Did I have to heal from it?

Yes. Did I grieve and mourn? Of course.

But now I'm looking back and it's more like a treasure hunt of finding the footsteps of God in my story and seeing how it's playing out today in the ministry that God has given me today. And that has been one of the most satisfying adventures of my life.

Talk to us a little bit more about that. I love that idea of, like, looking back and finding the footsteps of God in your life. How can we do that?

Part of it is a willingness to be honest. So some of us just need to tell our story. I often tell audiences an untold Story will never heal.

We somehow think it will because, like, we're super good at shoving it down, but it has to be shared.

And even if you don't have someone safe in your life to share your deep, dark secret with, you can at least write it down on a piece of paper or say it into your phone, at least get it out of you. And then begin to pray that the Lord would send you a safe person to share that delicate story with.

Because it will never start, that healing adventure in the darkness. It only happens in the light when we've been able to share it. And that takes a tremendous amount of bravery.

I'm not trying to, you know, play that down. It takes a lot of bravery to do that. But that's the first step in beginning to see, okay, where was God in all of this?

Because you have to first face it.

There's so much I want to ask you about that the line that you just gave us, an untold story will never be healed. I resonate with that so much.

I remember when I was like 21 years old and my landlord, I rented her basement apartment, and she was what I considered a crazy Christian just because she was Christian. I thought she was crazy and I was not Christian. And she would invite me into her life, into her days, her family meals, she'd have me up for coffee.

And she began to ask me questions about my story. And I'd never told people. And it was like this really crazy experience where I realized I even had a story.

And she began to speak Jesus into my story. And that was kind of the beginning of the stitching and mending that God wanted to do in my life.

When you think about us and those of us who have untold stories, what have we been told? I mean, why are they untold? What. What have we been made to believe that has locked our story up?

There's a lot of different nuances there, but I would say one of the most powerful ones, if your story's tied up with family, is we don't talk about this outside of the family. This is hush hush.

If other people found out that this beating happened or this abuse happened, or this, you know, whatever it is that happened, then you're betraying your family. I think there's also a subtle message in America and around the world too, of just buck up, don't be a problem. Nobody likes a broken person.

So shove it down, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and just get on with it. You don't have excuses. You just live your life. And I For sure. Preached that to myself as a kid. I always wondered why I was even on the earth.

Cause I just was there to be neglected or abused. And so I would give myself little pep talks of, knock it off, Mary. Don't be so needy. No one wants you to be needy.

And in fact, if you need to show that you're worthy, then you better perform pretty well. You know, some people will do the opposite. Like, well, I'm not being noticed, so I'm going to rebel negatively. I rebelled positively.

But it's still the same cry for significance and being noticed.

Yeah, I can resonate with that so much because I grew up in a home with childhood trauma.

But I also think I've run across women who maybe they didn't experience something so traumatic, but there was this, like, quiet toxicity to, oh, your brother gets all the airtime because he's a boy.

Or.

Your sister gets all of it because she's the sports star. So you. You don't really matter. We don't want to hear your opinion on where you want to go to eat.

Like, you hear these kind of, like, quiet, toxic ways that our family of origin invited us to stay quiet. Do you run across those stories, too?

That's. I'm so glad you brought that up, because it really relates to the story that we tell ourselves. And it may not have even been intended.

Like, the parents didn't sit down one day and say, oh, we love our sports star son, or she's really co school or whatever. They probably did not intend to do that. Some of them did. There were some bad parents out there that intended to be naughty and mean.

So I'm not saying that there aren't. But then we then internalize a story about ourselves. I'm not worthy of being noticed.

I better be quiet if I want to fit into this family system or I'm too much. That's a big one for women especially. We're not to be loud. We're not to be all that.

And so we've internalized the story of I'm too much, so I better not be enough. I better smallify myself, make myself a little mouth so that I don't rock the boat. Or we have this desire for peace so much.

We're such peacemakers internally that we will do anything to keep that peace. And so we're really good. Especially when you've been raised in a discomforting environment.

We become really good at reading the room and we know everybody's mood in the room, and we then shapeshift to create ourselves to be the solution to that problem so we won't have conflict.

Yeah, it's fascinating. The untold story. I love that you brought it up. I mean, I recently was even in therapy, like a month ago. I'm throwing myself under a bus today.

But I mean, why not? If we can't be real about it, what are we doing?

But I was freaking out because I'm gonna have my book published this year and my therapist is asking me why and I'm like, because I'm sharing things I'm not supposed to share. And she was like, you're right. You're breaking all the rules. You're breaking all the rules. And I, I literally, I still have it in my phone.

I wrote that down. Like, oh, wow.

I am like, by me even telling my story, I'm literally breaking these rules that weren't written in paper, but they were written like on my life, you know, And I think there's a lot of us who are like, oh, no, if I pipe up and actually give my opinion or if I actually tell you that you hurt my feelings or whatever, we're breaking all the rules. So I love that you're challenging us today that an untold story will never be healed.

You mentioned writing about it in a journal or saying it on our phone, like recording it. Are there other great spaces to begin to process our story that you'd recommend?

I mean, obviously, within the confines of friendship, that's probably the best place where we can process our stories is a trusted friend who just loves us no matter what. And I think we're so shocked. Like, we think, oh, I'm going to totally shock them if I say this story.

And most of the time, unless they're hiding some really big spirit of meanness, they are going to listen and empathize with you. And it is a risk to tell it. But I think it's kind of like when you've had a struggle with sin and you have kept it completely quiet.

I remember one time in college I had a specific thing I was struggling with and I just felt like I was the worst sinner ever. And I ended up just like whispering it to my friend. And I was terrified, like, oh my gosh, she's going to think I'm this or that or whatever.

And she's like, oh, Mary, everyone struggles with that. And I was like, they do. I had no idea. And then suddenly this darkness that was over me like a cloud, it just completely dissipated.

And all that self loathing and hatred just left because I realized I was not alone in that struggle.

Yeah, the power of that is incredible. Talk to us about this hesitancy that we have to reopen wounds. Like, we almost think it's gonna, like, kill us all over again. Yeah.

I would just validate that fear because it is a real fear and it can happen. And so that's where you do need to have a pretty trauma informed perspective.

And if you are going to open some wounds that you've let sit for a while, it may be really wise to have a counselor to process that with because they are more equipped and better equipped a licensed therapist to help you and then even do things like EMDR or brain spotting or some of the new methods that help you work through some of those traumatic memories. I will say for me, like, I was pretty cavalier about it when I decided I would go back to the place where Olive.

I was sexually abused for a year, my kindergarten year. And I decided I would go back and, like, look at. God's going to give me the big victory.

And I have pictures of me standing in front of all the terrible places that all these horrific things happened to me. And the moment I was safe again outside of that environment, I had never been back. Never. And this has been.

It had been decades since I had been there. The moment I was safe, I started vomiting and I realized I was being pretty cavalier. So just be super tender with yourself.

If you're going to open up a can of worms, be sure you have a professional there with you.

Yeah, absolutely. And a professional who will be patient. I remember the first Christian therapist I ever went to.

First therapist I went to, she invited me to go back to the origin of a pain as a child and invite Jesus to go with me. And I couldn't do it. Yeah, I, like, couldn't do it. And it took me, geez, I don't know, a year, two years. I finally was able to do that.

And it was a powerful experience. But I at first was like, why would I ever do that? Why would I go back to the origin of our pain?

Now I know, like you're talking about that if I don't go back to that and allow Jesus to heal me, I can stay stuck there in some ways. And can you talk to us about how you see us getting stuck in certain chapters of our story?

Yeah, I think unforgiveness can be a part of that. Forgiveness is a tricky thing. It's very hard. But I know that that has kept me connected to some hard stories.

And I guess what I'll say with that is that we, like you just said, we need to be really tender with ourselves and we need to understand that God is a gentlemanly healer and he takes us on the perfect journey and he opens up those doors when we can handle it. Like, if I had tried to handle it before, I don't think I could have. But he.

I think when, like, in terms of forgiveness, there was a day that I chose to forgive, let's say my mom, okay, difficult upbringing. But even last week there was a little trigger that happened and I was like, oh.

And so part of me, what I used to do with that is I would have this terrible story and I would say, I am the worst forgiver ever. Why can't I forgive her? I already forgave her. This proves that I didn't.

Instead of being more realistic about it and saying, yeah, I've forgiven her about 89 times or 473 times or however many times it's been, this is another time I need to forgive. And this hurts.

I'm going to mourn it a little bit and then I'm going to walk in forgiveness as God gives me the ability to do so, and then I'm going to move on. But that has kept me stuck before because I thought, oh, I'm a bad forgiver just because I was triggered.

Instead of seeing that forgiveness is this layered journey, you don't just do it one, and I wish it was, you just do it one, and I forgive. It's done. It's all the past. No, it is a long, long path.

Yeah, absolutely. I love this. This quote in, in your book. I cannot recount how many times I cried out to God trying to make sense of my story.

Sometimes he was silent, but even in that holy quiet, he was working. How do you look back and feel so certain that God was working even when you didn't hear Him?

I think part of that has gotten back to knowing him more and reading the word honestly, reminding myself and preaching the gospel to myself of these are the truths of our God throughout all of scripture. And I've been doing a practice where I rapid read the Bible a couple times a year, either in 60 days or 90 days.

And it is the most wonderful spiritual practice I've ever done and it has changed my life. And what I keep learning is that we wrongly think that God was kind of angry in the Old Testament, but super cool and hippie in the New Testament.

But as I was reading rapidly through the Old Testament, I realized just how much the hesed love of God, this, this central doctrine of the Lord, which is his loyal companion, like love and how he loved the nation of Israel. I felt like grabbing Israel and shaking it. And he would still come back, and he would still.

Even when they went into exile, he brought them back from exile. He was constantly wooing his people. And he is a God who is.

And so I have just had to remind myself when my emotions remind me that it feels like he's not there, I will remember. The truth of theology is that he is there. He will never leave me, he will never forsake me. And I can rest in that.

And then I retell myself my own story. I go back and say, oh, look at how he was faithful here. And he was faithful here, and he was faithful here.

And I remember that seven month period where I felt like I wasn't hearing anything from him, but it was all this time, soil work, that was happening. And now I look back and say, oh my gosh, he was doing so much work, but I couldn't see it then.

But that reminds me that when he's not saying stuff, he's doing stuff. And so that's kind of how I've dealt with it.

You opened up so vulnerably a few minutes ago about being abused when you were in kindergarten, and then you just now talked about you can look back and see times where he's been faithful. Can you give us some examples?

I know, you know, you probably don't have time to go into all the details, but, like, when you do look back, what are some things that you saw that were like, oh, no, that's evidence of God's footprints. He showed up here or he brought this person or what kind of things do you mean?

I'm asking because I think a listener who maybe hasn't done that kind of spiritual practice you're talking about might get a sense of what you mean, and then they could start doing it for their own life.

Sure. So one of them.

These are kind of weird things, but when I was five, when all those bad things were happening to me, another bad thing that was happening to me was that my mom and her husband, second husband, were having these drug parties in our house. It was exceptionally unsafe. Lots of crime, all of that. I was terrified all the time.

But they would get so stoned that they would pass the joint around in a circle and they would pass it to me and say, let's get the little girl stoned. And part of God's breadcrumbs in that is I, inside of me, knew that it was wrong. And I Walked away from it. Now, that is God giving me a conscience.

When I was only five years old, that protected me from years of drug abuse that could have happened. Another one is just so strange. But sometimes when I was growing up, a Christian song would make it onto, you know, like a normal.

Like, they would become popular for whatever reason. There were not very many of them. They were not. There were not a lot of crossovers.

But whenever there was one, that would become my favorite song, and I would sing it over and over, and there was just this longing in me, like, who is God? He loves me. What. What does this mean?

It was just this identification of that there was something more to this life than just me being harmed and neglected. And it was through the radio waves of all things that God was wooing me, even as a little, tiny kid.

Hmm, Very cool. You know, you're. You talk about letting Jesus rewrite our story. What does that look like?

Yeah, that sounds kind of esoteric.

But what I mean by that is that I guess how I look at it is when I started parenting my kids, I was absolutely desperate to have a different story than I had as a child. And I was terrified, to be super honest.

And so part of restorying was crying out to God, getting on my knees, crying all the time, asking the Lord to help me, because I had no earthly idea how to parent. I had zero example. And rewriting of my story was, I am not going to be, by God's grace, the parent that I had.

I'm not going to be the mother that I had. I'm not going to be the father that I had.

And so part of that restorying process is us acknowledging that we want something different, that we are going to react to the past in a way and see it as a cautionary tale rather than an inevitability that we have to walk into. I just did not believe it was an inevitability. I believed that God was big enough to change me, and I desperately cried out to him.

I just recently read a quote, and I don't have it memorized, so I'll botch it. But I loved it so much. And it was from C.S.

Lewis, and he said, you don't get to choose the beginning of your story, but you do get to choose how it will end.

Yeah. And we have a lot more volition than we think. My husband often talks about the fact that Christianity is active, not passive.

Even in the, you know, spiritual growth category, we don't passively grow. I don't randomly grow by sitting On a couch all day. Like, I have to pursue it right now. My son wants me to do a half marathon with him.

I can't just go out and run a half marathon. I mean, that would be miraculous if I could in one moment.

But I am training, and I ran eight this week, and my legs are sore, but then I'll run 9, and then I'll run 10, and then 11. And so it takes work, it takes intention. It takes a desire to change. It also takes a recognition of what you don't want to be.

I believe that so much.

And when I look at Jesus colliding, we talk about that all the time around here in the New Testament, when he collides with people who are wounded, he doesn't just wave a magic wand. Sometimes he does. But oftentimes you see him and he actually asks people to participate in the healing that they long for.

He actually asks them to care about their healing as much as they want him to care about their healing. Right? Like, he's like, no, I'm not.

Take up your mat.

Right? Like, you're gonna have to be the guy who does something different than you've done for the last 40 years in that sen story. Right?

That guy is like, no, I'm the guy who doesn't move. And Jesus is like, no, no, no. That's been your identity, but I ain't no more. You're gonna have to get up and move.

And I think we're waiting to wake up on a Wednesday and feel whole. Yeah. And it doesn't happen. We have to actually participate in that.

What are some of the greatest moves you've made to experience healing in your story, would you say, with God?

Part of it was that what I just mentioned, this desperation, longing. And to be honest, like, one of the best times of healing for me was in college where I just kept spilling my story like an oversharer. I would just.

Anyone that wanted to listen, I was like, let me tell you my story. But it really helped because I just had to tell. It's like I had some sort of, like, healing threshold.

Once I told my story 238 times, then I would feel better. So I just kind of believed that, and I did that.

But then there came a time where my eldest daughter turned 5, and I started having these flashbacks and relapses. And at that point, for me, the healing came.

We didn't have money for counseling, and so I read every book I could get my hands on and experienced a lot of healing through the power of books, which is why I write books. I mean, I hope and pray that the Restore youe Life book will be part of someone else's story story of healing as well.

Does that ever blow your mind that God uses your story of pain to help other people experience healing?

Every day. It's beautiful. It's shocking, it's lovely.

It is as I think it was Tolkien who coined the word eucatastrophe, which means good, catastrophe, catastrophe happened. And eu is that little word that means good. Good can come out of a catastrophe.

For people listening who need encouragement to take the next step to trust God that he can use their story to bring about great meaning and help and healing to others in this world. What's your encouragement for them today?

Find your people. Find community. Because you will only grow as much as your community is. You need other people. You cannot grow in isolation.

You have to have even just one friend. You have to have a friend to be a part of your healing journey.

Mary, I know there's people listening who are gonna wanna check out your latest book or the other 49 books that you have and follow along with what you're doing and the way that the Lord's using your story in the world. How can they do that? That?

I'm on socials at Mary DeMuth, and then my website is marydemuth.com and everything is there.

Awesome. Thank you so much for hanging out with us today, Mary.

Thanks for asking Great questions,.

Friend. Lots of tidbits to hold on to from that conversation. I just loved when Mary said an untold story will never be healed.

I think a lot of us don't think we have an untold story, But I wonder if there's parts and places.

Maybe they're not whole chapters, maybe they're paragraphs or sentences that we have yet to share or to even wonder at or consider or allow ourselves to reread. And if they hurt in any possible way and we aren't paying attention to them, it's hard to let Jesus in to heal them.

And so if there's something coming up for you and you think maybe you need to process it, and it could be something small, it could be something that happened this last week, or it could be something really big from the past 20 years ago. Where is a space that you can tell that story? Do you have a friend or a spouse or pastor or a therapist?

You can certainly go to the Lord in prayer and begin to process. I know I do that a lot in journaling and writing, but I find those other spaces to be so helpful as well.

God wants to get in touch all of the spaces and places that hurt. He wants to heal your pain and then purpose it to help heal others.

If you know of a friend who would be so blessed by hearing this interview, make sure you send it on to her. A simple text to share it could quite possibly change the trajectory of your friend's life. Or just blame lesson. Encourage her.

We'll catch you next week. Keep colliding.