She didn't choose social work. Social work chose her.

She was the valedictorian of her high school class of 500 — a natural mathematician who could have gone almost anywhere. Instead, she followed something quieter: a deep, unshakeable warmth for people. For their stories. For what they carry and what they're capable of. Psychology found her first, then social work. And forty years later, she's never looked back.

She calls other helping professionals her people — and she means it.

But she'll also tell you the truth: this work takes a toll. Life takes a toll. After decades as a clinical social worker, Ruth found herself facing the same question her clients often face — how do I keep going? Her answer became a framework, and that framework became a book: The Prescription for Joy. Not a theory. A lived practice.

Then her mother died. Ruth was working as a grief counselor with a local nonprofit hospice at the time — walking others through their losses while navigating her own. She did what she has always done: she paid attention, she felt it fully, and she wrote it down. Return to Mother, Returning Home is that book — honest, tender, and hard-won.

Music has run through all of it. It always has. One of the reasons Ruth landed in Nashville was a love for music and songwriting that she simply couldn't leave behind. These days, she plays a couple of times a month with a garage band of fellow "oldsters" — mostly therapists — wailing Bonnie Raitt tunes, harmonizing, and rotating between guitar, keyboard, and congo drums. She is, by all accounts, genuinely funny. Spontaneous. Creative. The kind of speaker your audience will still be talking about on the drive home.

Ruth doesn't just teach joy. She embodies the long, honest, sometimes messy journey of finding it — and she brings every bit of that journey into the room with her.