Jill Carroll Adjusts to Freedom

March 31, 2006 — -- When Jill Carroll was unexpectedly released Thursday after 82 days in captivity in Iraq, the first phone call she made was to her twin sister, Katie Carroll, to say, "I'm free."

Then both sisters burst into tears, according to The Christian Science Monitor, the newspaper for which Jill Carroll had been freelancing before she was kidnapped.

Next, she called her parents.

"I love you," she told her mother, according to the Monitor, "and every day single day I was in captivity I cried over how worried you must be. … And what a burden this must be for the family."

"Jill called me directly. It was quite a wake-up call, to say the least," her father, Jim Carroll, said. "She's apparently in good health and mentally strong."

"We just couldn't be more pleased and more grateful for this good news for Jill and her family," said Richard Bergenheim, the Monitor's editor.

Carroll was dropped off Thursday near an office of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's main Sunni political organization, in western Baghdad. Her feelings of joy and relief are only stage one of the long recovery process former hostages face, according to experts on kidnapping.

"In a matter of hours, 48 hours or 72, this world that she's been in the last three months is going to come crashing down on her and she is going to need her mental toughness to get through this," said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI agent and now ABC News consultant.

But so far, Carroll is holding up well, says Bergenheim who received an e-mail this morning from Jim Carroll.

"It was just letting us know that Jill was sounding very well, perhaps a little emotionally fragile, as we can certainly understand," Bergenheim said. "But on the whole they're just so encouraged by how well she does seem to be."

One enormous challenge former hostages must deal with is grappling with emotions about their captors. On Thursday, when Carroll gave an interview to an Iraqi TV station, she portrayed them as sympathetic, which experts say is normal.