TRAUMA THERAPIST

I was taken from my homeland when I was just a toddler. Born with Cerebral Palsy in South Korea and raised in the U.S. It took many years before I even began to question what had happened to me. “You were adopted” explained it all. I believed everything I was told and was told to believe everything I heard. After half a lifetime, I have learned that I’m among 250,000 other Korean children who were taken from our native country. I continue to seek ways to reconcile the pain that comes with being put into a child supply market as a disposable commodity. Should I be proud of doing my part to revitalize my country of birth? or do I have the right to be resentful towards a for-profit trafficking scheme run by a criminal industry?

The truth is that this industry operates in hundreds of countries around the world resulting in millions of victims. As a trauma therapist and educator, I use all my knowledge and experience to educate other survivors and assist them through a restoration process. Developing public awareness campaigns and providing trainings for mental health professionals and advocates are key elements for community-wide recovery from this industry. Writing and speaking about the numerous impacts of human trafficking, slavery, and abuse has not only been therapuetic for me, but informative to the communities I serve. Through The Truth Guide, I collaborate with experts and organizations to offer valuable resources for survivors, their loved ones, and the global society at large. I speak from a deeply personal place with the loss of Lark, Tam, and Thaddeus with whom I grew up with and shared a common spirit of survivorship. You can read my tributes to them on social media that I’ve written every year.

Today, I speak truth to power as the industry continues to grow its profits and expand into new markets. It must be fully criminalized as human trafficking and slavery to ensure a future free from an industry seeking to exploit the entire human race turning everyone into disposable commodities.