<Begin Segment 6>

PW: You told me about two specific support programs or groups, I should say, that were founded out of Buena Vista's work, and one of them was called the Wounded Healer support group. Can you tell me about that group?

MY: The Wounded Healer group was something I convened. As I remember it, I did a series of workshops on posttraumatic stress disorder. I did a series of sermons on it, and then post-worship conversations around what is PTSD. And so I was trying to help give people a framing that if they're experiencing certain things, it's not unusual, and to help people not feel out of sorts, and to be able to identify what we're feeling and then be able to take that energy and move with it in a positive way. And I considered that part of a healing ministry. And out of that series of workshops came a small support group that we decided to go ongoing, and we called it Wounded Healers. It was named after a book called Wounded Healer by Henri Nouwen, who was a Catholic writer and theologian. And so the idea around it for Christian theology is that Jesus was a "wounded healer" himself. And when he came to see the disciples after he was resurrected, he said, "Look at the wounds in my hands and my side." And the visceral wounds kind of were a jarring visual, but at the same time, evoked the sense of places of woundedness that people had for themselves to own their wounds and then to also move into a process of healing. So we had a support group that went on for some time and a handful of people that participated in that. And then from there, there was some interest in Sansei specific groups to talk about things that were, people were addressing and looking at from the standpoint of the third generation, or for that matter folks that had not been in camp but had inherited the experience. So kind of the notion of us looking at transgenerational trauma, and the ways in which we were impacted by that. And I personally felt that myself, and so it was natural for me to support that idea of us convening Sansei together to talk about things.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.