Intergenerational Trauma and the Korean War: Healing Across Generations, Helena Soholm & Joseph Han

In our first gathering of Korea Peace Now!'s Intergenerational Learning and Healing Series 2024, we heard from author Joseph Han and psychologist and shaman Helena Choi Soholm on intergenerational trauma, healing, and the Korean War. Both will share their approaches to healing intergenerational trauma and grappling with their families’ histories, the legacies of U.S. imperialism, and the ongoing war in Korea.
Helena Soholm, PhD is a transpersonal psychologist and a Korean shaman. She has been a clinician for the last 18 years, and in her practice, she integrates indigenous healing systems with Western theories of psychology to support the healing and growth process of people navigating the complexities of technologically advanced societies. As a healer and teacher, Helena facilitates soul and ancestral initiations through ceremony and ritual. Clearing and honoring ancestral energy is achieved through the recovery of the indigenous mind, which can deepen a person’s connection to self, others, and land. She collaborates with healers and artists around the world, offering shamanic ceremonies in the United States, Asia, and Europe. The goal of these ceremonies is to ignite collective healing from humanity’s colonial past while simultaneously creating pathways for people to gain awareness of their greater purpose on the planet.
Joseph Han is the author of Nuclear Family, named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a best book of the year by NPR and Time Magazine. He is a 2022 National Book Foundation ‘5 Under 35’ honoree and a Kundiman fellow in fiction. His novel won the 2023 Asian/Pacific American Literature Award Adult Fiction Honor, the 2024 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, and was short-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. At Korea Peace Action: National Mobilization to End the Korean War (July 2023), Joseph co-led a grief transmutation ceremony and community healing event focused on addressing collective and generational grief. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Korea Peace Now!’s Intergenerational Healing and Learning Series 2024:
"All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory," writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen. The Korean War was the “the most brutal war of the 20th century,” according to historian Samuel Moyn, with more than 4 million killed in three years, mostly Korean civilians. Although often referred to as “the Forgotten War,” the conflict continues more than 70 years after a fragile ceasefire was signed, keeping Korean families separated and driving the extreme militarization of the Korean Peninsula and the entire Asia-Pacific. Many Korean War survivors live with trauma, which is then inherited by their descendants, resulting in an ongoing cycle of violence, secrecy, and silence.
Korea Peace Now! is launching an online public educational series featuring activists, artists, and scholars to critically understand the impacts of intergenerational trauma stemming from the Korean War and other U.S. forever wars. Through dialogue, political education, and storytelling, we will empower our community to take action for peace, build bridges across generations, and forge a path toward realizing our collective security and liberation. Our speakers will highlight how intergenerational healing informs their work and efforts to end the ongoing Korean War. We will also discuss how the fate of the Korean War is inextricably intertwined with all movements seeking to end U.S. wars and militarism globally.
Event date: May 29, 2024