Wholistic Healer Spotlight:
Hye-Kyong Kim
Hye-Kyong Kim is a Korean American, Korean-Adopted, clinical psychologist with many years of experience working with individuals around healing through a trauma-focused and decolonized lens.
Hye-Kyong has experience working with Indigenous and multicultural communities, adoption (domestic, transnational, and transracial), foster care, complex and developmental trauma, grief, self- esteem, spirituality, depression, anxiety, attachment, racial trauma and oppression, and somatic work.
A Conversation with
Hye-Kyong Kim
IAMAdoptee interviews Hye-Kyong Kim, who was adopted from Seoul, South Korea in 1975. By day she works as a clinical psychologist and by night she writes creatively.
What is your name?
Hye-Kyong Kim
Spiritual name is Chilseong Seonnyeo (칠성 선녀)
How do you identify yourself?
I identify as a Korean American woman, a Korean adopted woman. I am a mother, a partner, a daughter, a sister, an aedong/mudang (애당 무당), a psychologist, and a writer.
Where were you adopted from and when? If you would like to briefly share any aspects of your life before adoption, please do.
I am adopted from Seoul, South Korea in 1975. I learned my story differs from my papers since coming into reunion. I learned that my papers were not correct, given a familial coverup, so I went through life thinking I was abandoned at a police box in Seoul. My American papers said I was found by a neighborhood woman who brought me to the police station, and my Korean papers said my mother brought me there saying there was no way her and my father would be together again. On Chuseok in 2018, I learned through a DNA match with a half-sister (who did not know of my existence) my omma was able to share her story: my grandmother and great aunt (the policewoman) took me while my mother was unconscious after giving birth and placed me up for adoption to protect her from a life of hardship as a single mother.
What is a shaman? and what does your practice look like?
A shaman is a spiritual healer who can be the translator and guide between the physical and spiritual world. They bring healing and guidance to the people, inviting them to go deep beyond physical survival in this rough world; to work with the spirits that are haunted even in death; to help bridge the separation of mind/body/spirit; to help regulate fears and ailments through release, fearlessness in working with emotions, and connection.
I have always been sensitive to people’s currents of survival of the fittest. Maybe it was because of the severe neglect as an infant in Korea, where I came to this country in a malnourished and pre-autistic state—already a “master” of dissociation—these seeing through people’s defenses and understandings have led to an eventual trust of my own intuition, my somatic experiences, and my relationship to the spirit world. My shamanic practice is like my therapy practice—I listen to people’s experiences and help them connect to their intuition and spirits. I believe that everyone has shin, but because of some people’s need to dominate and subjugate, natural mind, body, spirit has been separated and we do not trust our magnificent physiology to guide us through life. Spirit helps us do so. So, my hope is to help others connect to themselves, their spirits/ancestors, and develop trust in their own answers, which is much like I do in my psychological and somatic therapy practice. My shaman work is just focused more on the spiritual realm and listening to what the spirits have to say—dreams, energy, coins, candle rituals and prayers. I conduct sessions and energy candle/prayer work.
What does healing mean for you as a human, an intercountry adoptee and as a shaman? What does it look like?
I feel healing is crucial or we project and overcompensate all over the place, keeping our defenses up all the time. Then we are living in survival and miss life; we are busy living in The Walking Dead vortex, and that’s no way to exist. That’s no way to be a human relating to others. It’s clear how that mentality leads to intergenerational trauma and continued expansion of trauma globally. For me, healing means finding a connection to oneself and others, creativity, holding ambiguity and complexity, flexibility, and where we do not have to navigate the world in survival mode. Things are neither good nor bad. I was initiated a year ago and this year has been both amazing and painful. I’ve noticed the temptation to get sucked up into what a “good mudang” means, which picks up old traditional ways, language, ways of thinking—even buy-ins to patriarchy and hierarchy—even as the history of muism is to fight the power.
As an adoptee, this is very activating. The trauma of losing the culture, the people, the language, and to be cast back into a place of shame of not knowing, is so anxiety provoking.
Once again, the shaming dichotomies surface and in walks our very deep magical belief that something was inherently wrong or bad that our fates would be so literal. Once the newness, more experiences, and learning from Jennifer Kim in a way that was not hierarchal, lecturing, rigid/judgmental, I oriented and settled. I could breathe again, and I remembered I’ve always been connected and have been doing the work because I’ve been listening to them all long. I married at a young age into a Hmong family, had six children, and lived a life that was semi-traditional to help prepare for understanding my ancestors. When I walked away from that marriage, as heartbreaking and traumatic as it was, I now know it was a necessary part that led me right to where I am today, knowing who I am. I am now re-married to a Vietnamese-Adopted partner, and I had my seventh child. Chilseong showed up yet again. I am curious what is next.
And what motivated you to learn and want to become masterful at this practice?
I notice I have a visceral response to the word “want to become masterful at this practice.” The plight of the shaman is nothing that is asked for or even wanted, to be honest. It has been a very painful experience from a young age to not fit in, to experience things that do not make sense and deem you as crazy or sick, to develop a relationship with death when you just want to be like everyone else, to sponge in other’s ailments and manifestations (including ancestors), and to basically accept you are meant to live with one leg in the spirit realm and one in the physical. It’s not mastery, it’s acceptance of a role you have, an obligation to community and people and for the better-good of society. It’s humbling.
That is why it’s crucial that we work with our traumatized selves in our healing before working with clients in this way. It’s unconscious of course, but when we refuse to deal with our own traumas and loss, we often displace it onto helping others. Then the slide into the undercurrents of feeding our wounded selves (the need to belong; to be seen, heard, recognized; to be valued when we haven’t experienced that in our families) transforms into power, competition, rigidity/righteousness, and saviorism/ martyrdom…all understandable defense mechanisms, of course. But now consumed or distracted, unable to see how our hurt can hurt others, the capacity to hold accountability thins and we lean into defense mode—focus only on how we have been wronged and betrayed—and rage is released. Because you have created a masterful or “saintly” façade, that is when the people get hurt because you are now feeding your need not to hurt anymore.
I guess that’s all to say, “mastering this” means being open to wiggling around in pain and suffering, to not need to “fix it”, to allow others to be exactly where they are in all their different feelings, and to hold that space, compassion, and attunement with them. Attune requires attunement to yourself first, then it flows outwards and collectively.
Are there specific programs you are creating or have created for the intercountry adoptee community?
I am in the process of working with personal and collective rituals for adoptees to connect and release to their pain/grief, connection to birth lands, ancestors/spirits. As of now, I do spiritual SE sessions. I’ve noticed during sessions, even though I receive messages and dreams and knowing’s, so does the client. So, much as is the case in therapy (I do not give advice), to operate as expert-knows-best feels enabling and disempowering. Trauma causes helplessness and powerlessness. Healing from trauma and complicated grief entails empowerment, storytelling, and valuing our own wisdom and spirits.
I am also working with individual teachings of small ways to connect to Korean ancestors as the diaspora and working with ceremony (individual and groups) specifically for adoptees.
In what ways has your identity as an adoptee changed, evolved, or developed over the years?
I am in the process of working with personal and collective rituals for adoptees to connect and release to their pain/grief, connection to birth lands, ancestors/spirits. As of now, I do spiritual SE sessions. I’ve noticed during sessions, even though I receive messages and dreams and knowing’s, so does the client. So, much as is the case in therapy (I do not give advice), to operate as expert-knows-best feels enabling and disempowering. Trauma causes helplessness and powerlessness. Healing from trauma and complicated grief entails empowerment, storytelling, and valuing our own wisdom and spirits.
I am also working with individual teachings of small ways to connect to Korean ancestors as the diaspora and working with ceremony (individual and groups) specifically for adoptees.
Are there any ways you have incorporated your Korean heritage/culture into your daily life?
Korean food (even though I declare it is Hye-Kyong style), entertainment (books, movies, music, kdramas), collective ways of thinking, prayers in the morning and evening, and continued learning language (even though I have a huge trauma block).
Is there one book, film or movie you would recommend to fellow adoptees?
One? How is that even possible? I love The Language of Blood by Jane Jeong Trenka, Wet Hex by Sun Yung Shin, Lee Herrick’s poetry as well as Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. All so influential Korean adoptee writers. But when I read Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005), I was struck with the parallels of transracial/transnational adoptees, the allegory of waking up injured, alone, and with no memory with people trying to kill her….where finding who and what she was is crucial in her survival….I mean, isn’t that our story?
