This study examines the pains three North Korean women defectors whose families were separated have experienced, the contextual information necessary to understand their pains, how their pains evolved through meditation counseling, and the overall the... This study examines the pains three North Korean women defectors whose families were separated have experienced, the contextual information necessary to understand their pains, how their pains evolved through meditation counseling, and the overall therapeutic process. Narrative study is chosen as the research methodology, and meditative counseling based on Reflected Image Meditation(RIM) is used as the counseling method. Rather than strictly follow the ‘storytelling’ and ‘re-storytelling’ methodology, the study retains its focus on therapy. In the research findings, the experiences of the three North Korean women—Mount Baekdu, Rainbow, and Spring Water—are each organized into descriptive, explanatory, and therapeutic narratives. The women’s narratives are then reframed as ‘trauma (or pain), ‘family dissolution,’ ‘healing’ and ‘change’ to better understand the source and meaning of their pains. Mount Baekdu grows up in an army as a lonely child. She joins the military at a young age and continues on as a commissioned officer, but after she is held responsible for an incident in the military, she defects on her own. Ever since her children arrive from North Korea a few years after her arrival, she endures poor health and economic hardships. She especially finds it difficult to support the treatment of her young son’s incurable disease. Under such circumstances, whenever her son displeases her, she explodes in anger and sometimes even hits him. Through RIM Mount Baekdu confronts, narrates, and then reflects on her experiences such as the difficult and lonely time in the military, being blacklisted and defecting alone, the shock in seeing her son for the first time in South Korea, hitting and being mad at her son, and the hopeless outcome of her son’s surgery. She eventually heals. Throughout this process, her obsession with her ailing son transforms into acceptance and love. Rainbow is deeply in love with her husband. While her husband works as a major general in the military, she lives happily with a son and a daughter, but after her husband is discharged, they are relocated to an inn room and their ration is cut. After much deliberation, she decides to defect for the children’s sake, but her husband hesitates out of fear, and she ultimately parts from him. She is caught and put in prison twice while going back and forth between North Korea and China before she makes it to South Korea with her children. However, she still longs for her husband and develops a trauma from their parting. Additionally, during her first time in prison, she develops an obsession with money. Rainbow’s shock from the first time she was in prison, parting from her husband, death of a man she knew in China, and discovery that her friend at their factory died from overwork heals through RIM. She becomes free from the longing for her husband, discomfort around men, and obsession with money. Spring Water is top of her class in elementary school, but after her teacher and mother tell her that she will not be able to go to college, she experiences devastation from having to give up her studies. In her first marriage, she gives birth to a son, but she gets divorced after a year and a half, and the guilt of not having cared for him continues to weigh on her. She is later pressured by her mother to defect to China where she has some relatives, and there she meets her second husband, with whom she builds a happy life. However, she parts from him when she is forcibly repatriated after being caught by the Chinese police. When she finds that she cannot endure her life in North Korea any longer, she defects to China again and marries a third husband. She gives birth to a son and a daughter, but unable to withstand domestic violence and her mother-in-law’s abuse, she defects to South Korea on her own. Through RIM, Spring Water too becomes free from the devastation she felt as a young aspiring student, the guilt in not having raised her first son, her uneasy and violent experiences in China, and feeling sorry toward her two children in China for not being able to bring them to South Korea. The significance of this study is that first, in the context of scarce qualitative research that uses in-depth counseling available among studies focusing on North Korean defectors, this research sets a precedent by examining in depth, through eight counseling sessions, the stages and transformations that take place when counseling a North Korean defector. Second, it applies for the first time RIM-based meditation counseling on North Korean women defectors’ experiences of family dissolution, which is an area in which RIM-based meditation counseling has never been applied to. Third, by using not only descriptive and explanatory narratives but also therapeutic narrative when doing narrative study through meditation counseling, this study confirms the therapeutic effects of storytelling.
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