You're listening to the TechSoul Culture Podcast.

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You're listening to the Tex Soul Culture podcast from the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology.

Hey everybody.

Welcome back and thanks for listening to TechSoul Culture.

I'm Austin Hewelsbeck. I'm the multimedia

specialist here at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and I'm so excited to share

this conversation between Derek McNeil and Abby Wong-Hefter. Abby graduated from the Seattle

School with a Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology in 2007. She's been a part of the teaching staff at the Allender Center ever since its formation in 2010,

and recently has been integral in the development of a new concentration in trauma and abuse

for counseling students here at the school.

In this conversation, Abby explores some of her own personal history and how it led into the work she's doing today.

It's a deep and rich conversation that addresses both the realities of trauma and the hope to live a more integrated life on an individual level and also on a more collective level.

Hope you enjoy.

It is a pleasure for me to have today, Abby Wong, Hefter, with us. And Abby is a former student, but she's also working and really directing, I'll say, a new program that we're starting here. And we'll talk a little bit about that. But before we get into that, I asked Abby to share a little bit about her history with the school in the Allender Center and just what brings this conversation to the fore right now. I like to tell the pre-Marz Hill Graduate School story, which is that my first gig out of undergrad was working as a case manager at an adoption agency.

At that time, it was specifically working with China.

And I had just found myself wanting so much more than what I was doing. I can shuffle papers. I'm a fairly

decent administrative person, but my heart was just longing to actually more or less sit with

orphans.

So I started applying to graduate schools.

I was on my way, literally bags packed, moving across the country.

Again, I was headed back to Virginia.

...