toxic thoughts and replace them with love. There wasn’t anything
wrong with the patients.The errors were in me.”
As Dr. Hew Len explained it, the patients and even the ward
didn’t feel love. So he loved everything.
“I looked at the walls and saw they needed to be painted,” he
told me. “But none of the new paint would stick. It would peel off
right away. So I simply told the walls that I love them.Then one day
someone decided to paint the walls and this time the paint stuck.”
That sounded weird, to say the least, but I was getting accus-
tomed to this sort of talk from him. I finally had to ask the question
that had been bothering me the most.
“Did allof the patients get released?”
“Two of them never were,” he said. “They were both transferred
elsewhere. Otherwise, the entire ward was healed.”
Then he added something that truly helped me understand the
power of what he had been doing.
“If you want to know what it was like during those years, write
Omaka-O-Kala Hamaguchi. She worked as the social worker during
the time I was there.”
I did. She wrote the following to me:Dear Joe,
Thank you for this opportunity.
Please know that I am writing this in collaboration with Emory
Lance Oliveira, who is a social worker who worked on the unit with
Dr. Hew Len.
I found myself the social worker assigned to the newly opened
forensic unit at the state mental hospital in Hawaii.This unit was called
the Closed Intensive Security Unit (CISU). It housed prisoner-patients
who had committed often heinous felony crimes of murder, rape, assault,
robbery, molestation, and combinations thereof, and were also diagnosed
with or thought to possibly have a serious mental disorder.180 Zero Limitsccc_zero_177-188_truth.qxd 5/4/07 2:34 PM Page 180