The Official And Now Love Podcast: www.andnowlove.com The Freedom to Choose Project: www.freedomtochooseproject.org For more than 20 years, the Freedom to Choose Project has walked into maximum security prisons and done something the system was never designed to do. It brings outside volunteers in to sit knee to knee with incarcerated people, and in a space stripped of judgment, it helps everyone in the room set down the weight of old trauma and find their way back to their own worth. In this deeply moving episode, Cynthia Marks sits with the project's founders, husband and wife psychologists Dr. Bonnie Paul and Dr. David Paul, and with Eddie, a graduate of the program who joins the conversation as a free man and now a member of its staff. The name comes from Viktor Frankl, who survived the concentration camps and concluded that everything can be taken from a person except the freedom to choose one's attitude. David and Bonnie trace the whole thing back to a single letter from a woman named Rhonda, serving a life sentence, who wrote to around 300 people asking for a talk on self-esteem, and to the one yes that turned into two decades of work. They walk through how it actually happens, the trio format where a volunteer shares first and busts every stereotype in the room, the way shame gets laid down in childhood, and David's plain definition of healing: taking the love you finally feel and putting it on the places inside that hurt. Eddie's story carries the heart of it, from being told the only way out was a pine box, to the Sunday he cried like a baby when he realized unconditional love was all he had ever wanted, to the volunteer he found again eight years later. They also name something most of us never consider, that the people who lock the doors are carrying their own cumulative trauma, and that a correctional officer's average survival after retirement is less than five years. It all lands where this show always does, on the truth that no one is the worst thing they have ever done, and that love is the tool that changes everything. This is And Now Love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Please follow, rate, and share the podcast, and pass this episode along to someone who might need it. To volunteer in person, join the year-long correspondence program, or donate, visit the Freedom to Choose Project online. Follow our socials: Instagram / / andnowlove.podcast Facebook / / And Now Love Podcast Youtube / / @AndNowLovePodcast TikTok / / and.now.love.podc Timestamps 0:35 — Welcome: Bonnie, David, and Eddie 2:22 — "We Are So Flexible": The Space to Choose 7:12 — Viktor Frankl and the Origin of the Name 8:53 — One Letter From Rhonda That Started It All 12:25 — The First Workshop, and a Whole Prison Shifts 19:11 — Inside the Trio, and Why Rejection Is Universal 24:06 — Shame, Self-Worth, and What Healing Means 27:22 — Eddie's Story and His Breakthrough 35:48 — How the Practice Works 42:27 — Why Punishment Doesn't Work 47:26 — Walking Prisons and the Trauma of the Guards 56:23 — Hurt People Hurt People, Healed People Heal 1:01:42 — Feeling It Without Holding It 1:07:24 — "I Am the Author of My Book" 1:08:58 — A Dream: Teach Every Child These Skills 1:12:30 — How to Get Involved