Tag Archives: alaska

2018 Alaska Cult Awareness Conference

What an amazing experience, to talk to some Alaskan residents and share our hearts as survivors with doctors, lawyers and other cult survivors.  We have ignited a spark that won’t be quenched.

Click the coinciding .pdf PowerPoint presentations to follow along with the speakers.

Part One – the Early Days by Vennie Kocsis

PDF File:

I Survived the Move

YouTube:

Watch on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/moveforwardinc/videos/231836517505644

Part Two – the Modern Move by Glori L. Stiner

PDF File:

The Move of God cult presentation Glori L Stiner

YouTube: 

Watch on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/moveforwardinc/videos/716126958728186

 

My Mother Didn’t Want Me Calling Boys So I Wouldn’t Look Like a Slut

Cover Only

“Rise of Sila” book cover – coming soon!

As I’m writing “Rise of Sila”, the sequel to “Cult Child“, which details my transition as a teenager from growing up in a cult, to adjusting with American culture, the many ways in which I was conditioned by my child sexual abuse is coming out in deeper ways.

Excerpt from “Rise of Sila”: “I feel confused and lost.  Boys come to school all the time with “love marks”, as everyone calls them, on their necks.   Why does that make me bad?  When it comes to boys, things aren’t so different in this world than they were back on the farm.  Boys get treated better out here too. Girls? We’re dumped if we say no when they want to have sex with us and sluts if we say yes.  My second lesson is that because I am a girl, even in this new world, I will still never be right.

Eventually Mama does ask me where Russ is; why he doesn’t call anymore.  I tell her he met another girl and doesn’t want to talk to me anymore.  Mama spends the next hour telling me that men are shit.  They’re all shit.  They take and take. That’s it.  So, I should expect it.  I should never trust a man as far as I can throw him.  If I carry one thing into my adult life I better take this one, Mama rants on.   Her voice fades into the distance as it has come to do when she begins to lecture.

I won’t listen. I will grow up to become battered and bruised by the men I would choose.  I will also become hardened.   She’s right about one thing, though.  Right now, as I sit here listening to her, I know I’ll never be able to trust a boy.”

My mother reinforced in me an ideal that males can never be trusted.  She did so any time a boy I liked didn’t like me back.  While she had strict rules about boys, so I wouldn’t look like a “slut“, such as not allowing me to call them because a “lady” always lets a boy call her, she also projected her own hate for men out through my coming of age experiences.

The layers of aftermath created by the abuse of Sam Fife’s Move of God did not end the day we boarded a plane at the Fairbanks, AK airport in 1984 and flew off to Tennessee.  It would settle into my skin and dominate how I experienced every aspect of my life in regard to relationships.

Writing this sequel is, at times, daunting.  Stories I once told as funny, in short, cryptic and satirical form, now take on a different perspective as I re-live the experiences.  They’re not so humorous anymore.  They are painful and raw.  They are a direct look into my own reality.

Most of all, they are making their way out of my DNA, through my fingertips, and into the pages of a book, which continues to tell my true story through the eyes of a girl named Sila.

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Vennie Kocsis is the best-selling author of Cult Child and the hostess of Survivor Voices Show and her live Sunday broadcast Off the Cuff. She is an advocate, poet and artist.

I Never Loved My Body. Here’s Why.

When I broach the topic of my own sexuality and where I am inside of it, I am sometimes told that my state of mind and feelings regarding my sexuality are just skewed by my child sexual abuse. I don’t completely disagree with that perspective. It’s not a new concept. It’s a scientific fact that child rape shatters a human both mentally and physically.

I do however, disagree that’s its skewed. I wouldn’t use that specific word.  My whole view of sexuality was formed from being raped as a child.  To define my perspective as skewed is implying that I once had a choice to know what sexuality even was.  Just as I have had to travel a path of re-programming my DNA back to its authentic thought perspective form, to expel physical and mental childhood trauma, so I’ve also had to do work specifically with my sexuality.

 “You see, I’ve never loved my body, but not because my body isn’t lovable. It’s that the natural urge to love myself in any way was taken from me by abusive adults.”

Vennie Kocsis

You see, I’ve never loved my body, but not because my body isn’t lovable.  It’s that the natural urge to love myself in any way was taken from me by abusive adults.  When I say, “never loved my body”, I don’t mean standing naked in front of a mirror and being happy with what I see. I didn’t love my body by not caring how it was used. I didn’t know what boundaries were. I didn’t know that I had an option of saying no. By the time I was old enough to learn I could say no, I was formed into a fearfully compliant and sexual system. I often moved into a space of sexual robotics, dissociated away from the act itself, even convincing myself that I loved individuals I did not love, so the programmed guilt of my sexuality would not plague me.

Growing up in a religious cult, I was taught that my body was a temple. Masturbation was a sin. Females who had sex before marriage were vile, dirty whores. Girls who were caught being seductively raped by much older men were blamed for their own fear and compliance. We were taught that our bodies belonged to the Christian God until a husband was chosen for us.

We were taught purity in conjunction with being raped by pedophiles, who came in droves to backwoods communes full of children; pedophiles who sought healing from the religious ministry, a ministry more intent on their doctrine and accepting the pedophiles into the fold to cast out the “pedophile demon”, than on the safety of us children.

If you think all rape is violent you are wrong. There are many ways a predator takes what they want from children and/or adults. Sometimes it’s soft coercion through gifts and items given, so the predator can later say, “Now you owe me.” Sometimes it’s offering sweets, toys or gadgets to little children. Sometimes it’s seducing a teenager or adult who blindly believes and hopes for love. Sometimes there is the use of drugs and/or alcohol. Sometimes it is taken by force as the victim fights to no avail. The list of ways rape is enacted is long and varying.

The media tends to highlight violent rape when soft coercive rape is possibly more often used. It can leave even the victim blaming themselves. It can coerce the victim into believing they participated and even enjoyed it. It shatters the mind into countless pieces.

Whether through physical violence or mental coercion, when the intent of the rapist is to TAKE for them-self, it is, indeed, rape. It is not a fully consensual act.  Children cannot consent to and should not be consenting to sexual acts.  It is a violation for which there is no coming back.  There is no argument for this.  The fact that child rape damages a human so deeply, is proof enough of its dissecting aftermath.   When fear or falseness is involved in the taking of anything from another human without their awareness, it is an absolute act of taking. It leaves scars. It leaves a broken body and mind as the predator walks away full and fed.

Shattered throughout my whole-body system, physically and neurologically, I ran through life in many modes. At times I was in fight or flight for days. Other times I was dissociated. I had other states of being come into my forefront as the authentic me wandered and self-moved like a robot behind them. I had no way to gauge what was healthy for me.

I would search many facets of sexuality, from bisexuality to the lifestyle of fetishes and BDSM; to poly-amorous attempts and more. Being a sexual abuse survivor, I had no self-awareness to connect my spirit with my sexuality.  I had yet to call my soul back into my body.  Instead, sex became a way to both numb and sometimes expel rage and pain.

I had been trained to never say no. I had been trained that saying no would leave me punished and/or shunned.  Saying no meant I wasn’t a good person.  Saying no meant I was selfish. I had been trained for compliance since the age of three. It was all that my mind and my body ever knew.

Many victims of sexual abuse take a journey through exploring extreme sexuality. I do not blame them or judge them for this journey. There is both a disconnect and a confusion in the mind towards our sexuality when we have been raped starting at a very young age. We sometimes become dominant to control being hurt. Yet, in the quiet of our mind, the pain still exists. We sometimes become compliantly submissive, believing if we give our bodies fully, that we will be loved, often ending up further abused.

I am not ashamed of my sexual past.  You should not be either.  Let no one shame you, and please do not shame yourself.  All my experiences, especially the ones which left me hurt and damaged, with more scars, remnants of my pain left in the hands of men who only cared about their own wants and having visuals to hold for their own pleasure, have formed me into who I am today. This does not erase their accountability for their predatory behavior. Acceptance is merely my path to freeing myself from the hold these sexual patterns have had on me.

I believe deeply in my own sacred sexuality. I now know that my vagina belongs to MY body. I am not a fan anymore of the ideal that sacred sexuality means giving my body away. This does not at all feel in alignment with my spirit or what makes me feel comfortable inside.

I have misgivings about the industry of sacred sexuality. It is a new-age trend rife with predators, many seemingly moving through one partner after another, and charging money to other humans to “free them from their sexual traumas and blocks”. One can only wonder the effect this has on individuals emotionally, especially when they have been severely sexually abused. I see the trends of sexual gurus, and their followers crawling behind them, believing that “free sex” means “healed wounds”.  I’ve see the aftermath from those who have awakened to understand they were being preyed upon by ill-intended individuals.

I am becoming very comfortable in owning this personal space. As the numbers of my age rise, the more I am deeply connected to the ethereal strand holding my body together. I have come to many realizations over the years. I have given my body to other humans for the wrong reasons, most of which did not align with my greater good.

Sexual healing, for me, has been learning to say no without fear of rejection and loss.

Healing from my sexual abuse has meant being willing to walk away from anyone who can’t respect the space I am choosing to be centered into, who would still coerce me or place me in a compliant or humiliating position, even after me having said it wasn’t where I wanted to be.  Healing has meant walking away from those who may have a hold on this part of me. Healing is putting my body first in health and energetic care.  Healing has involved learning to be alone with myself without feeling lonely and loving my body with a healthy perspective.

I dare say be mindful of your intuition, fluttering there below your rib cage. If you feel as I feel, in a space of exclusivity, with no urge to give yourself to others out of a “free sexuality” trend following or patterns of past abuse, don’t let anyone persuade you away from yourself.  Do not judge, but more so, do not let yourself be judged for not following along with any patterns of group think.  You have the right to be an individual with your own choices.

This poem grew out of this journey, as my childhood sexual abuse has been the deepest wound I’ve had to clean.  It is the wound which has held the densest toxins and had the strongest hold on me.

Somewhere

There are kisses invisible

Sent by men who

Stare at ceilings

Dripping with strands

Of hair.

I don’t dare travel there.

Imagine surprises;

Beach town getaways,

Watching watery sunrises.

But aloneness

Doesn’t call

For such privileges.

Floating to other circles,

Hoping for different hues;

Something new,

Unfamiliar.

Some call it

‘Being loved unconditional.’

I don’t know what

That feels like.

I know abuse and use,

Sex feigned as passion.

Forever exists;

Waiting somewhere.

by Vennie Kocsis, 2015

As I am rising higher inside of my own power, I am wielding an invisible sword called boundaries.  I reserve and demand the right to say no. I do not consent to being love bombed and flattered into giving myself away. I hold onto my power, as it is my sovereign right to be in full control of my human body. My mind can no longer be persuaded to go against the greater good of my own thoughts and desires.

As it is, so shall it be.  img_3657Vennie Kocsis is the best-selling author of Cult Child and the hostess of Survivor Voices Show and her live Sunday broadcast Off the Cuff. She is an advocate, poet and artist.

#MondayBlogs – A Cult Memory

Growing up in Sam Fife’s Move of God cult, reading material on the Delta Junction, Alaska, compound was very censored. Magazines had pages, pictures and sections removed, all deemed by the cult leaders to be “bad for our minds.”

One girl managed to sneak in The Chronicles of Narnia, The Borrowers and Stuart Little, which she let me borrow, quickly read and give back to her with the promise I wouldn’t tell anyone she had them.

One of my cherished possessions was a box set of The Little House On the Prairie series which I found in the clothing bank, a community room where we could rummage through all the personal belongings other people gave over to the cult. I read and re-read those books until the pages were falling out.

In my post-cult teenage life, at the age of fourteen, one of my first introductions to television would be Little House On the Prairie series starring Melissa Gilbert. I would weep hysterically when Mary went blind.

These books were a comfort to me in the cult. So much about Laura’s life was familiar; the isolation, the hard work, the struggles of growing up in a primitive and patriarchal world.

I received a sweet random act of kindness the other evening when my brother stopped by to give me a “never been used” color version set of the Little House on the Prairie series he’d found. It warmed me to hold these books in my hands again. He is always thoughtful with gifts.

I was momentarily swept back to how often I fell into books, reading them over and over. Watership Down, the tales of Laura Wilder and the many pieces of literature that got me through, let me escape the trauma and somehow made me feel less alone.

Books are treasures. They are a place where many of us kids jumped to escape the traumatic surroundings we so desperately hoped to one day be brave enough to run from. We must preserve them and encourage children to read, taking a break away from technology.

Vennie Kocsis is the best-selling author of Cult Child and the hostess of Survivor Voices Show and her live Sunday broadcast Off the Cuff. She is an advocate, poet and artist.

The Horror at 1379 Milepost

If you take a drive from Fairbanks, Alaska, an hour down Richardson Highway, through Delta Junction, you will arrive at 1379 Milepost. There you will turn onto a solitary road. At the end of that road is a religious commune with a history so horrible, the average person can only listen with radical acceptance, in order to grasp the total truth about the roots of this cult.  Child Abuse.  Sexual Molestation.  Mental Brainwashing.  Torture.  Public Humiliation.  Sleep Deprivation.  Control.  Triangulation.  All orchestrated in a patriarchal society of narcissists.

Three years ago, a couple of young reporters made a trip out to two of the Alaska compounds. At the 1379 Milepost compound, where I lived from the ages of seven to fourteen, they were met by a man named David Johnson, Their eyes were wide with disbelief. What my fellow survivor and I had told them was in fact, truth. There are compounds deep in the Alaskan woods, secluded, patrolled and controlled, a place where they were not allowed to step foot anywhere, except the office inside of the Tabernacle.  A tour of that compound was out of the question, according to David Johnson.

Plans for The Land Cult Compound 76-74

The original survey plans for “The Land” cult compound at 1379 Milepost, Delta Junction, Alaska

The compound I was on had several names including, but not limited to, Dry Creek, Living Word Ministry, The Farm, or as we referred to it when we lived there, “The Land”. They quit claimed the deeds back and forth, most likely to avoid taxes, changing names, hustling land parcels together. Douglas McClain, Jr was just a child on this compound with me. His father, Douglas Sr, groomed him on a path into prison, where he sits today, awaiting appeal. They were hustling a drug derived from goat’s blood. You can read the actual court complaint here:

Security and Exchange Commission vs Stephen D. Ferrone, Douglas A. McClain, Jr., Douglas A. McClain Sr., and et al.

Doug McClain Quit-Claim Deed

This is just one of several deeds I have showing the quit claim sell of The Land between Douglas McClain and George Harris.

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Sam Fife in the green coat, with his wife and their private plane, scoping out “The Land”

The words the main reporter used to describe his brief visit to the compound felt familiar to me:

“Creepy.”
“The energy was so thick and heavy it could be cut.”
“An air of sadness hovering.”
“Desolate.”
“Isolated.”

Indeed. I nodded. I know. I remember David Johnson, with his slit eyes and foul energy. He doled out a few beatings.  Many of the adults where abusers. It was, after all, God’s will to strip a child of its flesh, as Brother Sam Fife would instruct. If we weren’t being punished, we were being humiliated, gossiped about, and any sexual abuse that was found out in later years is blamed on the victim.  Still today, the mentality remains the same. Religion cloaking forced insanity.  We were monitored, lived in continuous fear and told the “night watchmen” were there to keep the bears out.  Yet, the compound was so large, it was impossible for them to watch everything at all times, hence my brother’s success on his second escape.

Bryce and Pat Alloe

Young men at “The Land” approximately, 1980/1981, monitoring with guns.

Three years ago I was there as an adult, hunkered down in Fairbanks, Alaska, just miles away from so many people who had either abused me directly or who I had witnessed abuse other children. I wanted to drive onto that compound myself. I remember the layout like the back of my hand. I could navigate it in the dead of night. I wanted to find Marilyn Hagley and ask her why she beat me so much when she was my teacher.  Maybe if abusers experience what they have doled out onto children, they will get a notion of the affect it leaves behind.

Not far from The Land at 1379 Milepost is another compound owned by this cult. It is controlled by a man named Bill Grier.  Whitestone Farms is located not far from The Land. Some cult apologists have adamantly denied being associated with Sam Fife. Yet, Whitestone is on the cult’s Convention schedule, and Bill Grier’s criminal record began in the 1970’s. Their website proudly boasts about the man who helped broker their land; a man named Doug McClain.  When the pieces fit, they fit.  When the puzzle reveals the picture, it’s existence cannot be denied.

History of Whitestone Screenshot

ScreenshotBillGrierArrestedforExorcism

Press release naming Bill Grier in the use of exorcism on children in school from “Today’s World”, edition dated: 5/23/1974

I remember conventions. Six, sometimes eight hours of sitting with no breaks or food. My mother sometimes kept mints in her purse.

“To give us all a little sugar so we won’t get faint.” She’d say.

Conventions are hardcore mind control sessions with the Elite Move Leaders all gathering, vying for the position to preach their sordid interpretation of Biblical text. None of it matters. It’s all just long sessions of angry preachers feeding the fear of Hell and counter love bombing with the concept of Heaven and God for the good people.

Conventions provide a chance for the Movite “big wigs” to cavort with one another and shake their peacock feathers to impress the gathering of cult members, who often travel thousands of miles to attend the conventions and participate in lengthy frenzies of speaking in tongues, singing and serving their religious Handlers who feed their minds controlled instruction.

I wonder if the poor children still have to sit like we did for hours, on hard, backless benches or folding chairs. We sat so long, our hips ached.  Do they at least break for meals now?

There are mini countries inside of America. They make their own rules. They abuse children and swindle their “citizens”.  They are mind terrorists who get away with abuse under the guise of religious freedom, and American citizens have chosen to look away for too long.

I wonder when people will begin to care about the cult no one ever talks about?

The Outhouse and a Sears Magazine

When I was a child growing up on Sam Fife’s cult compound in Alaska, we did not have electricity or plumbing. As a result, we used the bathroom in chamber pots and outhouses. We also did not have toilet paper. Our toilet paper was often a Sears magazine with anything that wasn’t “proper” for us to see torn out of it.

We would rip out a couple of pages, sitting bare butted on top of a wooden hole, softening the glossy paper with our hands so that we could wipe as gently as possible.

I also had a severe fear that a demon would rise from the pile of human manure and snatch me down into the outhouse hole.

It was here, that I would find the toy sections of the magazine, and I would see what all the of the kids outside of the compound were getting to play with. These toys were considered evil commodities for they fed the wants and desires of the flesh; to want to play and enjoy doing it. For all “play” and attention should be only on God and what he wanted for our lives.

Yet, they left those pages in the magazine for us children to have to use as toilet paper after stealing a few seconds to dream of what could be.

So I used these pages to clean my body, dropping them to float down into a mound of lime covered feces, urine and other, already melting pages.

Your face crinkles as you read this.

“Gross“, you say.

Yes. The smell covers you, rancid and fuming, even with the lime to help counter it.

When we finally got toilet paper around 1981, it was rationed. Families were given toilet paper rolls based on how many people were in their family. Then the toilet paper roll itself was rationed.

“One square for number one and two squares for number two.”

The rule of thumb in regards to the use of toilet paper.

We live in this society who doesn’t understand what’s it’s like to be without even the smallest of things like toilet paper and baby wipes, diapers and showers, toilets that flush and electricity; even the freedom to be exactly who we want to be if we so choose.

Toilet meditations often reveal a lot.

I’m grateful as fuck for toilet paper and toilets that flush. Not because of third world countries who don’t have them, but because I lived a third world childhood in a first world country that was and still is so focused on third world issues that the citizens of America never pay attention to the horror children endure here in their own camp.

and for the most part, they still aren’t.

I’m done dealing with humans who claim co-consciousness and oneness or follow religions that claim to be based out of love yet are the same people supporting things like hitting children. They call it discipline. I call it abuse that damages the spinal column.

Oh, that’s just science. What do they know… unless you’re dying. Then you care about science.

Yes, I’m talking directly to you.

How can anyone be love in any way while at the same time finding a reason to support hitting, neglecting or harming the most innocent and defenseless humans on the planet?

This oxymoron of take and shut down are like gnats.

I realized today in a big way, how much humans are stuck in duality; how they think they know all, and yet, if they silenced themselves to listen, if they read the voices of us survivors who have written out our experiences, they would understand how deeply they must open their minds in order to truly bring this planet to a place of peace.

They’d understand why people like me, are grateful for toilet paper, why we fight against mind control and shorten our allowance arena.

Until you’ve lived with nothing. Until you’ve carried the scars of a shattered sacrum from too many childhood spankings, memories of outhouses and dumping chamber pots into potty dump holes, working through aching bones, untreated split skin and bruises, you can’t know. You lived a life of electricity, television and secular luxuries like getting to go to grocery stores.

Until you’ve had that all stripped from you and lived wiping yourself with magazine pages holding treasures you can never have, oh, dears, you cannot know. You can only accept and ask yourself why you can’t open your mind to care.

Be grateful for toilet paper.

When Abuse Is a Child’s Normal

**trigger warning: abuse description**

If there had been a safe place for me as a child, what would I have said? I didn’t know sexual abuse was wrong. I only knew it caused me physical pain and made me want to hide away. It sent me far from this earth place, to other dimensions, so I could endure it.

I didn’t know being beaten was wrong. It was my normal. I had to be stripped of my sin. I was a bad child. All children were born bad. If only I could learn to be good, then maybe the beatings would stop.

I didn’t know demons weren’t real. They lurked in shadows waiting to jump into me and make me do horrible things kids do, like laugh or play, cry and want their mother and make me loud, even though I was deaf. If I sat through enough demon casting out sessions, endure the fistfuls of hair pulling, face slapping, pinching and screaming, maybe the demons would leave me alone.

When torture is a child’s normal, what do they view as worse than that? What is there to tell someone; if there even is someone to tell?

I would one day find out that demons are real. The only difference is… They’re human.

S.C.