My Story--Short Version

Ancient History
I was born and raised in a cult in Northern California. My parents joined the group in the 1960s. The Beatles just got back from their famous trip to India where they studied Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh, and every tin-pot con-artist in the US was setting themselves up as the next greatest guru on the planet.

My parents met at Antioch College in Ohio, where they lived together off and on. My father graduated and moved to San Francisco to get into the film and TV industry. When he got there, he encountered Alex Horne and his Theater of All Possibilities. Alex styled himself a teacher of Gurdjieff and Middle Eastern mysticism, and my father joined his group. He wrote to my mother, and she came out to visit him over summer vacation. She never went back. Under pressure from Alex, they got married and had one child, my older sister. My mother cut ties to her family in San Antonio and never told them why. Throughout my childhood and long into my adulthood, she kept her involvement in the group a secret until she was diagnosed with cancer in 1997.

Both Alex, and later his wife Anne, who took over the group, made use of an abandonment device to keep their followers dependent. They repeatedly disbanded the group under the pretext of sending their followers out into the world to apply what they learned. This "Go Forth and Conquer" device produced the desired effect. The people they worked so hard to make dependent on them could not function alone after the intense control of the group. After each abandonment, the group members decided, supposedly of their own volition, to reform the group. They begged Alex, and later Anne, to restart "classes". Both Alex and Anne would then escalate their demand for control as the price of their participation.

Alex sent his followers out to "Go Forth and Conquer" shortly after my sister was born. My father moved the family down to LA to immerse himself in the film industry. While they were living there, some other members of Alex's group "decided" to reform the group and sent someone down to LA to bring my parents and sister back. After they got back from LA and the group reformed, my father wrote in his journal that he decided to destroy himself, to turn his body and his life into trash. That was the only way he could get out of the group.

He started drinking, using drugs, sleeping around, and staying away from home for days, even weeks, at a time. Around the same time, I was born, and my mother found herself alone, miles from home, with a toddler and a newborn baby. She ran straight into the arms of the group, who offered her help, a place to live, babysitting, work, and belonging.


Recent History
About this time, public scrutiny raised concerns over treatment of the children in the group. The police investigated, and newspapers ran stories critical of Alex and his group.

Alex's wife Anne announced to his followers that Alex didn't really know what he was talking about, that he never really followed the teachings of which he claimed to be a master, and that she knew more about it than he did. She told his followers to follow her instead, that she would show them the true way.

Under pressure from the police, the public, his followers, and even his own wife, Alex left town and moved back East to restart his group there. Anne took the remaining group members to Sonoma, north of San Francisco, along with my mother, my sister, and me. A few years later, Anne used the abandonment technique again, and my mother found herself cast adrift once more. Facing an uncertain future as a single mother, she remarried another man from the group.

The group "reformed" within months, and Anne gained total control over our lives. My sister and I, along with my younger brother and sister from my mother's second husband, attended the group's exclusive school and childcare centers. We did not associate with people outside the group. Brutal child abuse became institutionalized at every level, both on an individual basis and in group settings. Anne split up families and gave the children to different parent as reward for loyalty and punishment for infractions. Children and adults sat on the ground for hours, sometimes all night long, without food, water, or bathroom breaks, while Anne rant about whatever popped into her head. During these “lectures”, Anne stood up individual people, both children and adults, in front of the whole group to be criticized or to confess supposed wrongs. Every child got passed around to every family for abuse.
 
In the meantime, my step-father abused all four of us kids, both physically and sexually, within our own home. He beat, kicked, and punched us. He tortured us and terrorized us, and after the girls reached puberty, he would not allow us to close our bedroom or bathroom doors. He came into our bedrooms at night and raped and sodomized us in front of each other. He took every opportunity to take advantage of us until we all dreaded being alone with him. My mother facilitated our participation in the group setting and turned a blind eye to the abuse going on in our home.
 
When I was eleven years old, my parents left the group and moved to San Antonio to live closer to my mother’s family. They left without telling anyone what they planned to do, and they left me in the group school until the last possible moment. They waited until school let out for summer vacation before they moved. They managed to move my older sister and my younger brother to the local Catholic school in the months before they left, but they uprooted me from the only friends and social circle I ever knew over the space of a few weeks.
 
For months after we left, members of the group, including Anne, berated my parents over the phone for what they’d done. My stepfather tells the story that he once put down the phone during a call from Anne, he went to the kitchen and made a sandwich, and when he picked up the phone again, she’d been yelling at him so continuously she never noticed he was gone. Even after they left the group, he did not consider he had the option to hang up or end the conversation.
 
My mother’s family could tell our family was falling apart. They knew my stepfather was a tyrant, and my brother and I went into a tailspin. My brother got into trouble at school, and I could not interact in a positive way with anyone. I couldn’t make friends at school. I’d been dropped from another planet into a public middle school. In all the years we lived in Texas, my grandparents and aunts and cousin never knew what we’d been through. The abuse in our home continued until each of us left home. My brother descended into drug addiction, while I embarked on a two-decade path of recovery that eventually led me to found HomeFree as a way to give back and help people going through the same process.
 
About ten years ago, I was talking a rabbi in Sacramento about my upbringing. He asked me our group leader’s name, and when I told him, he went into his office and looked her up on the internet. To my amazement, there she was, right there on Rick Ross’s database, for all the world to see. I couldn’t believe it.
 
Why I Started HomeFree
My goal in founding HomeFree is to offer the resources that weren’t available to me. In all my years of recovery, I noticed a profound lack of resources available for people struggling to overcome the effects of cult involvement, especially SGAs. Cult awareness sites focus for the most part on adults leaving cults. While most cult experts acknowledge the extreme hardship SGAs face, no one offers counseling targeted to their needs. In twenty years on the internet, I have never come across a support network for SGAs, and very little for adults leaving cults. Most support groups focus on individuals meeting in person, which leaves people in rural areas or even smaller cities on their own. No comprehensive system for recovery exists. Each individual person has to muddle through as best they can, with the help of therapists often woefully lacking in experience and expertise in the areas of mind-control, dissociation, and severe abuse.
 
Child sexual abuse survivor support groups serve as a resource of last resort for many SGAs, but even that does not fit the SGAs’ needs. Survivors of childhood sexual and physical abuse who suffered within their own families or at the hands of strangers cannot relate to the SGA. The SGA’s abuse exists on a different scale from family or stranger abuse. When SGAs tell their stories in these support groups, the other survivors stare at them in wide-eyed horror. They shrink from the SGA the same way non-survivors shrink when survivors try to tell their stories. No one wants to hear these stories of horror, torture, child prostitution, mass brainwashing, and sadistic abuse. Most therapists react the same way. This isolates the SGA even more and leaves them utterly without support.
 
HomeFree acts as a nexus for everyone suffering involvement in cults, including adults leaving cults, their children, and SGAs. HomeFree offers support groups focusing on survivor needs specific to different cult-leaving demographics, such as men, SGAs, children, and others. If you require some assistance you don’t find on the site, please contact HomeFree and we will make every effort to meet your needs.