Early Years

My name is Shannon though I am known by many as Grip. Born deep in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state in a quaint little town called Tupper Lake. The town itself was mainly known for the lumber industry as the Adirondacks provided a vast expansion of endless trees for the harvest or so it seemed at the time. The year was 1977. My father and mother were very young and very inexperienced in life and raising a child. My father worked at a little store that sold electronics and my mother stayed home with me and my older sister of 4 years. By 1979, I was two years old, and my father and mother decided to call it quits. The details of the divorce I am still as of this day not certain of but, from what I gather it was intense. My father took me, and my mother took my older sister and that was that.

It was not long, before my father was remarried to my new stepmother. It was October of 1979. I was a bustling two-year old, and though I would like to tell you how amazing the next few years were. I honestly cannot remember them. I think I was maybe six years of age that I can remember everything taking a drastic and life altering turn.

My parents at this point in life around 1983-84 joined a church. This church was led by a much older leader than my parents. He shall remain nameless at this point because his name is not worth speaking. That said, he would over the course of the next ten years cause damage that would take years to erase. Of course, at the time no one could see this. This was a new adventure, and I am sure my parents looked at it as an opportunity to become something and to have this small little town see them as something special.

Day by day things became clear and in time many would gander to say this was less a church and more a cult. Things at first were pretty normal I would say. We attended this church twice a week. Thursday nights and Sunday morning. All was well. Sometime around 1985, I was taken out of the local public school system and started attending a school that was set up within this church we were attending, and my father and stepmother became this church/schools, music leaders.

The school itself was strange. There was no teacher teaching the students but rather the students setting daily and weekly goals and then completing those goals through a system called a PACE. These Paces as we children called them, were all religious in orientation. Math, Social Studies, Science, English, and Vocabulary were the five main subjects. The Social Studies did not include anything related to the secular world and only contained Bible and Christian related material. The same went for science. Only biblical related content. No evolution, nothing. Vocabulary was basic and original but Christian related words were the common core at the time.

We were required to do three to four pages in each Pace subject per day. Most of the content would include a reading and learning page followed by two written pages from what we had read. Once we completed the written subject matter, we would have to raise a yellow flag and wait for an appointed monitor to walk to our desk and give us permission to stand up and walk over to a score key desk to manually check our own work against the right answers in the score key. When we finished checking our work, we would then raise a blue flag at the score key and wait for a supervisor to come over to us and check to see we marked our work proper against the score key. Once we were given the ok, the supervisor would allow us to go back to our desk. This was how school happened every day.

Within the school on any given day there were only three adults amongst us children. The monitor, supervisor, and principle. No one else. As I heard it my parents paid $3,000.00 a year for myself and two other siblings to attend this school. Can you even imagine having one parent that worked a 9-5 job and paying almost $10,000.00 a year in 1985 to send three kids to school? That is exactly what they did and for ten years as well. Thinking about it now, I understand why we were so poor and why my parents filed bankruptcy three times.

This church/school devoured all our time. We were there constantly and when we were not there, there were home meetings that would take place where church members came to our house to pray and worship as it was called. Oddly, I was never sure what went on at these meeting as we children were not allowed to attend, we had to go up to my bedroom and play with the door closed and we were not allowed down the stairs until we were called.

There were a couple of times I was called down the stairs into the meeting. I was very young. I was forced to lay face up on the floor while the adults would lay hands on me and cast out demons that I had within me as I was told daily. You see, I was told this was factual because I came from an abolished relationship and since my parents had divorced the evil was within me and needed to be cast out. These laying on of hands at first were just that. Lots of different adults touching me and praying over me but, in time the laying on of hands became beatings. The beatings started with me and eventually all the children in the church group were subjected to them from any adult who wanted to take part. Those beatings opened the door to inexplicable acts against me, and many of the children whose parents were a part of this group and not even one of those parents ever questioned anything they just went with it.

The adults within this church were also subjected to some terrible acts. Any woman who was single was essentially the property of the group leader. He did with them as he wanted as if they were his concubines, and they were brainwashed to believe this was the way things worked. There was one woman who had two sons with no father in the picture. She was subjected to horrendous treatment and belittlement within the group and one of her sons was punished and beat much like I was daily. There came a point when there was not much we as children could or could not do that would not lead to beatings and other harsh punishments. It was the way it was, and we were installed with such a fear that we never told anyone outside of the group what was going on. This is how I spent most of my days.

By 1988-89, the beatings started to turn more violent and this was also around the time that a discovery was made within me the person. At the time there was not much in the medical books about a genetic condition I was born with but was not seen per say until I started to develop and hit puberty. I was essentially born Intersexed. At the time though, that word was not known, and it would have been called, hermaphrodite. I started to develop differently than most the other boys my age. Well, this added fuel to an already lit fire and was proof as the leader of the group claimed that I had the devil living inside me. It was hellish for me after that. The beatings intensified and when I was almost 12 years of age, I was outside playing on the church property which was extensive and included many, many acres of land, I was approached by three of the boys from the church group who cornered me against a giant boulder and a pine tree grove. They started to tease me and then one of them punched me in the face. It was such a powerful hit that it knocked me out. When I woke, I was being sexually assaulted by one of them and then the other two as well. They tied me to a tree and left me there. I was alone, beaten and bleeding in the woods for hours. Several people came looking for me and when I was found I was essentially threatened not to speak of the events that took place, or I would pay dearly for it. The very people that were in my life to protect me now held me basically emotionally and mentally hostage for the remainder of my childhood.