We ourselves are probably the most vital aspect of our children’s environment. We are their most immediate examples of adulthood – the stage of development which they are learning to reach. We cannot possibly create an atmosphere of social and moral freedom, in which our children can develop their own social and moral realities, if we are currently laying rigid social and moral demands and inhibitions upon ourselves.

Robert De Grimston, BI 29, “Process Children,” II, 2.

Jonathan DePeyer’s Coast to Coast was self-published in 2007, to little fanfare. Which is unsurprising, considering how few books put out by such ‘you pay, we profit’ companies as PublishAmerica ever sell more than a few dozen copies. It can be bought online, the ISBN-10 number being 1424164613.

To summarise, DePeyer was born in 1971 to two parents who were members of The Process. He doesn’t name his parents, but his father’s original given name was also Jonathan DePeyer, though by then he had become Father Christian (later, Gabriel). His mother was Sister (later, Mother) Hagar. His first chapter opens with the wrench of Jonathan Jnr. being taken out of the community by her in a near panic, before she was separated from him at a time when she wanted to flee the community.

“The group coveted the children, and when some of the parents separated from the Process,” he writes, “the children usually remained with the Foundation.” (Note: he has muddled the names the group used during two separate phases here, but since he was less than seven when all this happened, this is a technical quibble). “As a small pre-school boy, I looked up into her eyes and desperately pleaded with her. I wanted to return to the group, but mom said she would not let me go back this time.”

I’ll quote two other comments here, the first about his mother:

“My mom is a strong woman. Not particularly imposing physically, but my friends always were nervous around her when I was a kid. Maybe because she saw past their tough exteriors and into their hearts. Her mind is as sharp as a razor’s edge and her instincts about people are uncanny and usually dead on.”

Of his father, he writes:

“I don’t talk about my father a lot because there’s not much to say that has not been hashed over countless hours of therapy. My biological father was never in the picture and my stepfather and I have had our ups and downs.” Previously in the first chapter, he notes that he only recalls his father being at the group’s small restaurant, Sign of the Dove. "It’s also the only place I saw my mom with him….When my mom split from the cult I never heard another word from him.”

I once spoke to Father Christian – we exchanged five words, or maybe ten, one time when he was visiting the Omega chapter, the De Grimstons’ headquarters, and stopped in at the Toronto chapter. But there was a pretty girl in the room, so he began flirting by complimenting her about the decorative belt on her jeans, and ignored me thereafter.

However, Hagar and I both attended public Progress sessions and other activities together in 1969. She joined, but I didn’t, holding off instead for another year. Our paths never directly crossed again. However, I confirm her son’s description of her. I liked her, but her eye was too keen for me to feel chummy with her. She saw through me too easily.

But she and I, and DePeyer Snr., had something in common – we joined voluntarily, as adult or near-adults. We made a conscious choice and, in Hagar’s and my cases, we reversed that choice later on. Children born into the group did not have the same opportunity for consciously selecting their path.

A fundamental tenet of Processean teaching was that human beings ultimately have absolute power of choice over the circumstances and events of their lives, even if such choosing is excluded from conscious awareness. This view was extended to children. Robert De Grimston wrote in BI 29, IX, 4: Children are responsible to precisely the same extent as adults are responsible. They cause and create their circumstances, they control their relationships, they determine what happens to them, just as adults do.

But this would be choice seen in an absolute, topmost-level-of-being sense. Whatever you make of this notion, children undeniably experience their human lives as just the opposite of this, and any sense of having such control and power is the consequence of a decades-long growth process. DePeyer Jnr. shows that clearly, in the obvious loss and pain he records in his opening chapter.

As someone operating a blog that has covered the group’s teaching and history, I’m occasionally contacted by one of the kids born into The Process or its successor group, The Foundation. Do I, I’m asked, perhaps know where So-and-So, my dad, might be? And to date, I’ve always had to say: No, I don’t. The people who communicate with me may share with me some good memories, but they also grasp that it all caused a lot of pain, and have had to acknowledge this in dealing with their own hurts. They don’t include disowning dads – or evasive mothers.

In The Process, fathers and mothers were both required to remain at a distance from their children, to avoid building up compulsive agreements about “human” relationships, with their spiritually crippling effects. As a result the kids, not always but often, are royally messed up.

Processean teachings were about separating from such structures of humanity: that is, the vast societal and psychic web of shared need, hostility, hatred, blame and various other forms of destruction we have visited on ourselves. Conventional marriages were viewed as contributing to this state of affairs. Robert De Grimston left his first wife and children after he met Mary Ann, while her history as a call girl is not precisely known, but can be guessed at. Their experiences and attitudes become encoded in the group’s culture, and regular, stable nuclear family units were ruled out entirely.

The whole business was made more complicated by a series of experimental practices around sexuality. There were one-week unions called absorptions, and at times, very secret but officially directed group gropes, both of which produced offspring. I was never involved in either – I didn’t get laid for the whole two years-plus I was a member – but I was aware of the absorptions, if not, till much later, the orgies. Later, when legally recognised unions (the official term) became the norm, there were more children added to the community, but the parents could still be transferred at 48 hours notice to another chapter from the one where the children lived. The child raising praxis resembled that of a kibbutz. At one point in Toronto, I had charge of putting three children to bed each night, only two of whom had their mothers in the same chapter. And neither had more than minimal interaction with their children.

Where it all got downright evil is that several children were never told who their natural fathers were; either that, or they were told the name of one possible candidate, but not the real parent. Fathering and mothering were treated as biological processes, to be succeeded by collective child-raising.

There is another topic DePeyer raises that I never previously considered. He mentions being beaten for sneaking down at night to get food when he was hungry – and after my time, there were apparently some very hungry months. He recalls:

“When the watchers (as we liked to call them) found me with raisins in my hand, they immediately woke up all the other children and dragged them downstairs into the kitchen….Within a few minutes my pants and underwear were around my ankles and one of the watchers removed his belt. The beating was my punishment. The other kid’s (sic) faces turned away… For a moment the watcher stopped and told me the punishment would continue until I cried… Instead I chose to hold my tongue for as long as I could.”

One memory from my own time that still pulls up a twinge of guilt is slapping one of the little kids across the face one night (he wasn’t yet two) when I couldn’t control him. He looked more astonished than hurt, and I recall his reaction more than I do the slapping. But my conscience prodded me to admit it to a heavy in the hierarchy, and she left me in no doubt that The Process sanctioned no corporal punishment on its children. Which I knew already, but that underlined it.

If, when the teachings of The Process were abandoned, and a (sort of) Old Testament-based regime emerged under The Foundation, they may have opted for a “spare the rod, spoil the child” policy. If so, and it involved humiliating experiences like what DePeyer describes, then I’m saddened and disgusted. I want to believe he made it up, as a revenge fantasy, but the circumstantial detail in his account is quite compelling.

He also admits his pain at leaving what was, despite such incidents, a charmed circle. The Process included a deep feeling of belonging. This had a shadow aspect in that it devalued independent thought, ideas and action. But it also carried a strong sense of being in a circle of healing, and for anyone to leave, at any age, was wrenching. DePeyer’s own reported collapse into tears when his mother took him away rings true to me. We are not one-sided creatures: we can still love things that cause us pain (parents - or children - for instance), and that was his home, his playground, his community.

As an adult, DePeyer has found his metier in working with people with social and behavioural difficulties; the role of wounded healer is one classic life-answer for people who have been hurt growing up. But he admits living his life is still difficult, and always will be. The Process and The Foundation injured him. His mother’s taking him from the community comes across as cruel for a kid of six or seven, but she also realised she could do nothing to protect him against what might devolve if she left and he remained.

There have been several ridiculous stories spread about The Process, such as human or animal sacrifice, or the practice of eldritch rituals. The animal sacrifice story is especially ludicrous, since the attitude towards animals was downright reverential, and the original group’s gradual evolution into Best Friends seems predictable in retrospect. The presence of animals, so simple in their needs and in the affection they offer in return, is a healing balm for anyone who carries their own emotional wounds, so working to rescue them is something the group was bound to do well. Best Friends today is diminishingly staffed or administered by former Processeans/Founders, but perhaps that balm works yet, for those who remain in or close to the group.

The human animal, though, is a much more complex and demanding creature than a pet dog or cat. Children can themselves be cruel, unlovely things, and DePeyer doesn’t stint describing his own failings along the way. Parenting and relationships with children did (I understand) improve after the 1970s; but the collective and personal failure to provide well and lovingly earlier deprived the children of emotional sustenance. Those I’ve encountered are sweet-natured, but forever unsure of themselves.

That some of those children are still ignored by their natural parents, or aren’t even certain who both of them are, is as angering as it is stupid. I had little to do with the child rearing, and was far too junior to change it, even if I’d had the wit or the will to grasp what the effects would be. And there are greater evils than this done to children in our world, I admit. But I’m saddened and sorry for it all. Nothing else we did ever has affected me this way because adult members could recover or restore their selfhood after leaving, but the children can’t recover what they never had.