When my “marriage ceremony” happened, I had no idea what was going on.
I had just turned three.
I was told to smile, to do whatever “Grandpa” asked, and to treat it like something special—when it was not.
Things changed whenever Berg called for me.
He wanted me near him, and it was framed as “cuddle time with Grandpa.”
In reality, it was abuse—presented as normal, packaged as affection, and enforced through fear.
I was born in the Philippines in the 1980s, inside David Berg’s household.
Berg was the leader of the Children of God cult.
In his home, there were “chosen” children—his two adopted children, my older sister Davidita, and then me, after my mother became pregnant.
Berg decided my life would be documented before I was even born.
He wanted to use me as a “model child,” an example of how to raise children under his beliefs.
My mother, Sarah Kelly, wrote and contributed to publications that turned my pregnancy and birth into propaganda.
My mother’s entire pregnancy was recorded in a Children of God publication called *Lifelines*.
After I came home, my early years—learning to walk, growing up inside the house—were documented as well.
That material became a children’s comic series called *Life with Grandpa*, spanning five volumes.
The environment I grew up in was chaotic and sexualized.
There could be “war” in the house—constant tension, power struggles, and fear—while adults acted as if it was normal.
Women were pressured into “tease” performances, and meetings sometimes involved minors being made to perform for adults.
I was exposed to sexual content at an age when a child should not even know it exists.
It terrified me, not only because it was confusing, but because I understood I would eventually be forced into it too.
I just didn’t know when it would become my turn.
The Children of God initially presented itself as peace, love, joy, and anti-war.
That image attracted early followers and made the group appear harmless.
As it grew, Berg’s power grew with it, and his desire for control intensified.
He introduced “religious prostitution” as doctrine—women sent out to recruit men, bring money in, and “save souls.”
Those men often became supporters, funding the group’s expansion.
Because the sex was frequently unprotected, many women became pregnant, and there was a surge of children in the 1980s.
Once that exploitation became normalized, the next step was worse.
Berg pushed into child “marriage” and abuse framed as “spiritual.”
That is what happened to me when I was three.
My mother “gave” me to Berg in a ceremony described as a great honor.
Berg gave me a ring. There was a dress with puffy sleeves, and I was given a doll—rare, because children didn’t get many toys.
Everyone acted excited, as if this was something to celebrate.
I remember being told to smile and cooperate.
When Berg put me on his lap and placed the ring on me, I still didn’t understand.
Then he explained what the ring meant—words about belonging to him forever—and I was three, trying to process language meant to control an adult.
The ring he used was not a toy.
It still fits on my little finger.
That detail follows me, because it proves how real the ritual was, even if I didn’t understand it at the time.
At first, much of the abuse was done in ways that made you feel isolated.
It was designed to make you think you were the only one, and to make the abnormal feel “special.”
Later, I learned the same ring and the same treatment were given to other girls too, including his adopted daughter.
From age three onward, the exposure escalated.
Berg would request that girls be filmed dancing, or that women perform for him, and adults complied.
There was a filming area set up in the basement—lights, cameras, darkness around you, and the demand to perform.
Children were brought into that space and told what to do.
I remember freezing, then crying.
I was punished for “ruining” a video—punished not because I had done wrong, but because I did not perform on command.
Sometimes I would walk near the basement and see the bright lights on.
I would witness adults being filmed, and I would hear the language used to normalize it.
Berg would watch the footage and critique people like it was routine—appearance, movement, presentation—while everyone had to respond with obedience.
Discipline in the cult was also weaponized.
Children were punished publicly and physically, often with objects.
Berg justified it with scripture, repeating the line about “the rod of correction,” turning religion into a tool of harm.
With adults, the dynamic was even more disturbing.
Punishment wasn’t just physical; it required forced gratitude and submission—“Are you sorry?” “Thank you for punishing me.”
That same pattern was imposed on children, conditioning dissociation and compliance.
We didn’t choose the cult.
We were born into it, so we had no baseline for what normal life looked like.
That made the system harder to recognize—and easier for them to enforce.
My mother, Sarah Kelly, joined the group early, in Texas.
She was attending the University of Texas at Austin when she met Children of God members singing with guitars and “witnessing” in the street.
She left, never finished college, and followed them—an impulsive exit that later became a permanent trap.
She ended up in Europe, placed in charge of caring for babies as the first wave of cult children arrived in the 1970s.
People described her as likable and unusually capable with kids.
That reputation brought her to Berg’s attention, and once he personally requested her, refusing wasn’t treated as an option.
Berg called her into his household to care for his children, David and Tachi.
What he wanted wasn’t normal childcare—it was control, obedience, and cruelty framed as “training.”
My mother complied, and the part that still stuns me is that they didn’t just do it—they documented it.
They wrote about it, photographed it, and published it.
That material became a book: *The Story of Davidito*.
Years later, when I asked my mother how she could participate, her answer was simple: she did what Berg wanted because it made him happy.
That same logic explains what happened to me.
The “marriage” was not an isolated event—it was a reward system, a hierarchy, a public signal of loyalty.
My mother was elevated in the cult because she did what others wouldn’t, and that elevation came with a price paid by children.
After her book and her service to Berg, my mother’s status rose fast.
She became one of the top leaders, then later the top leader for South America.
The higher she climbed, the less she raised us, which raises an uncomfortable question: who was the cult really “saving”?
Travel with children was handled like a covert operation.
Moves happened in the middle of the night, with bags already packed, to avoid detection or pursuit.
When we left the Philippines for Japan, I was woken up, placed into a car, and put on a plane before daylight could ask questions.
In Japan, secrecy became routine.
I was told I couldn’t tell anyone I lived with “Grandpa,” couldn’t say I was “married,” couldn’t even explain who my family was.
I was given a simplified identity—“You’re just Serena”—and trained to treat truth like a threat.
We visited my father under strict concealment.
Once a month, we would get into a van, hide on the floor, drive to a “safe” house, and spend a weekend that had to look ordinary from the outside.
Then we repeated it in reverse, as if family contact itself was contraband.
Later we lived in a commune in Niigata for about two years, while my mother was pregnant with my younger sister.
Then, again, the middle-of-the-night move.
The trigger was familiar: a family member from the outside had discovered the location and alerted authorities about children living without their parents.
That pattern happened repeatedly—exposure, relocation, silence.
And the mechanism that made it possible was paperwork.
Whoever signed the papers became the legal guardian, and children could be transferred to whatever adult needed to travel next.
Power of attorney forms—pre-notarized, pre-signed—became the cult’s conveyor belt.
A child could be “assigned” the way luggage gets assigned a tag.
It sounds bureaucratic until you realize it made children portable, and portability made them controllable.
After my younger sister was born, my mother stopped raising us.
We were separated, and her leadership role became her primary identity.
I saw her rarely—sometimes once a year, sometimes once every other year—which forces a question: what does “motherhood” mean inside a hierarchy like that?
From then on, Jeremy Spencer and Dora became my assigned caregivers.
We had to call adults “Uncle” and “Auntie,” so Jeremy became “Uncle Jerry” and Dora became “Auntie Julie.”
I was told, clearly: they are your parents now, and whatever they say goes.
We moved to the mountains outside Rio, to Petrópolis.
It was a home filled with children of top leaders—kids raised to represent the system rather than themselves.
Even after leaving Berg’s house, I was reminded constantly that I was being watched.
I was told I was “special,” that I had to set an example, that I could not say certain things, could not do certain things.
A second persona was built around me—an approved version that others were allowed to see.
By age six, seven, eight, I was learning to split myself into what I felt and what I performed.
Lying became a skill, not a moral choice.
You learn it the way you learn a language: repetition, correction, consequences.
And when deception is called “obedience,” honesty becomes the first forbidden act.
Berg preached that Jesus was returning soon, that the chosen would be taken into the clouds.
Under that belief, education was treated as pointless.
Why plan for adulthood if the world is ending in ten years—except ten years kept passing, and the rule never changed.
Each time the prophecy failed, Berg reframed it as success.
He said they were doing such a good job spreading “love” that they were being granted more time on earth.
The timeline always moved, but the control stayed fixed.
My schooling never went far.
I learned to read and write well because reading was essential for indoctrination.
But beyond that, most children were directed into labor: childcare, kitchen work, or anything that kept the machine running.
I asked to work in the kitchen because it was quieter.
I didn’t want to be surrounded by screaming kids, and I hated being ordered to punish younger children the way we were punished.
In the kitchen, the work was simple and endless: peel hundreds of potatoes, sort rotten vegetables, cook huge pots of food.
When I was old enough, I was sent to sing and solicit money.
After performing, we approached tables to sell CDs, repeating a practiced pitch in Portuguese.
At stoplights, we begged with buckets for donations, and that’s how I learned the language—through survival scripts.
Everything was designed to separate us from the outside world.
No stable home, limited education, restricted contact, controlled identities, controlled documents.
And when children rely on the group for food, shelter, travel, and permission, what “choice” is left?
Women were encouraged to keep having babies, and there was a reason beyond doctrine.
A young mother with multiple children, no money, and sometimes no passport is easy to keep inside the system.
Dependency wasn’t a side effect—it was a strategy that made escape feel impossible.
The cult also enforced a strict image for women and girls.
Long hair, dresses, flowing clothes, and constant pressure to appear “presentable.”
Not for dignity, but for male approval—because approval was treated like the measure of worth.
There were nights when adults watched movies and were encouraged to violate basic boundaries under the banner of “freedom.”
What sounded like liberation from the outside was, inside, just another way to prove obedience.
And when obedience is sexualized, where does consent even begin?
I was thin, small, and shamed for it.
I was teased, told I looked like a boy, told I wasn’t desirable.
So I leaned into it—cut my hair, wore baggy clothes—and that rebellion became a strange form of protection.
But even bodies were regulated.
In the dining room, there was a three-tier shelf system: “mini,” “normal,” “maxi,” assigned arbitrarily by adults.
Food portions were controlled to force children’s bodies toward a preferred standard, which raises a cold question: who decided what a child’s body was supposed to be for?
Berg also created petty rules that reinforced power—down to how much toilet paper you were allowed to use.
At the same time, he demanded cleanliness and appearance, enforcing contradictions that kept people anxious and compliant.
When rules are inconsistent, enforcement becomes the point, not the rule itself.
By the late 1980s, public attention and pressure increased.
The cult began changing policies on paper, claiming new “revelations” that prohibited certain abuses.
But changing a rule doesn’t erase a culture, and the real question was what still continued in secret.
By the late 1980s, the rules started changing—at least on paper.
There was growing attention on the Children of God, and authorities were closing in.
So Berg announced a “new rule,” claiming it came from Jesus, and framed it as necessary because “the system wouldn’t understand.”
The messaging was always the same.
They insisted the outside world was full of “demons” and persecution, and that the group had to “adjust” to survive.
In practice, what changed was visibility, not the underlying culture.
Once a door like that is opened, it doesn’t simply close because a leader declares it closed.
I was still living around older teens and adults, and I still saw dynamics that contradicted the official line.
It became quieter, more hidden, and easier to deny.
After Berg died, another shift happened.
Suddenly, what had been treated as a dangerous secret became something they could talk about openly.
I went from being told “never mention him” to being recognized as someone connected to him.
I entered new communes where people already knew my story through the cult’s own publications.
Kids would approach me with books and materials and ask me to sign them.
They wanted notes “from Merry Dear,” as if my identity was a collectible.
The cult pushed that image hard.
They wanted me to stay as a model child, a living endorsement, proof that their system produced “special” people.
What they didn’t see was that I was already planning my exit.
By then, many from earlier generations had started leaving.
My older sister and others wrote to me and urged me to go too.
Every letter from the outside made the walls inside feel thinner.
I learned to wait.
In the cult, waiting is a survival skill: you don’t fight the system head-on, you outlast it.
I focused on one number—18—because adulthood meant movement without permission.
When the moment came, I kept it practical.
I got adults to drive me to a bus station without triggering suspicion.
Then I took a bus from Mexico City to Houston, and I didn’t look back.
Leaving was not dramatic in the way people imagine.
It was logistical, quiet, and terrifying.
And the first question that hit wasn’t “Who am I?”—it was “How do I exist out here?”
The outside world wasn’t a movie scene.
It was paperwork, money, identification, addresses, and rules nobody had ever taught me.
I needed a job immediately, because freedom without resources is just another kind of trap.
I got work as a receptionist in a massage parlor.
It wasn’t a dream job; it was a first foothold.
It gave me a paycheck, a routine, and contact with people who didn’t speak in cult code.
Friendship was another shock.
People talked casually, asked normal questions, and didn’t punish you for the “wrong” answer.
I realized life outside could be ordinary—and ordinary felt impossible at first.
I stayed on a friend’s couch and tried to build a life from scratch.
I needed a car, a place to live, and some understanding of how money actually works.
I didn’t know what a bank account was, and I didn’t know what a credit card was.
The gaps were everywhere.
Things other people take for granted—forms, bills, signatures, IDs—felt like obstacles designed to expose me.
Even the idea of “choosing” simple things was unfamiliar.
I also had to confront a strange reality: I didn’t feel like I “existed” in the normal system.
So many moves, so many documents handled by adults, so many identities simplified for secrecy.
When people asked, “Where did you come from?” there was no neat answer that fit on a line.
Then there were the small freedoms that hit me like a wave.
I could eat ice cream when I wanted.
I could watch any movie without someone monitoring meaning and morality.
I went through books and films with intensity, like someone making up for lost oxygen.
Not because I was trying to escape reality, but because I was finally allowed to meet it.
Learning became self-directed for the first time in my life.
At first, the dominant thought was blunt: I had been lied to my whole life.
Not lied to once, but built inside a structure where lies were called virtue.
That realization is destabilizing, because it forces you to doubt your own memory and instincts.
But I also saw something else.
The outside world was not perfect, but it wasn’t the nightmare the cult described.
And that mattered, because fear is the chain that keeps people inside.
Over time, my focus shifted from survival to healing.
I learned that healing isn’t pretending nothing happened.
It’s learning how to live without the past controlling your nervous system every day.
I don’t choose to wake up and center my life around what was done to me.
I don’t wake up thinking about the “marriage” at three or the fact that he was 68.
Those facts are real, but they don’t get to be my entire identity.
What I do wake up with is gratitude for what I’ve built afterward.
I speak three languages. I’ve been to 42 countries.
I’ve lived long-term in 10 countries, and that experience shaped how I understand people and power.
That worldview came at a cost, but it also gave me empathy.
I can recognize coercion, social control, and isolation tactics faster than most people.
I can see how systems trap individuals by controlling resources and information.
The point of healing, for me, is not becoming numb.
It’s becoming steady.
It’s having tools and resources that bring you back to baseline when something tries to pull you under.
Triggers still happen.
A phrase, a tone, a rule, a memory—something can hit without warning.
The difference now is that I’m not helpless inside it.
Healing means you know what to do when your body reacts.
You have coping strategies, support systems, and people you can call.
You can bring yourself back down toward homeostasis instead of spiraling.
It also means reclaiming power.
Not the kind of power that dominates others, but the kind that returns you to your own decisions.
The kind that makes you less reactive to the cruel things someone once told you.
I share this because people misunderstand survival stories.
They assume the ending is either total collapse or perfect recovery.
Most of the time, it’s neither—it’s building a life piece by piece.
You can still have a beautiful life even after terrible things.
That isn’t denial; it’s a refusal to let the worst chapter become the only chapter.
And for someone raised inside a system designed to erase autonomy, that refusal is the first real victory.
