Teri Dianne Ciacchi & Living Love Revolution Sanctuary

May this be of benefit.

This document reflects the personal subjective experience and opinions of some individuals who have participated in Teri Dianne Ciacchi’s services and offerings for many years and who are concerned about the harm past, current, and new members may experience from participating. This is by no means exhaustive.

Our intention with sharing this is to claim our voice, to act courageously and congruently with our values, and to share our personal lived experience and opinions, in the face of the sense of intimidation and fear we have felt for years. We hope this may support others who have also experienced harm to claim their voice. May we all heal.

We hope Teri, should she read this, pauses to hear the voices she’s ignored and cast out, steps down from all her roles of leadership, reckons with her impact (regardless of intention), makes amends, and closes the church.

We hope the individuals who continue to practice within Living Love Revolution Sanctuary (LLRS), should they read this, pause to notice and recognize that the ways we and they have been harmed, care for the harm they have experienced, recognize the harm they may have enabled or perpetuated, offer compassion for the ways they acted since everything occurred inside a context that was abusive, recognize that they deserve responsible and integrous leadership, disconnect from the church, and reorient towards practices, relationships, teachers, mentors, and communities that do not cause harm under the guise of love and healing.

Content Warning: This document contains details about abuse of positional power, control and manipulation strategies, contradictory ethics, and other subjects that may be particularly activating for anyone with a history of engaging in high-control groups.

This document serves as a follow up to an honorable and failed attempt at loving accountability: an open letter sent to Teri by several of her students in the 2017 cohort of Cascadia Holistic Peer Counseling with the assistance of Rain Crowe, peer and friend of Teri Dianne Ciacchi.
Notes: Michaela, named in the letter, was a student in the 2017 CHPC workshop series offered and delivered by Teri. It is not clear whether Rain Crowe is still available for communication regarding this letter.

What happened after Teri received the open letter in 2017?
Teri stopped offering public courses for 12 months.
She continued to offer her remaining services, including counseling sessions.
Teri said the standards and expectations demanded of her were unreasonable and unfair. She likened the letter with being “cancelled”. She criticized the authors for choosing anonymity.
After the 12 months, Teri proceeded to return to making public offerings. She did not consistently disclose the existence of the open letter, nor had she integrated the requests contained in the letter or altered her behavior.
In many cases, her behavior escalated. Some of this is detailed below.

Who is Teri Ciacchi?
Teri Dianne Ciacchi is the founder of Living Love Revolution (LLR). Over the course of the past decade 2013-2025, services designed and offered by Teri or members of LLR have included:

  • Cascadia Holistic Peer Counseling (CHPC)
  • Aphrodite Temple
  • Aphrodite Priestess Training
  • Temple of the Dark Goddess
  • Surrender: The EcoSex Convergence
  • EcoSex: Celebrating Lover Earth
  • Unwinding Envy
  • spiritual counseling
  • mediation
  • Psycho Naughty Love (PNL) rituals
  • “training” facilitators of rituals and medicine
  • Grounding & Anchoring training
  • LLRS Erotes Community
  • Temple of Ashes

Teri has operated as Interdependence & Autonomy LLC®™. In recent years, Teri has worked towards formalizing her work under the umbrella of a church called Living Love Revolution Sanctuary®™ (LLRS) for legal protection.

Our story
We experience regret that we came into Teri’s orbit and deep sadness – grief – that the beautiful vision and promise of her teachings were not modeled or lived in reality.
Grief for our time and life dedicated to, exposed to, invested in, enabling, promoting abuse dressed up as love.
Grief for the harm, imprints, and patterns we are tending and unlearning.

Our experience taught us a lot about the immense dimensions of harm one can experience from a person in a position of authority, and the complexity of harm when we sometimes experienced Teri’s behavior as loving, caring, generous, skillful attention, and other times as berating, yelling, and pathologizing, as well as the complexity of harm from coexisting as peers in a system that was abusive at its root.

Having experienced harm from Teri in the role of teacher, mentor, and spiritual counsellor, it has been difficult for us to feel safe accessing therapeutic support for our trauma.

Sadly, the behaviors we took issue with in the letter from 2017 continued and grew into new behaviors we took even greater issue with. Some of us now have a much deeper understanding of the patterns and systems Teri created to uphold and empower these behaviors.

Because Teri’s behavior is so misaligned and incongruent with much of her teachings, we can no longer consider the sharing of this knowledge, these practices, and this information as a reflection of wisdom. Instead we see them as a vehicle for manipulating and increasing the vulnerability of Teri’s clients, students, and partners.

Teri would often reference her personal traumatic history, both asserting that she was completely healed and that her trauma history justified her behavior. Having experienced trauma offers no justification for perpetuating abusive behaviors towards others, especially when that abuse is directed to those who hold similarly or even more marginalized identities. In our opinion, Teri’s behavior is particularly concerning because of the nature of her services and the community she targets with her work, which explicitly focuses on individuals who have and continue to experience many intersecting vulnerabilities such as queerness, poverty, and history of personal trauma and systemic oppression.

We no longer have any confidence or trust that Teri is open to, or willing, or able to learn or change her behavior to limit or minimize the harm that she subjects others to.
We have made many many attempts over the years, and we did not experience her behavior shift towards greater care towards others, any concern with her misuse of power, or any responsibility for her impact on others. 

~ a note for former students of CHPC and Aphrodite Priestesses ~
“If it is love, why does it hurt?”
Cascadia Holistic Peer counseling (CHPC) draws from Holistic Peer counseling, which comes from Reevaluation Counseling, which in turn was inspired by Scientology/Dianetics. This may be the first time you are informed  of this connection. In the course, the material asserts that love hurts because in the presence of love, past hurts will emerge to the surface to be met. In other words, the hurt we were experiencing was our own internal distress pattern. We were told: all we needed was to access more “loving attention” for the distress pattern to resolve and for us to become holistically well (or in Scientology terms: become “clear”).
Alas, as many of us who have participated in Teri’s offerings came to understand, it hurt because it was not love, it was abuse.
As emphasized in the book All About Love, bell hooks asserts that love and abuse cannot coexist. If there is abuse, it is not love.
Ironically, or deliberately, this excerpt was not included in our teaching materials.

 

The following is a list of some additional behaviors we experienced:


Grooming, stalking, and love bombing

  • Teri identified and pursued participants and members for the community, and encouraged members of her community to do the same.
    She has used flattery, eye gazing, gifts, and presented herself as a caring confidant or expert to gain trust. Her pursuit of some individuals lasted several years.
    This looked and felt like immense generosity, loving attention, kindness, care, consideration, acceptance, forgiveness, understanding, recognition, inclusion, regard, and respect. 

  • Teri generally targets kind, well-meaning, idealistic individuals who are vulnerable, whether through their history of abuse, mental health, or marginalized identity (often queer, trans, neurodivergent, or in a period of life transition (e.g. recent loss of relationship, recent move). 

 

An aura of trust

  • Teri fosters relationships with skilled and respected practitioners. Her affiliation with them lends her an aura of trust as she considers and describes them as her friends and peers. These include Annie Sprinkle, Betty Martin, Chris Stauffer, Christiane Pelmas, and Kai Wu.
    The members of Teri’s teams and community are generally very kind, well-meaning, loving, and caring. We do not currently know of any direct harm perpetrated by Annie, Chris, or Kai; only the indirect harm caused by their public positive association with Teri lending her this aura of trust.

  • Teri references her history as a mental health expert and her Masters of Social Work although she no longer holds a license and operates without any supervision.
    She references her history as a former licensed social worker as a justification for her pattern of pathologizing students and community members.

  • Participating in Teri’s longer training programs and forming intimate relationships with Teri have required regular “spiritual counseling” sessions with Teri and taking her Cascadia Holistic Peer Counseling Training.
    In the spiritual counseling sessions (sometimes called Priestess Sessions), Teri learned of her student’s personal trauma history and became a confidant.
    These sessions were presented as confidential – one of the stated core agreements of a CHPC session.

  • Teri has been teaching ‘consent’ and upholds herself as an expert in consent.
    She has a long relationship with Betty Martin and has included teaching The Wheel of Consent® in her offerings and claims her offerings are consent-based. 

  • Teri uses various techniques for inducing altered states, including group resonance practices, singing, breathwork, trance work, and various medicines.
    This increases participants’ susceptibility and vulnerability to harm. 

  • Teri is ordained and uses the title Reverend.

  • Teri states that she has taken a Bodhicitta vow and teaches Bodhicitta practices. 

 

Power over dressed up as Consent

  • Teri’s consent teachings have not included a framework or acknowledgement of power dynamics. The in-person programming offered by Teri is generally intense and includes state-altering practices that impairs participants’ capacity to consent. Some of LLRS policy and process documents acknowledge that it is not possible to consent while in an altered state and that it is not permitted. This recognition was not honored or reflected in practice. For example, the role of priestess was to serve and receive from participants, while holding an invocation.
    Teri insisted that the program was designed and delivered in a way that was congruent with consent, but she would resist or reject proposals from members for increasing the support for participants and members to consensually choose.
    These proposals included slowing down the program intensity, allowing participants to decline specific activities, or allowing participants to leave the premises.
    Teri said, “do not fix what is not broken”.

Teri demonstrated adverse reactions (fear, annoyance, anger, distress) when students/members/participants declined her requests or invitations. 

  • Teri’s most intimate relationships are dual relationships, where her partners are or have been students or mentees or recipients of her services. Teri does not offer clear boundaries or distinction between when she’s performing her roles of spiritual mentor, teacher, friend, lover, partner, or counselor. In the mandatory counseling sessions with members, Teri would break the role of counsellor and start clienting about her own distress during the session. Teri would initiate intimate relationships with people she was supervising and offering spiritual counselling for.

  • Teri has used coercion (threats, demands, belittling, expressing impatience) with participants attempting to choose whether or not to receive medicine from her or make other significant choices. 

  • In the mandatory counseling sessions, Teri has exerted influence on members, including instructing members on what to do or actions to take in their life (for example, to leave their partner, apply for a specific job, move in with her, use their inheritance to buy a property for the church, or kill themselves). 

  • Teri has spoken commands, for example “we belong together”, directly to participants while the participant is in an altered state/under the influence of medicine provided by Teri.

  • Teri disclosed confidential counseling material to others in the community, or referred to counseling material in moments of conflict or when Teri’s expectations were not met. ‘Privacy’ was construed as a tool of the patriarchy and confidentiality needed to be broken to enable ‘constellational thinking’. Teri would use individuals’ counseling material against them, in moments of vulnerability expressed by students, including re-triggering specific traumas that had been revealed to her in counseling sessions.

  • Teri has yelled in rage at participants while delivering programming, while they are in an altered state from one or more of the practices she facilitates or services she provides. 

  • Teri has justified her rage outbursts by her trauma history, class background, and her gender. She would characterize it as ‘being powerful’ and ‘being genderqueer/exhibiting gender-bending behavior’ and ‘not performing the ‘mother’ archetype’

  • Teri would demand that students/members/participants offer loving regard and compassion towards her for her own personal expressions of extreme emotions (such as anger, fear, etc.), without Teri being accountable for her role of power in the dynamic. 

  • Teri has expressed contempt towards and about her students and members, both directly and with peers. This has included expressing contempt towards some expressions of vulnerability, sometimes directly to the person or in conversations with other community members when the person discussed was not present.

  • Teri offered PNL services in which she served medicine pretending to measure the volume of medicine she provided.

  • Some of Teri’s programs offered sexual healing and welcomed survivors of sexual abuse. Teri was aware of sexual trauma history among her members and invited disclosures from participants as part of the program. Teri’s participants and members were invited to perform sexual services for each other, regardless of rank (Rank determined the order of events). This was presented as a pathway for healing. Services offered by lower ranking members towards higher ranking members were contextualized as a devotional practice. We experienced that one’s willingness to serve reflected one’s skill and level of sexual enlightenment. Members and students who performed these acts with greater enthusiasm gained higher status and favour with Teri. Teri expressed disapproval and pathologization when some encouragements were declined or caused distress for members.

  • Teri proposed that a member and survivor of sexual abuse engage in sexual acts with Teri’s lover, against that member’s willingness or autonomous desire. This encouragement continued over several months during paid sessions, justified by the claim that it would help heal the member’s sexual trauma. Teri invited her lover to join portions of the paid sessions, to facilitate conversations. When the member ultimately declined, Teri reacted angrily during a group event, expressing public disapproval and pathologizing the member, causing further distress.

 

Controlling language

  • Teri’s Aphrodite Temple programming included several thought-terminating cliches: “some of us need to fuck to heal, some of us need to heal to fuck”, “everything is permitted, nothing is tolerated”.
  • Teri used complex language and invented new terminology that instilled dependence on Teri’s definition. The temples were described as gynocentric, queercentric, polynormative, and sex positive; each with its own definition provided by Teri.

 

Pretending to tend to conflict

  • Teri has sought legal advice to protect herself. She shared that she developed her many policy documents and agreements as a form of protection from litigation. She would describe previous litigation against her as attacks on her identity or progressive politics, or as acts by people who are mentally unwell.
    Teri would overwhelm new community members or those who register to attend an event with many (5 to 11) documents outlining policies, rules, processes, and definitions. These include outlining a specific process for responding to abuse or conflict, without offering room, space, or process to learn these rules.
    Not complying with these policies and processes resulted in expulsion from the community for some.
    While the Communication Agreement did not specify a specific limited timeframe for addressing hurt or harm, this would be imposed informally through the conflict process. Not resolving a conflict with Teri within the limited timeframe could result in removal from the group.

  • The role of an Ombudsperson has been performed by individuals who were not capable of offering neutral witness or support to the person who had experienced harm or was in conflict with Teri because of their dependent relationship with Teri. 

  • The rules or protocols presented by Teri through her various programs have been incongruently applied to members and leadership. Most harmfully, the rules were not symmetrically applied to Teri. Examples of Teri’s behaviors that were not considered violations by her include patterns of microaggressions towards trans members and participants such as regularly, but not consistently, misgendering members, expressing rage towards participants and members, being late or missing appointments with students and members, and expressing rage and throwing objects during programming while leading programming.

  • When participants expressed confusion or disagreement with policies or processes or how they are imposed or applied, Teri dismissed these concerns as being evidence that the person simply had not been around for long enough to understand it yet, or that the person sharing their confusion or disagreement was being argumentative or difficult or resistant or enacting their trauma pattern.

  • Teri would use group resonance practices to counter tension or conflict in the room and move forward with programming without addressing the source of the tension or tending the rupture. This instilled a pattern of normalizing harm and reorient towards intimacy after we were harmed. This role of initiating group resonance practices in moments of conflict and tension was often performed by members who held leadership positions.

  • While Teri sometimes apologized for her behavior, a critical step was missing: offer repair and change the behavior. In moments of making apologies, she would often appear small and vulnerable, and use a soft baby-like voice. She occasionally complained about the tedious obligation of making apologies, both before and after making the apology, indicating it was not an earnest or genuine concern for repair. We now understand she approached these apologies as a manipulation tactic – avoiding taking responsibility for her role of power and the very adult and real harm we feel that she caused. The apology encouraged us to stay, but since the behavior continued or escalated, it resulted in us experiencing the same or worse harm.

 

Isolating members

  • Teri has repeatedly pathologized individuals she is in conflict with and members who have left the community, including asserting that these individuals hold a specific mental health diagnosis (frequently, borderline personality disorder). 

  • Teri would misconstrue students’ intention, actions, behaviors, speech and pathologize/label behaviors and persons as evidence of mental health conditions. 

  • Teri has expressed discomfort and frustration with and about members who connect with each other on shared experiences of hurt, calling it “trauma bonding”.

  • In her teachings and promotions, Teri has emphasized ‘us’ vs ‘them’, making distinctions between people who have taken Teri’s courses vs those who haven’t, those who are ‘in’ vs those who are ‘out’, straight vs queer, mainstream (Fading Uber Culture) vs radical (the culture presented by Teri and her organizations), etc.

  • Teri has asked members and students to share information about former members and students. Members and students who have left the community have been fearful of connecting with current members or students. This fear includes that information about them and their life will be passed on to Teri and leave them vulnerable to more manipulation or abuse.

  • Teri has regularly characterized life circumstances (especially those that drew a member’s attention away from the community) as patterns of dramatization of that individual, including family members of a member being ill or dying, or a member experiencing personal illness, or experiencing an accident (e.g. being hit by a car). This frame reinforces the notion that the most important thing for a member is to participate in the community and anything else is a distraction, cry for attention, or a sign of not being healed.

  • Teri has created and amplified conflicts between students or community members or between students and Teri. She has expressed glee at her students “competing for” her attention. 

  • Teri would openly criticize students and point to another student who was “doing it better” and instructed to “learn from them”. This, including spotlighting a person’s trauma, confidential counseling material, and mistakes, would be experienced as public/group humiliation.

 

Questionable sources, Questionable uses

Teri draws from a very wide range of lineages, teachers, and practices in her work. Some of these are useful and resourcing practices. Some of these are associated with abuse; the mix of good teachers with those associated with abuse makes it more confusing for folks to discern what is good from what is problematic and harmful, including whether it is possible to disconnect the teachings from the teacher. We recommend all past students of LLR(S) to review the source of the content and practices they have been exposed to, explore how even useful tools may be misused as levers of abuse and control (intentionally or not), and choose wisely what they continue to engage in and how. 
Sources include:

Teri brought some of her teachings to an intentional community. These teachings were used by the founder to groom young people into sexual abuse, whereby the founder required sexual favors in exchange for their continued access to the land and community.

Current state of LLRS, as of Oct 2025

The legal structure of LLRS has recently changed. According to the LLRS Newsletter in October 2025, the new Grand Hierophant of LLRS USA is Mark Welch, Teri’s husband. Teri is the new Grand Hierophant of LLRS – South America as Teri is about to move to Ecuador. Mark Welsh, Megan Pedone, and Addison Kavish are named as current Board Members of LLRS USA. According to the Oregon Secretary of State Annual Report filing on 6/8/2025, Teri is both President & Registered Agent and Kelsey Croft is the Secretary. The experiences expressed and included in this post pertain specifically to Teri and services offered by Teri’s organizations. While Teri no longer holds any official board position within the USA organization, Teri is the founder and has been the spiritual lead since inception. We strongly suspect that Teri is still directing decisions and exerting influence on members, including USA board members, and we deeply fear that members engaging in LLRS services may risk being subjected to harm.

[Editor’s note: feel free to email me if you’d like to talk about any of this. -Pace]