{"id":84682,"date":"2018-11-29T09:59:31","date_gmt":"2018-11-29T17:59:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=84682"},"modified":"2019-09-23T16:35:10","modified_gmt":"2019-09-23T23:35:10","slug":"teri-buford-oshea-surviving-betrayal","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=84682","title":{"rendered":"Teri Buford O\u2019Shea: Surviving Betrayal"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Teri Buford O\u2019Shea died November 28, 2018. An obituary is here<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Teri Buford couldn\u2019t buy a break.<\/p>\n

She lived a life of betrayal \u2013 often when she turned to someone for love or support or healing or comfort, she received just the opposite \u2013 but she never saw herself as a victim. That was part of her strength, and she needed every ounce that she could muster.<\/p>\n

She suffered emotional turmoil all of her life, beginning with a strained relationship with a distant mother. She was a military brat, living her life in two-year-long segments during her father’s naval deployments, until she graduated from high school. After attending college at UC-Berkeley, she wound up in the arms of Peoples Temple and \u2013 more specifically \u2013 Jim Jones. The relationship she had with Jones tore at her sense of identity and self-worth. It also affected the relationship she had with at least one of his other lovers. When Jones and Maria Katsaris tortured her by pressing a red-hot spoon to her stomach \u2013 which left a life-long physical and emotional scar upon her \u2013 it was more than a test of Teri\u2019s loyalty to the cause, it was a vengeful act of a jealous competitor for Jones\u2019 affections.<\/p>\n

The emotional turmoil extended into her post-Temple years. Plagued with PTSD, Teri sought counseling innumerable times. Her therapy was not helped by the discovery within the last decade that one counselor who had been treating her for a number of years worked from the premise that Teri\u2019s demons were delusional \u2013 that she had never been a member of Peoples Temple or had been to Jonestown \u2013 and that she was fantasizing about the source of her deepest pain.<\/p>\n

Teri was hospitalized with emotional breakdowns on numerous occasions, especially during a period in 2017, when the onset of dementia coincided with a series of severe flashbacks. She went in to a psychiatric ward with everyone thinking she would be there for her typical stay of one- to two weeks. But two weeks turned to six, and six weeks turned to three months. Much of that time, she wasn\u2019t in Massachusetts in 2017, she was back in Jonestown in 1978.<\/p>\n

Teri had bad luck with her physical health too. When she contracted myasthenia gravis, two doctors \u2013 who apparently never talked to each other \u2013 put her on different medications, which, in combination, were contra-indicated. Her earlier weight gain, at least one other medical condition, and even the liver failure that led to her death, were all attributed to reactions to medications.<\/p>\n

Teri also had bad luck with men. She left Jim Jones and Peoples Temple under the wing of Mark Lane. He provided her support and encouragement, and she lived with him for several years before she found the courage to leave him. Years later, he hinted that he would disclose the secrets she had confided in him; whether it was her threat of a lawsuit that convinced him otherwise will never be known. After leaving Lane, she lived a number of years with another\u00a0<\/em>man who, following their break-up, did write a book about Peoples Temple which can only be characterized as revenge porn. And, although she never had a romantic relationship with Tim Stoen, she was deeply wounded by allegations of misdeeds that the former Temple attorney made about her in his\u00a0<\/em>book \u2013 misdeeds which, according to Teri, were acts that Stoen himself directed her to take.<\/p>\n

And then there was her bad luck in timing. Teri left Peoples Temple on October 27, 1978, just three weeks before the deaths. It was a quiet departure \u2013 no announcement to the Temple beforehand, no announcement to the press afterwards \u2013 and as a result, she soon found herself caught in a limbo. Was she still a loyalist, as members of Concerned Relatives thought? Was she a defector, a traitor, a new Temple enemy, as Jones described her to the Jonestown community? She walked that fine line \u2013 slipping numerous times \u2013 for many years.<\/p>\n

So who was she? Despite it all, Teri remained a kind woman \u2013 sometimes fragile, most times strong \u2013 who wanted only to be accepted and loved. She felt a deep sense of responsibility for the Temple\u2019s end, a burden which paralyzed her at times. When reminded of other people\u2019s roles in the weeks leading up to the deaths, she would reply, \u201cYeah,\u201d but it was the \u201cYeah\u201d of someone who heard you talking, not of her believing.<\/p>\n

Teri spent the first 30 years following the tragedy outside of any Temple orbit. The circumstances of her separation, the obscurity she had embraced all too well, her sense of personal guilt, all conspired to make any ideas of reconnecting tentative.<\/p>\n

She toyed with the idea of coming to the first non-memorial reunion of Temple survivors in San Diego for months. She was afraid of how she would be received; she was afraid of resurrecting the sorrow which she had spent so much time burying; the great distance between New England, to which she had returned, and the health problems which were already dogging her almost prevented her from coming. But then she heard the rumor that Stephan Jones might be there, and that decided it for her: \u201cI need to ask Stephan for his forgiveness,\u201d she said. (At the same time, Stephan was struggling with the idea of whether to come himself, but he had heard the rumor that Teri might be there, and that decided it for him: \u201cI need to ask Teri for her forgiveness,\u201d he said.) Whatever reservations either of them had were dissolved with tears the moment they embraced.<\/p>\n

That characterized Teri\u2019s reintroduction to the first large family that ever accepted her. She began the first evening of that reunion with timid handshakes and a trembling voice; by the end of the second day, she was greeting everyone she met with tremendous bear hugs. On the first full day at the reunion, she confided \u2013 to several people, as it turned out \u2013 her secret about Maria, Jim, and the red-hot spoon; the night before she left to return to Boston, she lifted her shirt in a room full of people to display her scar.<\/p>\n

Throughout it all \u2013 all the years of isolation from the Temple community, the fewer years of reconnection \u2013 she expressed herself in poetry<\/a>. There she found the refuge where she could tell her story. There she could express her strength, her defiance. Consider the last lines of \u201cI Do Not Love You<\/a>,\u201d in which she relates the story of Jim Jones holding a gun to her head and commanding her to declare her love: \u201cI don\u2019t care \/ If you pull the trigger \/ This is the one thing \/ You cannot have.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those of us whom Teri did\u00a0<\/em>love \u2013 and who returned it in great measure \u2013 feel lucky to have had that love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Teri Buford O\u2019Shea died November 28, 2018. An obituary is here.) Teri Buford couldn\u2019t buy a break. She lived a life of betrayal \u2013 often when she turned to someone for love or support or healing or comfort, she received just the opposite \u2013 but she never saw herself as a victim. That was part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":52694,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-84682","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/84682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84682"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/84682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92922,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/84682\/revisions\/92922"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/52694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}