I’m up late, was about to go to bed, but I had a bowl and had some thoughts I wanted to share before they slip my mind.
It’s important to me that I help other people. I don’t know why that is and if it’s just something that was groomed in me through Scientology, the need to have a higher purpose. But I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to give in to my need to help other people. It’s unfortunately what sucked me into Scientology and the Sea Org in the first place, but it also helped me escape once I realized help was not happening.
Right now I really want to help other people like me, the 2nd generation Scientologists who are coming out of the woodwork to share their stories of abuse, and those who are also under the radar in order to protect their connection with their family. So many of them have already helped me.
I have spent a decade in a sort of purgatory since I left the Sea Org. As ordered by Scientology, I can’t talk to my friends who have left, but my friends who are still in won’t spend any time with me until I pay what the Sea Org says I owe them for a decade of slave labor ($180,000).
The day I left – after three months of isolation, security guards, and begging to be let go – I knew I would never ever let anyone audit me again. I didn’t think the tech worked. BUT I didn’t think it worked on ME. I thought I was an SP, as LRH had outlined, and I just wouldn’t be able to get case gain.
I had just spent three months in isolation – no access to a phone, unable to speak with my husband or mother, no access to my wallet with ID or credit cards, under 24/7 security watch – receiving False Purpose Rundown Sec Checking, which is the highest level of interrogation you can receive in Scientology.
Every day I was escorted from my room to my auditor (interrogator), and put in a small room with him (a man about my age, a peer) between me and the locked door. He’d have me hold on to these cans that attached to his meter by wire and he’d stare me down, asking question after question until I gave the appropriate response and the needle on the meter “confirmed” it.
He not only made me look for “crimes” related to things I had done in the recent past, he required me to find them in past lives and find whatever suppressive being or entity had given me the false purpose that led to me committing the crime in the first place.
I was asked over 100 questions, and these session went for hours and hours, day after day, for several weeks. And I had already been being interrogated for qualifications purposes for my entire Sea Org career. I had over 100 folders of 80% interrogations and 20% garbage.
I had been in training to be an interrogator and was required to have an extremely high level of ethics according to Scientology standards. I had no “crimes” to tell them so I had to start making things up based on what my previous interrogatees had told me they had done. The worst I could come up with was that I had received a shoulder rub from a co-worker and masturbated in the bathroom, but to them that’s essentially adultery since I was married (separated).
Once I was finished finding my so-called crimes, there were dozes of questions regarding my feelings about Scientology, all the entities and executives of Scientology, and especially David Miscavige. At this point, I was begging daily, “Please, please, let me go home and see my mom. All I want to do is visit my mom. I’ll even come back if you let me see or talk to my mom.” But they continued the interrogation in order to ask me these questions, not because they thought I had any bad feelings about Scientology, I had never given them reason to believe so.
Essentially, it was an interrogation tactic that helped them see that I had no intention of speaking out against Scientology, or sharing any information regarding the Chairman of the Board RTC (David Miscavige) or any other Scientology executive, celebrity, or representative. MORE IMPORTANTLY, it planted (literally, planted) the idea in my head, that speaking out about any negative experience I had in the Sea Organization would be considered criminal behavior and would get me punished. It was a form of brainwashing. And it worked on me for a very long time after that.
It took watching Going Clear and seeing my friends speak out on the Aftermath before I could fully deprogram myself from the idea that I was not allowed to speak out about the abuse I endured, the abuse I leveraged on others, and the fact that the Scientology organization is doing very evil things.
But even after I decided it was okay to speak out, I knew that by doing so I would be declared a Suppressive Person and my family would be made to choose between me and the spiritual freedom they had hoped and expected to receive from Scientology. The spiritual freedom they had spent hundreds and thousands of dollars on, and spent decades, day after day, grinding towards.
And it’s that reasoning that has kept me from coming out about who I am and staying under the radar for almost a decade. I love my family too much. If they leave the church they will be destroyed. If I leave the church, I will lose them.
I wanted to share this because I know many of my other friends are in the same boat. It’s not easy. It hurts very much, and it makes it much harder to heal from some of the abuses of the past. It makes it hard to move on.
But I think that it’s time to move on soon. I’m ready to choose myself, so I’m working out how to find my own future and what makes me happy. Scientology can’t tell me who to be friends with and what to talk about, anymore.
I may not be open yet about who I am, but I’m not going to worry about them finding out. If something happens as a result of being my true self, so be it. It’s on them.
I will always be here for my family if they choose it. But I’m going to live for myself now while I still have some of this life to live.