If so, what are your thoughts on it?
My uncle was suckered into Scientology. He’s one of the smartest people I know–offered a full-ride scholarship to both MIT and Caltech. He went to MIT and a professor there inducted him. I don’t know what the spiel was, but presumably it sounded good. This was long before the days when the crazy inner workings of Scientology were known about.
They used their standard cult techiques to isolate him from his friends and family. Destroyed relationships with effects that are still felt decades later. Ultimately ended up in their Sea Org division, which is pretty much the final step in isolation. You’re on a boat, literally halfway across the world, and your only human contact is with other cult members.
He hit rock bottom and finally reached out to his family. After a lot of drama he was able to get out of the cult and rejoin them. Afterwards, he completed his degree, got married, and had (has) a pretty happy and normal life.
He got really, really lucky. A coin flip of difference and he might not have made it out. It’s impossible to say what would have happened but it would not have been good.
Well, I’m going to share my story tomorrow. I need someone to talk to about it, where I know my parents won’t read it.
I’m happy to help any way I can, though I’ve pretty much shared all that I know. It is, for better or worse, one of those family “secrets” that doesn’t get talked about much. There are probably others here with much more direct experience–if not with Scientology, then possibly other cults.
Welcome to the SDMB, IncognitoOne. We have different forums for different kinds of discussions – since you’re looking for opinions, I’ve moved this to IMHO (from MPSIMS).
Again, welcome – enjoy your stay.
twickster, MPSIMS moderator
I know only what I’ve read. Maybe first-hand is different, I dunno.
I got suckered into Amway for a little while.
My brother got pretty deep into, dragged his girlfriend in, they got married and moved to Clearwater to work in the Org. After a year, he took a motorcycle and vanished. No one heard from him for 28 years, which seemed kind of odd. I finally had to find him when our dad died. He seemed to have made a full recovery in fairly short order and was living in the sticks, not too far from where he had been living before he got involved with the church.
I am guessing he met LRH, never asked.
How did you find him! Private detectives? What happened to his wife after he abandoned her?
Never mind.
She went back to school, remarried and became a lawyer – I get the impression she was prettymuch able to walk away from the church, it can be very difficult for scientologists to function normally in society.
I found him with a simple SSN search, I guess he was not hiding very deep.
Indirectly. My mother attended a Dianetics seminar around 1972 and brought home the book, which was good for years of laughs.
Another relative who shall remain otherwise unidentified won an S-sponsored award and spent a bizarre weekend at the Mansion in LA with quite a few famous names. S/he has about 48 hours of stories about the weekend, all of them enlightening and entertaining. (Basically, if you thought cold war era Soviets bugged everything…) S/he still gets top-level solicitation material, even after moving semi-anonymously a few times and a couple of major life breakpoints. Pretty creepy stuff.
Why so? What was the last interval that had passed before anyone had heard from him?
Very briefly, in '79 or’80. I had just moved to the US and became friends with someone who was just getting into Scientology. She persuaded me to do their “Comm” (communications) course, which cost maybe $10 and consisted mainly, as far as I can recall now, of sitting in groups and trying to read other people’s minds and communicating without words or body language. Or something like that. I’d never heard of Scientology, or cults, or anything like that, at the time. So I was naive.
During the course we were sent home with a psych eval-type test, multiple choice. I’d already figured out by then this whole thing was bullshit, so I sat down with a cousin who was a psychologist and we filled out “my” test as if I were the most mentally-healthy human on the planet. (Which I am not, so we made up answers.) At the end of the Comm course, participants were encouraged to have an exit interview. They basically told me I was just a breath away from suicide, but if I were to give them $1500 (that’s in 1980 dollars) I could continue on some sort of path of self enlightenment. I ignored them and walked out.
I remember being amazed at the number of people in my Comm course intro class who became sucked in and evangelical about the whole thing within the few short weeks. They seemed, mostly, like intelligent people.
My friend Paula went down the rabbit hole, ended up working at some Scientology print shop for free and living in a hovel, became bizarre and I lost touch with her after about a year, I think. She was smart and I liked her and sometimes I wonder what happened with her life.
When I first signed up, I was as I said recently arrived in the US and for a while lived at my aunt’s house in Cupertino, CA. So that was the address the Scientology crazies had for me. She was there for about another 18 years before she moved, and about once a year Scientologist drones would knock on her door asking where I was. That was rather creepy.
IncognitoOne, I hope you come back and share more. I’d be interested to hear whether any of my 35-year-old memories still resonate.
We had regular communication and occasional contact with him several times a year. Letters but no visits for the year they were in Clearwater (opposite end of the country from us). He was 21 when he disappeared. My parents tried several avenues for finding him. My mother hired a PI, but was not prepared to lay out $2000 when they offered her a lead.
My son asked to be taken to see what thy were all about when he was 17. We spent an hour or so, then left. He is 34 now and STILL gets cards from them inviting him back.
Word to the wise: Never give your real name and address when taking the Scientology “Personality Test”.
I was joking. You said he lost contact for 28 years and it was “rather odd” in such an understated way that I thought is was kind of humorous.
O.k, so, this is going to be long and unbelievable, but this is my life and I need to talk to some people about it.
So, for most of my childhood I remember my parents using strange words and lingo, I remember my Mom locking herself in her room with a sign reading “In Session” for hours, and during that time period the kids (My sisters, brother and me) had to be quiet. I remember her coming out of her room and spanking us if we got too loud and being very upset at whichever one of us disrupted her session. Sometimes she would make snide remarks about how she was just about to have a “win” or other such lingo and our “cases” were intentionally conspiring to ruin it by being loud.
A little background into how my Mom (I don’t know how my Dad got into it, but he was one when they met) got into Scientology before I begin. My Grandfather, was who first got introduced into Scientology. He is a very brilliant man, and so is my Mom. He went to Stanford medical school and has a near genius I.Q. Even he wasn’t privy to withstanding Scientology’s tactics of mental manipulation. So, of course, he got my Mom into it because he thought it was a good thing for helping someone with their mental/spiritual problems. This was before the cat was let out of the bag about how wacky it really is. They have a very specific way of brainwashing people, to where once you’re far enough up the “bridge” so to speak, the crazy stuff that they tell you about, well, doesn’t seem so crazy anymore because you’ve been conditioned by then. So, that’s how my Mom got into it. I remember her telling me the story of when she really decided to go gung ho about it. She was 13 years old, and it was after backpacking to see her boyfriend that she gave her virginity to, and he had said another girl’s name while she was in bed with him, on the walk back that was when she told us she had decided she needed “auditing”. Needless to say, 13 was way too young and I can’t imagine the amount of trauma that incident must have caused to her developing neurology.
So, back to my story. My Mom sat me down to ask me when I would be ready to start Scientology, and I told her when I was 11 (I was 9 then). So, sure enough, when I became 11 years old, that’s when my parents started me on the study tech, TRs, auditing, pulling withholds and overts, etc, etc. I remember if one of us broke something by accident, or was upset at our Mom, or whatever reason, we were made to write down everything we did to our parents that was wrong and that we didn’t tell them. Which would always later come up in arguments to be used against us in someway. I remember my Mom/Dad sitting me down and berating us for hours on end, sometimes all day long, if we so much as disagreed with something in Scientology, etc.
My Mom also, forced through manipulation, her step daughters to disconnect from their own Mother for a period of time. The reason being that their Mother was against Scientology, and a critic of it, so therefore they were pressured not only from my Mom but their/my Dad as well to do so. (I have three half sisters, two are from the same dad and one from the same Mom, and one half brother from the same Mom) They came to live with us for awhile, so that they could help my sister with her high school since she was not doing well in California public schools. It was during that time period, that I remember my Mom arguing with a lot of people, trying to get them into Scientology. My sister K’s boyfriend was even put under pressure by my Mom to join Scientology. I remember his parents were made into enemies by mine because they were Catholic and didn’t like Scientology.
So, we were always audited, harassed to like Scientology, and if we ever disagreed with our Mom it wasn’t really us and just our “case” talking. Our Mom thought she could really never be wrong, and she would go on tirades about it to us, so much to where we just learned to shut up and agree with her even though we really didn’t. I remember her and my brother at one time being very nasty to me, I can’t remember what the argument was, as is normal when you are in such distress, but I remember that’s the first time I stood up to her. Yelling fuck you bitch, then I turned and walked away because I knew she was going to physically assault me as I’d seen her do to my brother multiple times. She slapped me hard on the back and I just kept walking, then she called me a dumb bitch and told me I was a coward. I remember her and my Dad physically bullying my brother by pushing him into his room when he didn’t want to go in it, over something else dumb. She ripped his shirt before because he wouldn’t do what she told him to and how dare he stand up to such an incredible “being” such as she. I remember her telling me that I was too stupid to do anything without her help, she told me multiple times that I was being a whore even though I’d never even had a boyfriend at the time, because I went online and posted normal photos of myself.
She thought she was this almighty being because of Scientology. As if she could do no wrong and anyone who disagreed was below her and deserved to be punished or made to pull withholds, or hours of yard work, etc. It’s not so much that punishing children or having them do chores when they do something wrong is bad, but we were made to do these things for the simple fact of disagreeing with her or waking her up by accident or disrupting her session, etc, etc, etc. We did not date, we studied and got good grades, we didn’t do drugs or go out to parties or drink. We were the kids that parents would love to have. But we were treated like we did the worst crimes if we didn’t want to do Scientology and/or annoyed our Mom by accident. My Dad would sometimes stick up for us, so we never really had a problem with him. But now he’s long gone mentally, I’ll get into that soon. This is where it gets interesting though.
My Mom found a bulletin that was “out tech” and that was just not what L.R.H wrote so she went about trying to get the “tech” put back in as per L.R.H. This ultimately led to her getting declared an “S.P”. So, my Mom, went on a valiant mission to right the wrongdoings of the evil global enslavers who were butchering L.R.Hs Scientology tech. This is when all of us kids began to be in true Hell. If we thought it was bad before, that was nothing.
My parents made a site, exposing the Church’s rewriting and omitting of certain L.R.H/Scientology tech. My Mom and my Dad both thought they were telepathically talking to L.R.Hs thetan and fulfilling his wishes by exposing the Church, etc. They wrote a huge time track of the REAL Earth’s history, filled with Marcabians, NWO, Illuminati, British NWO, Intergalatic space battles, etc, etc, etc. Then, my Dad had worked with the G.O when he was in Scientology, and he knew that these people were vicious to an alarming extent when it came to those who would openly criticize Scientology. He had false identities made, he ruined people’s businesses, marriages, friendships, families, all in the name of Scientology. His reason being that, well, Scientology would get rid of all crime and free the planet, so anyone that attacks it was “fair game” and must be ruined completely. So, they knew about that, so they became paranoid about “agents” and “spys”. Which, some did come and their covers were blown, etc. So, it was at this time that I wanted to start dating, I didn’t want to do all this Scientology crap and my Mom pretty much forced us to listen to her insane ideas for hours on end. To which point all of us just learned to say yeah at the right times. Because she really doesn’t care about what you think, she just wanted to hear herself talk and inflate her own ego of how awesome and powerful of a being she was. That only her and her husband had the TRUE L.R.H tech and upper levels and that they were chosen by the great being himself to right the world of all the evil enslavers.
She accused any guy that I ever dated, of being an agent if they ever did anything hurtful to me. Even if they were sorry, or it was something that would normally happen in ALL relationships. It really fucked with me, because I know thanks to my Dad that they will do things like that. So, I was always thinking that my parents might be right. That these people might be agents, and it caused so many arguments and stress in my relationships.
Fast forward years later, now my parents are saying that they were never really Scientologists, that it was all a cover they lived for 30 years, and that they were really just trying to find something to bring the Church of Scientology down.
I’m going to write more but…ugh…there’s so much shit…this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. I’m going to go more into my parents complete 180 and trying to convince everyone they were really “spies”, hired by no one, and putting their kids through hell all for a “cover”.
Wow.
And the sentence I quoted is a real twist! How bizarre…do you still live with your parents, or have you moved away?