My Nine Lives in Scientology by M. Pignotti 10/10 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/pignotti/ I had saved up about $200 when I was Director of Processing and getting bonuses. When I left that position, I no longer got the bonuses that went along with it; only Sea Org pay, which was $10 a week at the time. Soon my $200 would be used up and I would have no money to go anywhere and would have to give up my apartment. I concluded that if I wanted to leave the Sea Org, it would have to be that day, before a Committee of Evidence was convened on me. It happened that I had the afternoon off that day, which gave me the perfect chance to leave, since I would not be missed until the following day, but I still hadn't made a final decision. I went for a swim, took a shower and put on a new dress my mother had sent me. Then I went to a pay phone and called the airlines to see if I could get a plane out of LA, but all the flights were booked up. Then I walked to the bus station to see when the next bus left to Michigan. There was a bus leaving at 6:00 PM and the fare was $125, which I could afford. The time was 2:30 PM. I returned to my apartment and found one of my roomates there. I tried to act normal. He went out to get a paper and I started to pack some of my things. Soon he returned and I hastily hid what I had packed. I told him I had just been for a swim and the water felt great, hoping he would go for a swim. Fortunately, he did and I was left alone, once again. Now there was nothing to stop me from leaving except the barriers I imposed on myself. For what seemed like a long time, but was probably no more than 5 minutes, I agonized over the final decision I knew I would have to make. I wanted to go, but was afraid. I knew that this would be my only chance to go. If I didn't do it that day, I might not get another opportunity for a long time, if ever. Yet I still vacillated between whether to go or whether to stay. I felt like I was making the biggest and toughest decision I ever had to make in my life. I finished packing some of my clothes in a small carry-on bag. I kept telling myself that I wasn't happy and that things were not going to get better; yet I still hesitated. Then, suddenly, I realized that making the decision to leave was never going to be easy and if I waited for it to feel easy, I would never do it. Finally, I took the plunge. I gathered up a few of my things and left the apartment. I knew I couldn't take everything I had with me because I might run into someone I knew on the way to the bus station and would have difficulty explaining the suitcases. I just took a small carry-on bag, a plastic bag and my handbag. I even made up a story to explain why I was carrying these bags if I ran into anyone on the street but, fortunately, I didn't have to use it. I was terrified of running into someone in the group, and of being stopped and locked up against my will. As soon as I arrived at the bus station in Hollywood, which was about a 10-minute walk from my apartment, I purchased my ticket to Michigan. Then I called my mother and told her I was coming home. She was overjoyed and strongly supported me in my decision to leave. She said, "I always knew you were a free spirit." At 5:00 PM my bus left Hollywood for LA, where I was to change busses. I had a splitting headache and was still worried about someone finding me. It wasn't until my bus pulled out of LA at 6:00 PM that I finally began to relax. I felt more relieved than I ever felt in my life. I felt as if a big weight had been lifted off me and that I was free at last. I Begin My New Life For nine months, I didn't do anything but stay home, try to make some sense out of what I had been through and adjust to my new life. One week after I left, I started recording my thoughts about what had happened to me in a journal, which I still have. I was very confused. For several months, I saw no one but my parents and felt very much alone. Six weeks after leaving, I made an attempt in my journal to analyze the group to see if I could figure out what went wrong. I wrote, "There is something very wrong with the way this group is being run -- something very basic that I can't quite put my finger on." At this point, I was not yet willing to hold LRH responsible for the situation and I didn't know anything about mind control. However, there is one observation that I made that I consider to be an insight that was of great value to me: that there was little or no real caring about people as human beings. People were only seen in terms of their usefulness to the group. An example I came up with was a young woman from Holland who was being trained as an auditor on Flag. She was still having difficulty with the English language and, as a result, had trouble with understanding the course materials and later, in her attempts to audit people. She was never able to progress beyond the most basic levels as an auditor because of her difficulty with the language. When she made mistakes she was sent to ethics and was one of the first to be put on the RPF. It never seemed to occur to anyone that her problem was not "evil intentions towards the group" but simply not understanding English well enough. No one cared enough about her to see the obvious. All anyone could see was that she didn't perform well as an auditor and therefore must have evil intentions, so she was disciplined accordingly. If anyone had really cared about her as a person, rather than just a commodity, they would have easily been able to see what her problem was and help her learn English, but that just wasn't the way things worked in the Sea Org. I began to realize that, for the most part, in the Sea Org there was no real caring -- no love. All "love" was conditional upon job performance and the standards for job performance were often quite ridiculous. There were exceptions, of course; sometimes true friendships between people did develop in spite of everything, but that is not how the group, as a whole, was run. Often, when such real friendships did develop, every attempt was made to separate the people, such as what happened between Quentin and myself. The real threat to Hubbard was not the possibility of our having sex, but the emotional closeness and true friendship that we had developed. This separation of true friends has the effect of making the person feel very isolated, even though they may be surrounded constantly by hundreds of people in the cult environment. In my opinion, the most effective thing an exit counsellor could do in an intervention with a Scientologist, is to have a genuinely caring attitude towards the person. Scientologists, especially staff members, are starving for that sort of compassion. I cannot stress this point strongly enough. A compassionate, caring attitude will be much more likely to help the person break free of their mental prison than any information about the group will. Simply giving the person information will not work, because it will be dismissed as lies from the "wog press". I know this because I lived in such an environment for over five years. The main key to free a person from this cult is compassion. This is true of all cults, but it is especially true of Scientology, where, in the upper echelons, there isn't even any pretense of compassion. Showing compassion just might be the key to breaking through the person's cult identity and reaching the real person. Once an emotional bond is established with the person, you can then give them the facts and help them to see their way out of the trap. One friendship the Church of Scientology was never able to destroy was the one between Quentin and myself. We continued to write to one another. In September, I received a letter from him, saying that he was having a very rough time. He had been taken off auditing for "errors" he had committed on a PC who had cancer. Quentin had been desperately trying to help the person, but nothing seemed to be working. He sounded very depressed. He sent me a picture of himself, saying that it was to remind me of him. I was very concerned that he might try to commit suicide again and wrote him back right away. I told him I was concerned that he might be feeling he had to commit suicide and if he ever felt that way, he could call me anytime and talk about it. On October 12, I received my last letter from Quentin. He told me not to worry and that he would never attempt suicide again. Things seemed to be looking up for him. He had written up a proposal to his father, requesting an indefinite leave of absence so he could go to school and learn how to be a pilot. I had the feeling that if his proposal was not approved, he would leave Scientology, which would be very difficult for him. He would have to cut himself off from his parents and the only life he had ever known. I was determined to support him in any way I could, if he made such a decision. Once again, I answered his letter right away. This time I received no reply. For the next eight months, I kept sending letters, hoping to get through to him. I thought that maybe his parents had found out he was writing to me and stopped my letters from getting through. Since I had left Scientology, I was considered a Suppressive Person and no Scientologist in good standing was allowed to communicate with me, but that hadn't stopped Quentin. It occurred to me that maybe the worst had happened and Quentin had committed suicide, but I kept trying to write to him. I had many dreams about Quentin and about Scientology. For a whole year, I had nightmares every night about the group, where I would be running away from Scientologists who were trying to get me to come back. Sometimes I would have dreams about being locked up in prison and escaping. After a year, these dreams became less and less frequent. In June, 1977, I received a call from Chuck Ohl, who worked in the Guardian's Office. He told me that Quentin had passed away last October. According to the story Chuck told me, Quentin had been found in a coma in his car near the airport in Las Vegas. The cause of his death was listed as "unknown" and Mary Sue had ordered a full investigation into his death. Chuck wanted to know if Quentin had called or tried to contact me. I was stunned. I had felt for a long time that something had happened, but hearing the news really shocked me. I told Chuck that Quentin had written me just before he left and that I would send him copies of the letters and do everything I could to help with the investigation. I felt that his mother had a right to know what happened to her son. I knew that she really loved him. I made copies of the letters and sent them to Chuck. Just recently, I talked to someone who had been in Florida at the time Quentin had left for Las Vegas. She had quite a bit of inside information on what happened to Quentin. I asked her if his request to go to flying school had been approved and she said that as far as she knew, it hadn't. He was just going on another three week vacation and had been expected to return. I am now convinced that Quentin's death was a suicide. By the time I heard the sad news, I had started going back to college at the University of Michigan and was well on my way to a new life. I felt badly about Quentin, but I vowed that I would do everything in my power to live my life to the fullest. Since leaving Scientology, I have never taken my freedom for granted. I know how precious it is because I lived for over five years without it. Quentin was gone, but I had my whole life ahead of me, which I would live the best I could, in honor of both Quentin and myself. Fortunately, I had no trouble in school, probably because I held a fairly high position in Scientology that required me to use my mind and to make decisions, even if they were in service of the group. I managed to graduate from the University of Michigan with a 3.7 GPA in the top 10% of my class. In July, 1977, I received a call from Karen de la Carriere, who had been one of my closest friends on Flag. She was on a mission to LA and tried to convince me to come back. She said that the org had moved to a brand new complex and that exciting things were going on. Gary Epstein, the Commanding Officer at the time I left, had been removed from his post after having been discovered to be a "suppressive person". She said that because Gary had been in charge at the time I left, I was welcome to come back with no penalties, since I couldn't be blamed for leaving when such a "suppressive" person was in charge. For a few seconds, I was tempted. I didn't tell her yes, but I didn't tell her no either. I said I'd think about it. When I hung up the phone, I realized that I'd never go back. I was starting a new life and it didn't sound as if things had changed all that much in the Sea Org. About a week later, she called me back and I told her that I was not going to return. That was the last time I ever heard from anyone in Scientology. Recently, I spoke with three former Scientologists who didn't leave until the early 1980s, all of whom were top Scientology executives. They said that from the late 1970s on, things got much worse in Scientology, especially after Hubbard's messengers took over. They all agreed that I was very lucky to have left when I did. If anyone tries to tell you that the kind of horrendous experiences I went through in Scientology don't happen anymore, don't believe it -- there are many people around who can testify that things have gotten even worse. After graduating from the University of Michigan with a B.A., I moved to New York in 1980. While, in some ways, I was functioning well in life, in other ways, my experiences in Scientology were still affecting me. Over the years, I considered several different careers, but I never followed through on any of them. The career I was most interested in was being a psychotherapist. I went to school for about a year and a half at a Psychoanalytic institute, but I didn't complete the program. I had no trouble academically, but just didn't have the motivation necessary to complete the program and found an excuse to drop out. I didn't realize until very recently that my inability to get a new career going, particularly in this field, had very much to do with my experiences in Scientology. Because my "success" in Scientology resulted in such total devastation for me, I had a deep subconscious fear of ever being successful again. After all, for me in Scientology, any success I achieved was very temporary and could be wiped out any time at the whim of LRH. Success, to me, meant being wiped out. Now that I realize this, I am able to reprogram my subconscious mind and am finally starting to work things out for myself. I am planning to go back to school for my MSW. I am no longer in a cult and can be as successful as I want without fear of being wiped out. For the first time in years, I am starting to feel like the enthusiastic, ambitious, idealistic young woman I was at the age of 18. This time, however, I know that no one is going to give me the answers to life. I now realize that I have a mind that is fully capable of guiding me through the decisions I make in life and I will never put anyone or anything above what I know and feel. I now know the techniques that are used to control people's minds and that people exist in this world that have no compunction about using these techniques to manipulate people. If I see that a person or group is using these techniques, that is where my association with that person or group ends. My life and my mind are now my own and I will never give them up again. [Update, August 1996: I have since gone back to school and have completed my Masters Degree in Social Work, passed my licensing exam (CSW), and am now a certified mental health professional.] <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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