I enjoyed Ted's post as well and feel that as regards FoTi's story which I also just started reading, a rant is the appropriate response.
I see FoTi's parents as heroic figures, especially her Mother. Coming from a different background, a different generation, of couse they wanted her to finish college. Her Mother showed a great deal of Love for FoTi by giving her $5,000 for her last semester in college to safeguard FoTi's college completion if she, the Mom, died unexpectedly while treating her cancer. Her Dad showed love by buying her the car. Then the couple even went on lines at ASHO in an effort to assist their daughter achieve happiness and success. These people were fine parents yet C of S doctrine tended strongly towards labeling them Suppressive Persons. To ASHO's credit, they tried hard to get FoTi to handle her parents and not declare them but the fact that declaring them SP's was a valid option, shows the psychosis of Hubbard's policies.
I find it amusing in a way that C of S bullies people by threatening to keep them from their "Eternity". Based on FoTi's story and Ted's and especially Roger's comments about C of S tech, I just wonder what eternity that might be. In actual fact, if you are denied tech services at today's C of S, you are denied an Eternity of Damnation. They could not do you a bigger favor than tell you that you are ineligible to do services with them and that you have been denied your Eternity. They have been so reduced in power and scope that that is the only gift of any real meaning which they have left to give you - a ban on doing further services in their jaundiced organizations.
Lakey
Lakey, my relationship with my mother was pretty bad. As a child she was emotionally pretty brutal. She told me that I caused all her problems, that I ruined her health and her marriage and she wished I'd never been born. That was pretty devistating for me when I was a child and I had no idea what I had done to make this happen to her. I was overwhelmed with guilt. I was an only child and I had no one to talk to about this. I thought I was so evil that I was just bad for anybody and I withdrew from people so that my influence, whatever it was, wouldn't hurt them. My mother wasn't supposed to be able to have any children and didn't want any. She told me children were not a blessing, but that they were an accident. Thus I was an accident. That made me feel horrible. She never once told me she loved me and she couldn't stand to have me touch her. I always felt like she hated me. She would be very vindictive when we were alone, but not when my father was around, so when I tried to talk to him about things she did or said, he would tell me I was crazy or that she was sick. She accidentally slipped one time when I was in my late 20's and my father was present when she tore into me. He called her on it, but it was the only time he ever saw it.
In high school I never wanted to go home after school because it was depressing. My parents didn't have a good marriage and that was even more depressing to me knowing that my mother didn't love my father. Every time I saw my father show her affection and saw her reject him it hurt me. She was very high strung and ill most of her life and she just sort of tolerated me and my father. I know she was miserable. There was no love expressed in our family. It was almost as if it was forbidden.
My father loved me, but never had any time for me even when he was retired, my mother was gone, I was living with him and he had nothing to do. His stock answer was "I don't have any time". (engramic command?) :confused2: But I also felt oppressed and dogged by him. Sometimes he would follow me and snoop on me. It just drove me up a wall. He was the one that wanted me to go to college. My mother sort of poo pooed and looked down on people that went to college and would bad mouth them. So, if I went to college my father would be pleased, but my mother wouldn't be, but if I didn't go to college my mother wouldn't bad mouth me for that, but my father wouldn't be satisfied. They didn't agree on a lot of things so I was damned if I did and damned if I didn't - no matter what I did somebody was going to be unhappy with me. I guess I was hoping that Scientology would resolve this issue if I could get my family in session. I don't know if it would have ever resolved, but at the time I thought it would.
My father wouldn't ever let me grow up. He had to hang onto me and protect me from anything and everything in life. It was oppressive and I felt dogged by him.
I was torn between wanting to have a good relationship with my parents and wanting to get away from them altogether.
My parents were always pretty free with the money. The $5,000 was money that she inherited from a relative and she passed it on to me. Had she not done that my father would have helped me to finish school. I think she might have had some idea that he wouldn't. :confused2: It might have been better had she not done that because then I would have had to finish college and I only had one more semester to go to graduate. Then I could have worked in that field and paid for my own bridge and would have been happier in the long run with a career to pay for services and to live on instead of having to work jobs that I didn't like. The reason I started going to college was to get out of having to work in jobs that I hated. It just would have put off my own auditing for a while and I probably would have trained first, and maybe I would have had a chance to co-audit with another student. At the time I kept having this thought that I was dying - it was actually my mother who was dying of cancer....maybe it was her thought. I don't know. I just know I was kind of frantic to get up the Bridge so that I wouldn't get Cancer like my mother had, and I wanted my parents to get up the bridge so they could go free and if they had another life I wanted them to do this before they passed on so that they could me more cause over where they ended up next lifetime, since I was under the impression that Scientology would handle ANYTHING and give one a better future than they had this lifetime. My mother had a really rough life and I wanted her and my father to have a better life next time.
Giving most of the money to CC and then having to give more (so I sold the car my dad gave me to get to school and work) to pay for the BC when I transferred over to ASHO left me feeling overwhellmed with guilt for betraying my parents by giving the money and my car to CoS and not finishing college, since that was what it was given to me for. I felt like a real turd for doing that even though I was convinced it was the greatest good for the greatest number and that everything would come out better in the end. I got some pretty dynamic wins from auditing in 1974 from students on the BC, but it came at the expense of my friends, my education, my family, my income, my integrity, my self respect and my happiness and it didn't have to be that way. That's just the way LRH set it up.
ASHO did not try hard to get me to handle my parents and not declare them. I don't know where you got that idea, Lakey. I was sent to the MAA and told to handle or disconnect. I was new to Scientology - didn't know how to handle my dad,and they didn't tell me how, so my only other choice was to disconnect and in my mind I thought it was only while I was getting the auditing...not on any permanent basic. I gave a solution, which I wrote in my story, but the MAA wouldn't accept that solution which did not include any disconnection, but just an avoidance while I was getting my auditing. I didn't want to upset my mother's auditing at ASHO because for the first time ever her cheeks were pink and she looked healthier and better than I had ever seen her. She even smiled a little.
After the disconnection from my father, she blew and asked for her money back. According to her when I talked to her a couple of years later she didn't say anything about it having to do with the disconnection - she didn't like the way her auditor handled her. The auditor asked her what she had done to me and she got mad and tried to blow the session. The auditor trapped her and wouldn't let her out of the room - she freaked because she was being held against her will. Somehow she got out of there and would never go back and asked for her money back.
She also didn't like all the word clearing she was paying for because she would give the definition and then the auditor had to look it up to be sure and she was paying for the lack of knowledge on the auditor's part. My mother was a crossword puzzle whiz and an avid dictionary user. I used to play scrabble with her once in a while and she came up with words I'd never heard of before. She was word wise and quite smart. They gave her the money back and declared her. Then she threatened to sue for loss of her daughter, so I was told. That's why the MAA at ASHO told me to call her to get her off their back. They just didn't want her to sue them. When I called her, she was furious with me and told me she never wanted to see me again and to never come to her house because all I wanted was her money, which was not true, but that's what she thought.
I could never talk to either one of my parents to straighten anything out or handle anything - all I ever got was make wrong when trying to talk about anything that needed talking about. I never understood my parents - there was a big wall between us. I mostly felt like they gave me money out of guilt because they couldn't give me love. :confused2: I could never do anything for my parents - they never needed or wanted anything from me, which left me feeling like I wasn't really part of the family. Going home to stay with them when my mother was dying to help out and staying on with my father when he was alone to help him out was the most I was ever allowed to do for them and that was spoiled by Flag telling me to move out and get as far away from my father as possible. More ethics and PTS/SP shit.
I tell you, the CoS had me convinced my parents were SPs and I was so torn between wanting to be with them and do things for them and feeling like I shouldn't be with them or do things for them and feeling so wrong and guilty for helping them out.
And Flag took auditing away from me unless I turned on my father. I thought my eternity was at stake. I felt like I was being torn apart. I weighed an eternity against one lifetime with my father. I wanted him to come along with me and go free too, but he didn't want to, so I totally rejected him and squashed him and walked away....man that was hard to do....I didn't want to do it. Then I killed him off altogether by telling him I never wanted to see him or talk to him ever again and told him he was in treason to mankind - this was my solution to getting rid of the problem with him supposedly being the stop on my bridge because ethics continually gave me trouble over it. I felt so pressured to get him out of my life so that I could do Scientology. I was fighting myself and my family all the way for the sake of Full OT and Total Spiritual Freedom. I continually had to invalidate myself and those who didn't agree with LRH in order to stay on the Bridge. As a result of this I have no family today. I actually have two cousins close to my age, but I am so ashamed of the way I treated my father and of being a Scientologist and making such a mess of my life that I could never face either one of them ever again and I have had no contact with either one of them since 1979. They are both very successful with families of their own and I have nothing to show for my life. The CoS is cruel and breeds cruelty....they teach cruelty to others. It confuses me so because the auditing is gold sometimes but the organization just sucks. How something so good can be paired up with something so bad is really confusing to me. :confused2:
What I never understood whenever I looked back on this was why they didn't just handle my charge on my dad while I was in session instead of doing the ethics thing which resulted in a disconnection? :confused2: When the origination from me which was charged came up in session, instead of handling me, the auditor ended the session with me all charged up and I was sent to ethics to handle him. I hate ethics and all that PTS/SP crap that kept being shoved down my throat.
It was a nightmare for years and years.
I thought it was something I had to put up with to get up the bridge. Ethics was horribly confusing to me. A little bit of it was useful to me, but not what came at me from Ethics Officers or MAAs, or what came at me from the C/S in regards to ethics.
My parents didn't come on lines for me, Lakey. I got a doctor in the SO to talk to my parents to convince them to come in so that my mother could get auditing so that she wouldn't die - she had cancer and I didn't want her to be sick or to die. I was really distraught about her condition. I didn't like to see her in pain and suffereing, but that's not why she came in. She came in thinking that this would help her. After she blew and while I was disconnected from them for two years, she found a field auditor somehow and got some auditing. Of course at the time I was upset that she did that. When I got back together with my parents it seemed to be easier to be around her though, now that I think about it. I think she did get some benefit out of her auditing. I was hoping too that auditing would help our relationship so that there would be love there instead of resentment. My father came in because he brought my mother in. He was not interested in doing Scientology for himself or me at all.
Lakey, I don't think it's very amusing the way the CoS bullies people by threatening to keep them from their Eternity. It's actually very painful to the people this is being done to. What's so amusing about it?
I don't believe this. I wrote this whole thing up and then it disappeared on me and I couldn't find it anywhere on my computer for the last hour. I was really upset. It suddenly appeared again. I'm sending it before it disappears again.
