I don't recall if I mentioned it in an earlier post or not, but I had a friend in Clearwater who was also a Scientologist. We worked together and she used to ride with me to work. After some of my experiences with ethics at Flag and before I heard from Greg, on the way to work one morning, I said....you know, I think there is something wrong at Flag. That's all I said. She immediately disconnected from me. Told me she'd find some other way to get to work and didn't talk to me for two years. Eventually she had to talk to me at work and that sort of broke the ice but she told me to never say anything negative to her about Scientology.
After the SP parties with Greg and Debra, I was talking to an old Class 8 who was still in and I said that I thought something was wrong at Flag because of my own experiences and what I'd heard from some others. I also told him that someone had told me that OT III was a farce

(actually several people told me that). He refuted all of what I said

and tried to convince me otherwise. His wife wasn't there for the conversation, but she turned antagonistic toward me after that, so I assume he told her and so I probably got written up.
I got a laptop (my first and only computer) and Greg and Debra told me how to get online and look up OCMB (xenu.net).

The first person I read about was Tory. She talked about what it was like auditing on Solo NOTS and how she thought it was bogus. That was my introduction to the critics online. Wow! Somebody was telling it like it is which was a whole lot different than the rah rah that the church put out.
I lived in a complex of townhouses and condos. There were quite a few Scientologists that either owned or rented there. I had never told any of the non-Scientologists in the complex that I was a Scientologist. The lady who lived next door to me was a renter. She had a tree in her backyard that was an illegal type of tree in Florida and it was growing very rapidly, knocking over the fence and tearing up my patio with it's roots. I told the homeowners association about this and they told the owner of the house she was renting from to take the tree out. The owner ignored them and so the homeowners association had someone come and take the tree out and they fixed the fence. The lady next door went berzerk and started telling everyone that I was a Scientologist and what a horrible person I was and how evil I was. I never told her I was a Scientologist, so somebody else must have done that. The gal who lived across the way from her was on the BC at Flag. She told me to handle the lady next door so that she wouldn't be saying bad things in relation to Scientology. I didn't know how to handle her because she was mad at me and refused to speak to me. So the gal across the way wrote me up for putting the Church of Scientology in danger because of what my neighbor was doing. This was just too crazy.

I didn't even bother to refute it. It just seemed insane to try to defend myself against this BS.
With this last act from the gal on the BC, along with a lot of other things I'd experienced from Scientologists, I decided I'd had it with Scientologists. They were too f - ing crazy.
This same gal on the BC at Flag, had been married a while back. One day her husband, who was also on lines at Flag, was having trouble with a tooth so he went to the dentist and they ended up pulling the tooth. Then a tumor very quickly grew out of the hole where the tooth had been...it was cancer. It grew very rapidly over a few weeks and filled his mouth. I tried to tell her of some things that might have helped - maybe not, but they had helped others. Her attitude was nah -

we don't do any of that natural stuff. We just do the medical doctors. Okay. He was from Sweden originally so she shipped him off on a plane where he could get free medical treatment. The tumor grew so rapidly that it filled his throat. 3 weeks later he was dead. She went on as if nothing had ever happened. Her attitude was like....well he was just a downstat.....he pulled it in. I got the impression this woman had no heart...no feelings about the person she was married to...she didn't care a whit as long as she could continue on the BC. If she was an example of where Scientology would lead one, I thought it was pretty bad.
Another gal bought a townhouse in the complex where I lived. She seemed really nice. She was a jeweler from the mountains of Colorado. She'd had a very successful business and she was married to a native American Indian. Somebody got her interested in Scientology and regged her for her whole Bridge at Flag. She bought the whole Bridge, auditing and training, bought the townhouse, gave up her jewelry business and moved to Florida to go full time on the Bridge. Her husband didn't want to live in Florida. Someone convinced him to go on staff at an org out west. She started getting auditing at Flag. The more they tried to audit her, the more she got spun in. Her husband hated being on staff and kept blowing and she kept talking him into going back so that he wouldn't get in trouble. The more they tried to handle her at Flag, the more enturbulated she got, so they finally told her she couldn't do services at Flag and they sent her to Tampa Org. She willingly went. She wanted to get trained. Last I talked to her before I moved away from Clearwater, she was trying to figure out how to make a living again. It made me feel bad that she had sacrified her marriage, her husband and her business and had given so much money to Scientology and then to be treated like there was something wrong with her. I felt sorry for her. It felt like such a loss to me to know she had given up everything to just be jacked around.
Over the years I saw and heard of so many people that had things go wrong in their lives and were having so much trouble and the excuse was always....it's the bank. These things would make me feel bad, but I sort of ignored how I felt figuring it's just difficult to get up the Bridge because the bank will fight you all the way. LRH gave us that reason why. I so much ignored my feelings in Scientology. I made myself wrong so much of the time in order to agree with Scientology. I so regret it now.
If the people in this world ever knew how much trouble most Scientologists have in their life because of Scientology, they would never walk in the door of a Church of Scientology.
Several months after the last ethics cycle where I walked out, I got something in the mail :mail:from Flag.

It was a Type D Declare

along with a letter telling me that they were giving me my money back.

This struck me as rather strange since I hadn't asked for a refund or a repay and I'd never heard of them just voluntarily giving people back their money.

Then I get a call from OSA wanting me to meet them at a local coffee shop to pick up the check and sign the waivers. I went to the coffee shop. The guy from OSA shows me the checks and asks me to sign the waivers. I look at the checks. What I saw really pissed me off. I had the OT Levels at AOLA paid for. They unmocked my OT Levels at AOLA and gave them back to me. I had paid a package discount when I bought them They redid my account, charging me full price for the services I had already received there and gave me back the difference, which wasn't much. They did the same for the services I had paid for at Flag and so I didn't get much back there either. I was angry

but I didn't see any way that I could fight them. I was also very much afraid of them, like one would be afraid of not cooperating with a big bully who was a whole lot bigger than you ever would be. I couldn't afford to go after them legally. I figured something was better than nothing, so I meekly signed their papers

and he gave me the checks. Then the guy tells me that I could still go do services at the Tampa Org if I wanted to. Yeh, sure, no way.

Well, that was it for me. I didn't ever want to do any more services in Scientology.

The only reason I could ever think of as to why they just voluntarily did this was because they knew I had been talking with Greg and Debra Barnes.
I ran an ad in the Who What Where to sell my green vols and red vols and my emeter and sold them. Most of the rest of my books I either sold to a used bookstore or gave them away. I only kept a few of the older books.
I also no longer wanted to work or live in Clearwater. I wanted to get away from the creeps.
So, I quit my job and worked on fixing up my house, sold it and moved out of Florida. As I drove away from Clearwater on my way to another state it was such a feeling of relief - I felt a kind of freedom that I hadn't felt in a long time.
For several years I followed what was happening in Scientology with OCMB but I never signed up to post there. Then ESMB opened up and I've been here daily ever since. I'm so glad Emma decided to do this board. Thank you Emma.
It's been really helpful to me to learn about other people's experiences with Scientology. - It has given me a clearer overall view of what has been going on with LRH in relation to the CoS since before Dianetics and Scientology ever began.
I'm really sad that Scientology didn't turn out to be what I thought it was supposed to be. It's really hard to even look at what a disappointment this is after dedicating 30 years of my life to being a Scientologist and thinking it was the only way to go. It's really upsetting.
My father said I was brainwashed. I couldn't see it. It just made me mad that he said that. Boy, did I make him wrong for that, but it turned out in the long run he was right. He could see it, I couldn't. All I could see were some of the wins I'd had in Scientology and I was overlooking and ignoring all the shit.