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Part 3 of My Story - A Mission PC

tiptoethrutheminefield

Patron with Honors
:tiptoe: :write:

I'm not going to be posting for awhile, but when I get back I look forward to reading everyone's stories and continuing to educate and free myself. Thanks :flowers: to all who've read and commented on my story--the human connection is great! :happydance: Here's the next installment:

Bruce Harris, the chiropractor I went to with my bad jaw :crutch:, was an awesome healer and a cool guy--and he looked like Gregory Hines. :flirt:

Sooner or later, it had to happen. He asked me if I'd like to try Dianetics. I asked him what it had done for him. He said, "Well, some stuff that used to bother me just doesn't bother me anymore." :hey: I just thought this was a great answer. If he'd used any hyperbole, I would have bolted--maybe he knew that. Going over this story is raising curtain after curtain in my mind. I had never considered before ESMB how orchestrated every moment of my trip through the Tunnel of $cientology might have been--it didn't seem "staged" at the time. :conspiracy:

Quicker than you can say "fresh meat" I was at his apartment getting Dianetic auditing from his wife. Woah-hoah, what do you know, since I'd already been indoctrinated into metaphysical belief by my mother, I was prepped and ready! Out popped a big pastlife trauma and then I had to be routed to a mission for some serious services. Dianetics could just not handle the magnitude of my case--was I intrigued?:yes:

Did I "bite" just because someone was finally taking my "past-life" fantasies for real, with respect and validation? I was willing to "look into this," so right away an appointment was set up with Gary Fishman, a mission-holder.

I walked into a little office space on Hillhurst on an April morning to find Gary glugging Emergent-C, his feet up on the desk, looking--pardon the expression--hungover. He said he been working late the night before. At the time, I had no idea the hours that staff worked or the abuse--ahem, motivation :whip:--they received. This is very hush-hush around public, I assume. I did know that my niece's mom--let's call her BJ--hardly ever got time off. I got a lot closer to BJ toward the end of her life, but I still don't know what all she went through in the SO. She was a True Believer and a stoic til the day she died. She had a Scientology funeral--and is due back in the SO about 16 more years now. (Dear BJ, please go AWOL! :fly2:) I found out after her death how much she and I had had in common for 30 years, but had never shared with each other when it might have helped. :sadsigh:

When Gary found out I was a teacher he started enthusing about LRH's amazing "literary output" He hit a wall right then, because as timid as I've presented myself as (and can be) I also have a tough, stubborn side. Not even to be social could I pretend to like that dreck. :no: Gary had to move on, and he did, to my "ruin." :ball: He had heavy going with this, too, because I didn't have drug or alcohol problems and I professed not to be that upset that I was in my mid-30s and not married. I now think that my true ruin my whole life has been being such an obedient little girl, but at the time I guess we figured out my ruin was being depressed.

I mean, I didn't have anything to be depressed about did I--bad job, bad relationship, bad family environment, lies on lies?--so surely I should be more joyful. And I COULD be, with Scientology! I bought the introductory course.

I started course that evening. I love to study and will study anything.
Patrice was my Course Sup and I was the only student in the tiny course room. Patrice is Gary's wife and an ex-American Ballet dancer. She was nice and never proved to be anything else. But this needs to be understood--she and Gary were on staff, but They Had Their Own Money, lots of it, just like the celebrities they lived near in their castle in the Hollywood Hills. So, I have a hard time picturing anyone screaming at them or making them wear a dirty rag. At the time they were servicing me, they were buying major OT services, donating, etc. The mission may have been like a hobby for them. I have no idea. Patrice shepherded me through about a year of my auditing and I'm sure that had a lot to do with it being a good experience. Stuff happened (how not?), but it always got fixed.

Meanwhile, my grandmother who was 102 died. She left each of her grandchildren about 30K. I had never expected this, and it is odd that the money came when I was in Scientology. Just a coincidence, I suppose. At the time I figured that as a religious person herself, she'd approve of my investing in my "immortal soul." :ghost:

When my brother found out I had bought a whole bunch of intensives and was "on the bridge," he called and was very agitated. He asked to talk to me privately--which he had never done--he didn't even talk to me when I was at his house. So I met him and he was in his usual 'shaking with rage' mode :crazy: that made me so nervous; he said all this stuff about the Church wanting money, getting people in debt, and some other stuff about the "wall of fire" and "facing the tiger." In other words, he was telling me not to get auditing. This was the guy who worshipped LRH and all his works. :mindblow:

To jump ahead a few months, I went on with the auditing and became a different person-- I don't know why I recovered self-confidence--there are many ways to explain it, I guess. I've got some ideas but I won't air them here. It was fun, too, to do courses and find things that I thought made sense--like that covert hostility is between anger and fear. I guess one could figure that out that a backstabber wants to hurt you but is afraid of direct confrontation, but 1.1 is nice shorthand.

Something that sticks in my mind was when Gary used the word "wog. " I objected and explained the racist origin of the term. He totally denied it, refused to look at a dictionary that gave etymology, and refused to accept my certainty. So, I practiced "ignosis" and forged ahead. After all, I already knew from Doris and my brother that you had to be selectively blind to be in Scientology.

Because I had a good income and no family to spend it on, I was able to buy each course or set of intensives in Scientology relatively easily. I put some of it on credit cards, but since I'd never spent on myself before, I thought I could afford it. One time I got kind of upset when I was regged for about 5K of stuff and then the whole Mission--I was invited--went out to a Beverly Hills restaurant and Gary ran up what must have been a thousand dollar tab! Now I realize he could have paid for it out of his own pocket, and probably did, but at the time I felt like I'd hemorhaged money and now others were drinking my blood! I'd never been in a restaurant that lavish, though, and I liked it--again, being around non-fearful, good-humored people was just really building up my own confidence. I was ready to believe that money is just energy and readily available if you're "uptone." :duh:

As time went on, the road got rockier, but it happened very gradually.

At first, as paying public, I was subjected to heavy regging, but not much ethics trouble. Three things stand out that seem quite different from what staff and SO people experienced: one, 'they' treated me with kiddy gloves in "ethics" cycles--I was never told I was in any condition nor was it insisted that I do anything but talk to an eithics officer and I don't remember them doing anything but chatting; two, after the infamous personality test and i.q. test, they told me I was quite high on both :kma: three, they didn't bug me to overdo the time on course--again, I was working fulltime and they must have figured that if they pushed too hard, I'd be outta there.

There was one time when I was getting auditing at the mission that I started feeling very agitated and disturbed. Immediately, Patrice and Charmayne got me in session at some odd hours on the weekend. I felt better, but still my needle was stuck, so Nancy audited me every chance she got over about a week. I won't go into details, but when the "thing" resolved, I have to admit I felt better and was less fearful around people at work, for example. :highfive:

Even with all the best treatment, though, my case bogged down at some point and I started cycles at AOLA and then LAOrg. That started to bother me; I didn't like the "vibe" at LAOrg, and since I'm one of those who are hyper-alert to conflict and "read" people's emotion (nothing spooky, I'd had to develop those skills in my crappy family) I probably was picking up on the intense stress among the staff there. :whipped: It was during this time of my folders being endlessly reviewed and being on and off the meter that I really started to be wary of Scientology again. All the pressure to buy things, the uptight attitude on course (they seemed almost annoyed that I breezed through course after course and never had MUs) and the worried whispering over my folders started to turn me off to the process. :gossip:

A funny thing: I found a Rolex in the dirt in the parking lot of the org and took it to the receptionist. She refused to keep it and took my telephone number. That night I got a phone call from a staff member who breathlessly asked me to bring her the watch at the org--I thought that was a bit much, so she said she'd come to my apartment. I didn't know if she'd traveled astrally or what, but she was in Eagle Rock from Hollywood in about ten minutes! WTF? Had she thought I'd leave my telephone number and then pawn her Rolex while she was driving up there?? Now I realize from what I've learned on ESMB that she couldn't afford the time off-post and maybe her senior even punished her for the "overt" of losing her watch --poor thing.

When my case got moving again, I had great sessions (I don't remember specifics, but I'd go in and handle stuff and then with the needle floating I'd come out feeling higher than a kite) :hyper:. The way this backfired as far as the reg was concerned was that I just wanted to go out in the world and enjoy feeling good for the first time in 30 years. :fly: Like that one staffer posted about some girl he saw come in a repressed mouse and turn into a radiant woman, I was really happy and free, but the org just used it to "alloy my affinity". Sorry I don't remember the name of that poster--let me know if you read this, because I loved how you put that. :thumbsup:

Meanwhile, Doris and the kids were not thriving, but they were doing okay. The kids :noevil: went to college. My brother worked by himself and didn't have to interact with anyone he didn't want to--which seemed to suit him. Doris and I had not been as close, though, since I'd stopped contributing to the rent on the house and got my own place; in general, I'd say she was no longer close to anyone except my brother. The kids seemed to have pulled well away; her boys spent much more time with her 'wog' husband than with her. After I became active in CoS she seemed to get re-interested in being onlines. She joined the Toastmasters' group that met at the Manor. Around this time she tried to recruit her boss at the corporation where she worked and that soured the whole work situation for her; I'd seen her do this before and it always bit her in the backside. I would never have told anyone at my job that I was a Scientologist. :hide:

My "improvement" had other effects on Doris; one night she wanted to spend the night at my place because she and my brother were fighting. I think she was asserting herself against his total control of her life. She could never bring herself, though, to confide in a "pc" like me, though, or--totally apart from Scientology--to overcome her own will to be powerful and better than other people. So, she wouldn't talk to me about all her problems with her hubby, my sibling. The next day he showed up at my place angry. :furious: He was berating me and--with the confidence I'd gotten lately--I was not intimidated. He raised his hand to hit me (he'd been doing that since my childhood :bully:--the last time when I was 18) and I said "Yeah, go ahead. My dad beat me and you beat me and, guess what, that's probably why I was with a lover who beat me." This stopped him dead--it was amazing. A look came over his face and, truth to tell, he never again treated me with exactly the same contempt and intimidation--with one sentence I'd backed him off for good. :)

Next time: I bring my ex- into Scientology or "it seemed like such a good idea at the time" :horse:
 

Good twin

Floater
Thanks Tippy. It's a great story. We'll miss you while you are off the board, but will be ready when you return. :yes:
 

tiptoethrutheminefield

Patron with Honors
Part Four--The End of the Story

By 1989, after about a year of courses and auditing, I was feeling great--not fearful, not depressed, not guilty, not any of the feelings that had been my companions for as long as I could remember. I was still lonely, though, and still emotionally-dependent on my ex-boyfriend, an older man, a French Jew from Egypt, no less. He managed to blend the particular male chauvinism of each of those cultures into what to me was an irresistible trainwreck. :love8: We had parted when I couldn't stand the infidelity and his obsession with controlling everything, especially me, but I wasn't over him.:duh:

I wanted to share my newfound health, peace and happiness with him. I figured the good parts of our relationship would be better and the bad parts could be resolved. So I met him one day at Barnsdall Park and we sat looking out over Los Angeles while I told him--briefly, so as not to give him MUs--of the bridge to total freedom. :faceslap:

That I should never have returned to his influence seems fairly clear to me now. I say "fairly" because if we hadn't gotten back together and subsequently married, I probably wouldn't have found the man I am now married to, a wonderful person. :kiss: It was almost like I had to go back and prove to myself that I couldn't make it with the guy--let's call him David--so that I could eventually have a good 2-D. But he was not auditing material, that's for sure. He didn't trust anyone nor believe in telling the truth to anyone if a lie was possible. He had one of the longest comm lags ever, although my brother's is a close second.

Of course, my reg was happy, happy, happy :happydance: to set me up with some expensive (is there any other kind?) co-counselling process for David and myself. I paid for it; he never would have. Meanwhile we got back together, but not to living together. Keeping my apartment was a good idea, because David seemed to respect me more and treat me better than when I'd been schlepping between bro and Doris's place and his like a refugee. :screwy:

I think he also was very wary of the hold CoS had over me, and their power in general; for the first time, I saw him worried about me--at seeing that I was obeying someone besides him, but that is in hindsight based on his actions. For example, he didn't verbally abuse me any longer and when I was sick twice one winter, he looked after me kindly. Unfortunately, the inappropriateness of our relationship, in almost every way, was not something I could look at then, nor was anyone in my life encouraging me to do so. Not that I was receptive; at the time I was totally involved with the tech and all that, and the enticing, entrancing idea of Saving the World, one wog at a time. :horse:

At this same time, I was applying stuff at work and pleased with the results; let's just say that in general my confidence level hit a lifetime high and has had ups and depths, but never gone back down to pre-tech levels; as far as making me more rational about my decisions, none of the processes or auditing had done anything to help me in that department--naturally, if they had, one of the first rational decisions I would have made was not to give more money to CoS. :lol:

I was on a high, but it was a shaky high because I was not truly looking at my environment--I had made myself very vulnerable on many levels. I was being relentlessly pressured by the org to keep moving, keep buying--I was also asked to join the Sea Org. This was a short reg cycle, though, because they could see from my response that that was not on. :deadhorse:

David was pressuring me to move in with him again.

Family-wise, Doris was changing in unbelievable--to me--ways. She went through menopause, but I've been there now and it doesn't explain the way her whole personality shifted. :alien: There had been signs all along, but now the change accelerated: she was no longer positive, didn't laugh as much, never talked about anything CoS related. Instead of quoting tech, she started socializing with and quoting her Beverly Hills relatives, people she had always scorned in the past. Everything with her was mundane now, money, food, t.v., her job at an oil company--her homelife consisted of serving my brother and trying to keep the fights to a minimum.

For example, I would witness him yelling at her at dinner about too many spices in the (bland) food, how he couldn't eat salt, when with my eyes I'd seen him at his workshop in Marina del Rey surrounded by the remains of junk food every time I'd ever dropped by. :wtf: The better I felt, the less I could stand to be around their marriage. And it wasn't the same, either, without the kids, who were all off on their own lives. The two boys chose ultra-materialistic careers. They hated the CoS. BJ's daughter chose to work at Flag and then nanny in Europe for a self-involved Sea Org couple. So self-involved they went back to the U.S. and left her in the apartment alone with no money for three months--great ethics? :no:

Let me skip ahead to 1990 when many things reached a crisis. I was not getting any progress from my auditing and I'd taken all the courses I was interested in taking--I got sick of the ridiculous regimentation and sad atmosphere at LA Org. David and I had to either move forward or part. I had insisted that he sign up for basic courses and auditing as a condition of my marrying him. He did, paid for them himself, and so we married. :melodramatic:

What I didn't know was that immediately after we married, he refunded. He was not getting any more services from the org. After a few months I talked to them about it, to Donella at the Westwood Mission to be specific, and she said straight to my face that he just wasn't coming in. I knew that. I asked her to talk to him to get him in, but she seemed strangely reluctant. She did NOT give me the very relevant information that he had refunded. When I found out later, from him, I was very angry :pullhair: ; she had no reason to keep that information from me, his wife--especially when she knew I'd only married him because he was getting "help".

In reality (not found in orgs), Donella et al did me a favor, because from that time on, I never trusted the orgs, regs, fsms, or anyone in CoS the same way again. That had really torn the last bond left.

Thank god I went off lines because I didn't have to be dealing with their bs when :shithitfan: David began abusing me because I would not sign off on illegal real estate dealings he was involved in. I had to divorce him or possibly end up dead, judging from his fury at my standing up to him. Soon after that I met my wonderful current husband, my job sent me to Japan, an amazing opportunity, and the rest is history--the rest of my life, not relevant here.

Except this: Japan was a miracle, but it also brought to the very forefront of my attention my ambivalence toward other people--the way I would trust and then withdraw :nervous:, cope with dissonance for long periods and then totally lose it :furious:. I started thinking about why this self-defeating pattern had always been a part of my life. It cost me money, relationships, peace of mind and self-respect. Auditing hadn't touched this and it was seriously hurting my life.

I'd been out of CoS a few years--although THEY didn't know that. :hide:
so I saw some therapists but I couldn't seem to get near a cause; I started thinking about sexual abuse, because my symptoms uncannily matched those of abuse survivors--actually those symptoms are a form of ptsd.

When the internet exploded in the early eighties, there was so much information readily available. Plus, maybe because I was ready, I was having significant nightmares and certain interactions with people were setting off alarm bells and 'memories' in my mind. Vague, unplaceable, but persistent. One morning I woke up from a vivid dream and said to my husband, "My brother molested me when I was very small." That was the beginning of a terrible, unavoidable journey I'm still on. Now it gets sad, but, sorry, it's the truth.

I guess it's not too startling to find that older siblings have hit, slapped, held down, cursed, lied to, manipulated, degraded verbally and so on their younger siblings. I know it happens a lot--I just happened to be the youngest in a family of four or I might have done some slapping myself, who knows? But this is worse. My elder brother sexually abused me when he was 15 and I was 5 and then kept that to himself for half a century. He also shot my kittens and told me it was because of me. He admitted these things when I confronted him with it a couple of years ago. But, of course, he minimized, was "no sympathy" and sarcastic, and when I cried and was furious with him, offered to "come over and shoot myself on your porch." Too bad it wasn't a sincere offer but just another stab at manipulation.

I cut off all contact with him and Doris (who sent me an angry email telling me that she and my brother had "done a lot for me over the years"). Yeah.

What a wonderful family I had. What a 'withhold', huh? Did he, who supposedly had read every book of Hubbards and studied every policy, ever think to himself that his withhold might explain all the rage and verbal abuse he inflicted on me for 40 years? Did he ever think that abusing and then silencing with threats a 5 year old might have something to do with her emotional problems in later life? Guess not.

Now, what I wonder about is this: did bro choose Hubbard and Scientology, consciously or unconsciously, because he could tell himself that he was not a criminal or a deviant, but that I'd pulled it in, was being a victim, etc. etc.?

I wonder why I chose CoS? And, I wonder if other victims of abuse are attracted to CoS? Is that why some of them left their children in dangerous hands? I found out from BJ's sister just last year that BJ had been molested when she was five--her mother was neglectful and would leave her all day in an apartment house to wander around. I wonder if that is why BJ left her daughter in my brother's sole and tender care from 3 until 7 when he married Doris. I wonder a lot of things. I will probably not find the answers.

Sometimes I can laugh about my life. Sometimes I can't. Like everybody. When I said it was an all-Scientology story in Part One, I meant that it is all about abuse. And that is what I've come to think about all organized religions, new age ones, judeo-christian ones, CoS, mithraism, you name it: they are all about abuse. So, in a way, we are all survivors. I'm trying now to be someone who stands up against abuse. It's about time.


Free at last, free at last, thank god(?) in heaven I am free at last! :fly2:
 

tiptoethrutheminefield

Patron with Honors
"Coming out" here

Thanks, Happy Girl--I know it may seem like TMI to some, but I just have to get this out--Scientology and my brother are inextricably linked in my life.

I haven't had the nerve to post it as a thread yet. Baby steps.

I'm getting so much out of the stories and posts here. It seems like a good community.
 

Good twin

Floater
Thanks for telling Tippy. I am glad you are free. You are right. It is a good community. You are welcome here.
 

Free2Dream

Patron with Honors
Tippy,

Thank you for sharing your amazing story! It takes a lot of courage to share what you have. It makes me so happy that you found the strength to stand on your own and get out!

Welcome to the world of being able to make your own choices, create your own destiny, and follow your own path. Welcome to real total freedom! Now go stand in front of a mirror and yell "Hip Hip Hooray" to yourself! :)
 
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