The harshest life lessons we got got were the time & expense of our doing scientolgy.
The money can be made back but the time is gone.
Even at the worst of times ( and these aren't ) we've looked at one another & felt fortunate that we love one another.
Just as a counterpoint to all of this:
My wife and I, had each read "Cheaper By the Dozen" and thought a big family was a great model. When a former girl friend (of many years) told me, in her bedroom, that my (future) wife and her husband were getting a divorce, I thought, "I'm in the wrong bedroom."
I called my future wife the next day, and set up a date.
My future wife (at this point), and I had been friends since 1969. She was still married to a
very successful franchise / mission holder / auditor at Palo Alto in 1976. Her oldest step daughter was a Class Vlll at age 16. We, ourselves, were auditors also. We used the tech, and still do use much of it.
Our first date was a Sunday brunch at a funky expensive restaurant (Clementine's, in the Stanford Shopping Center). We got high on champagne. As it turned out, she liked being eaten out, and her husband didn't like to do that,..... and on our third date, a trip with her kids to see the Budweiser Clydesdales, it turned out, that her husband didn't like doing things with the kids, and I did.
There was no fourth date; within about a week, or two, she had moved out, and we were living together.
I sold my little center (now the Los Gatos Org). 1976, the prices started rising 10% a month.My wife had a private school (still does), and the Co$ started pressuring her for 10% of her school's income.
Without discussing it, we both walked away from the Co$. We never talked about it really; we just saw
leaving as the obvious thing to do.
[video=youtube;NnSAAVuEob8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnSAAVuEob8[/video]
Like avoiding a broken down bus in your lane on the freeway, you drive around,
it is obvious.
Her husband was out of his mind with rage, that he was super successful at Scientology, and his kids were living with us,
black sheep, who had forsaken the real true truth. He and I got into a fistfight, as I was "encouraging" him to leave our house one day. We didn't give a flying fuck about Scientology -- at least compared to our personal vision of what was right.
By 1980, he was gone, from the Co$, on his own determinism, too.