Scientology Reflections (8) 10 Years After Leaving-A Painful Transition
This is the eighth post in a series that I am publishing in 2024. The series is on the journey I have been on AFTER leaving Scientology and Dianetics and what my experiences were, and mistakes I made, and things that I learned, some shortly after leaving Scientology and others further along the way, even up to the present day. Some of this involves Scientology and Dianetics. Some involves the process of leaving a cult. Some is just knowledge that I could have benefited from knowing sooner, that may even be unrelated to the cultic topic entirely.
For anyone who is unaware, I was in Scientology for twenty five years, between 1989 and 2014. I left in 2014 and discovered that Scientology is a harmful fraud and jam packed with lies and further it is composed of techniques plagiarized from other practices and sources. Ronald Hubbard had the ability to take a practice, file off the serial numbers and repackage it as his own in first Dianetics and later Scientology.
Ronald Hubbard.
One thing that I went through when I left Scientology was a literally physically painful process. It hurt me for several months.
While I was in Scientology for twenty five years I was so fanatical, so zealous, so devoted to constantly letting Ronald Hubbard do as much of my thinking for me as possible by trying to follow Scientology doctrine in EVERYTHING I thought that I was putting EVERYTHING I saw, read, heard, said, did, felt, or thought through a filter of trying to see what I thought Hubbard would think of the information or experience and have that guide me.
This is the end result of decades of cult indoctrination and hundreds, probably thousands, of hours of indoctrination in the courseroom and as a Scientology staff member and briefly as a Sea Org recruit.
I was stunned after I left Scientology and within a few weeks of leaving Scientology I examined the evidence that Scientology is a harmful fraud that utilizes hypnotic techniques and I realized the fact that I was subjected to such techniques and mistook the euphoric trances that Scientology indoctrination can induce for transcendent spiritual experiences.
I had a further obstacle to overcome that rapidly became obvious. I had to learn to think for myself. I discovered it as the two people that I turned to for guidance when I left Scientology were people who have very different opinions on some things, despite sharing similar beliefs about some aspects of Scientology.
I couldn't just parrot them both as they fundamentally disagree on some things, which was actually good for me because I didn't just blindly follow either one.
I started reading all sorts of books on psychology, cognitive dissonance theory, hypnosis, cults, critical thinking, and related subjects.
I observed that this was remarkably difficult for me. I was reading books that I could have read before I was in Scientology. I was seventeen years old when I was recruited into Scientology and had enjoyed reading books for years. I certainly had at least a tenth to twelfth grade reading level and enjoyed books by Stephen King for example.
After leaving Scientology and starting to read various books I realized that it was literally painful to try to read a book and decide what to believe, what to disagree with, and what to say, "I don't know enough about something to form an educated opinion on this idea." to.
I was dumbfounded and had to find a way to think for myself and not just reject or accept something completely, which I used to do based on the Scientology doctrine related to the subject or source. Hubbard agreed with this? Then I used to agree! Hubbard disagreed? Then I disagreed! It was simple! No thought required!
So, I was stuck in a very unpleasant bind. I knew that I had to study about cults, the history of cults, the techniques they used, the science regarding these methods and more, but I didn't know how to even read for myself as myself any more!
It's quite different to read as an independent person than as a mental slave who just wants to obey their master!
So, what's one to do?
I can't claim this is a one size fits all solution or will work for you or any other particular person, but I feel that I should at least share it because it could help someone or it can get them to think of a better approach, or a better approach for themselves. It can also possibly help people who are not in cults to understand how deeply cult indoctrination can go.
My solution that I came up with was to take a little notebook. I bought a bunch of these, they are tiny and maybe a few inches by a few inches. I would read my book and stop reading and write down the important ideas that I found in my notebook and I decided to make one side have ideas that I was agreeing with and eventually it became ideas that I would consider but not necessarily believe. Some are for consideration.
On the other side of the notebook I would write ideas that I highly doubted or disagreed with and added ideas that I found to be things that I could not decide on. The uncertain.
This involved painful headaches and they persisted for months. Perhaps a neuroscientist would have some idea about pathways getting work that had not been used in years or even atrophied.
I am not going to pretend to fully understand the phenomena.
As more and more books were devoured and I came to do more and more thinking for myself, including deciding what to believe, what to disagree with, what to doubt, what to question and what to explore further, the headaches became less frequent and mercifully less painful until they eventually completely went away.
I eventually was realizing that I was forming my own beliefs and gradually integrating different ideas from different sources and seeing connections and gaps in the subjects. I kept finding more and more subjects that I felt compelled to explore as they addressed different aspects of the larger whole.
I have read perhaps a hundred or so books since leaving Scientology in 2014. I went from struggling in extreme pain and making very slow progress in reading with very poor retention and understanding to eventually over many months getting to be able to read about fifty pages per hour and retain much of what I read well enough to write extensively on most of what I read.
I developed a habit of writing about the things that drew my attention and were important in my eyes to understand, the lies in Scientology that were important to analyze and debunk, the history of the subject that was portrayed in a false manner in the cult indoctrination and which I wanted to thoroughly expose the truth about.
I wanted to take the techniques that were used on me in Scientology and treat them as a web of lies to untangle myself from to hopefully break the spell of undue influence that Hubbard cast on his followers.
I wanted to know what Scientology founder Ronald Hubbard studied, what he plagiarized, what he hid in Scientology and what he thought was happening in Scientology and what was actually happening in Scientology. I already knew what he said was happening to his followers.
I took the time to look at the work done by others, in particular Jon Atack (the most) and other people who had worked to dissect cults and Scientology in particular. (His work at The Underground Bunker by Tony Ortega is especially relevant and accessible in my opinion.) Jeff Jacobsen and Arnie Lerma and a few others had done excellent work and experts on cults in general such as Margaret Singer, Robert Jay Lifton (eight criteria for thought reform in particular), Daniel Shaw, Janja Lalich, Alexandra Stein, Steve Hassan, Leon Festinger and a few others. I read about psychology, hypnosis, rhetoric, critical thinking and other related subjects.
I learned that writing about the books and topics that I examined helped me to fully form my own ideas. This is something that John Stuart Mill elaborated on in his short classic book on critical thinking, On Liberty.
The idea that we need to present our ideas, communicate them and even get feedback on them to even understand them is important to me.
I found that writing about and presenting my ideas and then getting feedback from others and working to make my ideas clear to them and also to fill in any parts that I hadn't presented or presented clearly enough resulted in much better retention of my ideas by me, better understanding by me, and greater ability to explain my ideas and integrate or compare or contrast them against other ideas, including ideas from other subjects.
I feel that the overall result of all this work is a level of independent and critical thinking that is far better than what they were from twenty five years of Scientology indoctrination. It in my opinion may have got me back to where I was at regarding these aptitudes before I heard of Scientology. Which, while certainly not perfect, is much better than it was.
The process was rough and gradual. The writing I have done has been frankly rough. It was almost pure stream of consciousness initially, with lots of things coming out rapidly and my mind just creating thoughts and dumping them out as fast as I can write and then very gradually I started to read what I had written and edit for spelling and grammar errors and poor substitutions by autocorrect, then eventually for grammar errors and eventually for errors in tense and other inconsistencies.
Then even more awareness of the need to slow down and actually proofread the entire content of anything I have written before publishing it came into effect.
Now, I have no claim of being a great writer, but hope to at least have become more clear, concise, and comprehensible and to have largely rehabilitated my own independent and critical thinking capacities.
I think that the road from totally zealous and fanatical cult member who in my opinion would kill or die for a cult to someone who has zero willingness or interest in doing anything like that is worth pursuing, but it has to be a personal decision, a personal effort or it won't work.
Here's a link to my blog archive by topic:
Scientology Reflections (8) 10 Years After Leaving-A Painful Transition
