Coyote13
Thought Criminal
"My experience with scientology - by Coyote13
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Here's a short( well proly not gonna end up being short, but we'll see) summary of my experience in scientology. Pardon the grammar, paragraph structure and such.
My mom was in scientology when she had me(1976). She went to the sacramento org. Most of the adults I was around were scientologists, except my extended family who lived in the sacramento area as well. I recall being the vampire family for a halloween party there.
I recall watching movies and such, like the meaning of life(or whatever its called, where this couple is trying to find the meaning of life or how to be happy and talk to all kinds of professions, architect, lawyer, and psychiatrist ). the psychiatrist i recall cause they had him like kinda pale faced with a pointy moustache and beard with a top hat if i recall and a rat in the maze and he ended up stabbing the rat over and over while saying phrases about what life is supposed to be about( he was obviously supposed to be insnae, but what an image for a 3 or 4 or 5 year old lol).
i recall having to have touch assists for a horrible ear ache and i was trying to fdo whatever i could to make them stop cause i was in so much pain and them touching me didnt help one bit, in fact made things a lot worse cause i couldnt sleep while they did it and we for some reason had to go to the org to do it.
i remember my brother wandering away from the org one day when he was 3( we went to the org a lot with my mom and/or stepfather when we we little and werent supervised) and i though he was gone forever and was pretty sad till they called the police and they said they found him a few blocks away and one of the mounted police that were around the downtown area asked him where his parents were and he said he didnt know.
I remember going to san francisco in the back of our station wagon with hella other people( 6 adults and 3 or 4+ kids ) for some kinda event, i was like 4 or 5 so i dont know what it was for, just we got to go to san francisco for "important" stuff. I dont recall what all happened that made this the next step, but my mom and stepfather decided to join the sea org in l.a. i remember they kept tewlling how awesome it was going to be in the sea org and how important and better our lives would be and we would be part of the greatest group on earth, for the earth and we'd learn how to handle degraded beings like bums and such.
(1984)My older sister and younger brother and i went down to l.a. first( well, my stepfather went down to l.a. first, i guess to get established or whatever). we all rode the greyhound together, i was 8, my older sister was 13, and my brother was 7. i rememebr being very sad cause i left all my friends behind and knew i wasnt going to see them ever again, but also kinda excited cause they built it up so much and it was like i was going to save the world, so losing friends was a small price to pay).
i dont know where htey had my older sister staying, i think she may have gone on the epf. my brother and i stayed in the complex with my stepfather, sharing a top bunk. things are a bit fuzzy around this time, a lot went on that i didnt understand( and still dont understand some and i dont think i can get a straight answer from anyone who was there).
my brother and i were in the ceo( bronson and franklin, across the ditch from the manor) and we learned how to steal from the mayfair market if we wanted candy. i remember yuri and serge were two other brothers that were kinda like us, and we played with star wars figures and played tag and threatened each other to become book one auditors and put ethics on whoever we were threatening lol.
i recall having to drink cal mag and we couldnt get fruit or whatever desert there was if we didnt drink it, and it tasted like death to me, so i poured it out when they werent looking or plugged my nose and chugged it like they taught me to do. i remember this kid named jaoquin( spelling?) whose mom worked at the ceo so he kinda had authority( in all our kids eyes at least, he could tell his mom anything and shed believe him) having a bullwhip one time and threatening us so i punched him in the head and got in trouble.
i recall them taking us to griffith park and serge saying his dad and him went up there and collected quartz crystals( which i havent seen a single one in all the hikes up there since and he never showed any).
there were a lot of stories about people who used to be at the ceo and went away, namely jeremy prefontaine i recall, he was a mad scientist a made a freeze ray and coould do all sorts of things (the freeze ray was flocking for christmas trees
and hed put batteries to circuit boards and melt them and i learned to do it to, was amusing to a kid).
i dont remember when my older sister wnet back to sacramento and what all happened that made her have to go( we didnt see her much after we came to the complex). i remember when my mom came down to l.a. with my little sister, we waitied for a long while till we were able to gewt family berthing, first in the complex, then the place where they have the christmas thing every year on hollywood boulevard. the complex was just with my mom and little sister (2 or 3 years old at the time) and my brother and myself, and we loved the triple bunkbeds and hoped for a four story one( we'd only seen regular bunk beds before).
we wandered the complex and looked for the dead bodies that were still supposed to be there from before it was renovated and drank half and half with hot water in the canteen and played with the tar that melted on hot days on the roof and threw things off the roof as well. and in the ceo we ditched to the manor and wandered the parking place when they left it open and made secret hideouts in all the junk we found and wandered on the checkerboard courtyard( where one of our friends, i think his name was matt, fell and cracked his head open and there was a huge pool of blood and we never heard from him again after the ambulance took him away, i forget what they say happend to him though).
we'd go up to griffith park and eat berries out of the tree right at the entrance( the tree is gone now, or at least i havent seen any berries up there since coming back hella later) or we'd take the manor bus to the complex and steal candy and walk in the water at barnsdell art park behind kaiser permanente.
my mom worked at AO for a while doing certs and awards for a while then she worked at the ceo doing nanny duty and i recall boiling barley in bags for formula and watered down appkle juice so the babies teeth didnt rot.
i remember avoiding when i could the group showers at the ceo, i didnt like to shower with a bunch of other kids and the adults supervising.
i remember a dude from the ceo named jim, i think he may have a daughter named carly, but not sure, though i did know a carly from there. i remember a new dude named gayorg( spelling) who was there right before we left the ceo for good.
i recall a dude named jose( who i think became security later) who would hit us and "discipline" us.
i remember eating all the cherry vitamin c at the ceo, and working in the kitchen and getting paid $24 one week and the adults got half of that( for a 9year old, makes you feel pretty pimp to make more than people 2 or 3 or 4 times your age lol, though i think stats were down and that was like a humiliation for the adult downstats).
i remeber they sang a song on the bus a lot that got on my nerves , "we are the upstats, the mighty mighty upstats............". my brother and i would say, "we are the downstats the mighty mighty downstats".
i remember they bused us out to studio city to go to a public school called carpenter avenue elementary with about 5 other kids from the ceo. it was when there was an eclipse in 1985 or something.
then they sent us to baldwin hills elementary school when we lived right near selma elementary cause we were at the hollywood boulevard family berthings(the eighth floor in a room with no hot water or window, only a tarpt for the window).
we had a lot fo trouble at that school and got beat up a lot ( we stuck out hella like sore thumbs at that school, but taught me how it feels to be singled out for being different). we ditched school a lot and wandered the berthings and took a lot of things from peoples rooms and set off fire extinguishers and generally ran amok.
we told my mom about what was going on at school and she didnt believe us, or told us we brought it on ourselves and to just walk away( when you walk away from a fight, you get beat up from behind lol but maybe we just werent walkign the right way or needed to quit being out ethics and theyd stop teasing us and beating us up lol).
by then i figured that whatever happened, whatever i did, things would suck ass, so it didnt really matter what i did, "good" or "bad" there consequences were the same and we didnt have anyone to defend us or look out for us ( my mom and stepfather said we pulled it all in and we couldnt figure for the life of us what we had done to deserve it, no matter how hard i thought about it, i got good and making up stories that would satisfy what they wanted to hear, it wasnt about how you feel, its about what you say and how you act/ tow the line).
things escalated a lot and we ended up throwing a bunch of things off the roof of the fountain building (the berthings that were on fountain accross from the complex next to the parking structure), including a can of paint which splattered on a car, luckily it was a scientologist cause thered have been even bigger hell to pay( i think some of these things were what led to my mom and stepfather being kicked out of the sea org ).
i dont know where my mom was at the time, and my stepfather was on the rpf ( i have no idea why, and they wouldnt tell me, but ive read some of his overts and witholds, so i can only speculate). we did conditions for taking things in the hollywood berthings and ran up to the eight floor and back down i dont know how many times but more than i thought i was able to handle.
i remember hearing we had to leave the sea org and i was very very very very very( to save time multiply times infinity to get the full magnitude of releif of being away from that place) happy to be gone, and we had to go to the ceo one day and my brother and i were very hungry so went in and got some egg custard thing and my stepfather yelled at us cause we were stealing (we thought we were still part of the ceo, like no one explained things to us, well the reality of things, we just had made up stories from them).
then we lived in a station wagon my stepfathers brother gave us for a few weeks ( hella sucked riding up to school in the same clothes all the time in the car you obviously sleep in, didnt help one bit wit hthe teasing and such lol).
we stayed with some people on berendo at one time(l ron hubbard way now) who had a daughter named roxanne. eventually we started living with some dude named jack farmer who lived at the fountain arms. i remember he had a tandy and i started learning to program games like q bert and some desert text adventure game ( if you put commands it didnt understand, itd say "ra helps those who help themselves") and jack farmer had hella hella comics, archie and jughead stuff which we thought was cool.
we got our own studio apartment at the fountain arms eventually and then the thing in portalnd happened and we had to go fight for religious freedom cause some chick killed herself and her parents were suing scientology cause they blamed them ( ive heard it was another reason since, but thats what my understanding was at the time, i was 9 years old).
we stayed in portland for a good month, and i met some homeless dude who said that lrh wanted to start a religion to make money and he was a fraud and he actually knew him from back in the military, to which i promptly reported him to security and never saw him there again (maybe he found a different park or whatever, but i was pretty angry hed say those things about lrh).
i recall marching to salem, and passing out hella way to happiness books door to door thinking i was so special to bring such wonderful tech to people so they could be so much happier. we eventually got asked to leave portland ( my mom said it was cause what my brother and i had done while they were in the sea org).
we then moved to the shangri lodge accross from the manor (they said someone killed themselves in that apartment and we were lucky to have gotten it ) and thats when i did my purif at age 10 (i didnt want to but my stepfather got very very angry and physically brought us there and had the staff watch us so we didnt run away, though we did every chance we got, we had a bus pass and could ride the public bus any time and had been doing so since 8). my brother and little sister finished theirs first, so i said i was done, and they said no you arent. so i asked my brother and little sister what they told them, and then a few days later i said i was done again, and they put me on an emeter and i repeated what my brother told me " i feel so much more able and have so much more energy and my head is much clearer" , though to be honest, i didnt feel different one bit and i wondered what i was possibly detoxing from and if i did it at a young age, wouldnt the chemicals be back in my system if its just environmental stuff?
lots of things didnt make sense to me that adults did and said, and i thought it was me, and now i know it was them, trying to make sense of a scientologists logic is futile unless you can do a mental juggling act which allows you to believe things which your senses and mind tell you are blatantly untrue.
i recall as well some event going on, maybe new years and we'd huff ballons of helium and go into seizures and thought it was pretty funny and theyd just tell us to quit it. and feeling super uncomfortable almost painful hot from the niacin we had to take.
we went to hella events at the shrine auditorium and it was fun to wander around checking out the various rooms there and theyd have free food at the end, so even better.
i did the how to get along with others course, but i dont recall doing it at all until i found my old course book with my writing in it( i still remember doing it though, but it is my handwriting), then my brother and i did the success through communications course, again leavign and ditching when we could, but ultimately finishing it.
when i was 12, after i was getting in lots of trouble on a regular basis and we'd moved a lot and finally lived in some lady named sylvia bradford/morales' house, they sent me to flag to do the student hat, and it was supposed to be hella hella awesome (according to them) but my mom was crying and a limo picked me up at AO and i went to flag.
there was a lady with a french accent who had me word clear "bank" but with her accent i thought she said bunk, and i got in trouble for essentially saying "bank" is a place you sleep and it can be doubled up, one on top of the other, and some times 3 high.
i was very home sick and wished i could be home again (which sucked ass at home ,but at leat i was in familiar territory and my brother and little sister were there). eventually they put me on the learning book course and i finished it and they sent me home( they didnt want me to leave without a win, and i just wanted to leave so i did whatever i had to do).
while out there, that lady sylvia, repeatedly told me how lowly and how she couldnt take care of me and how i need to stay in florida and be on course and help her flip houses.
a lot of these things were making me question the value of being in or around scientology, and question myself and what i did to deserve such a crappy life and parents and such, i must have been a horrible horrible person last life to deserve this as a child.
when i got back to l.a. i found a lot of books on the occult and black magic in the garage underneath the house that i think belonged to pavone, sylvias daughter, and her husband who i knew nothing about other than they went squirrel or some such like that.
that became a good outlet for all my anger and frustration at life and the things i had to experience that as a child i had no power to stop or prevent and not having parents who would protect me from those things and actually put me in those situations at times and said i was a liar when i said what was going on.
shortly after i turned 13 i decided i wanted nothing to do with scientology. i didnt care about anything and again, life sucked ass no matter what you did or how hard you tried cause everyone was crazy.
even when i talked to police or firemen and such, they said i deserved it( i dont know what my stepfather said to them ), though there were instances when strangers intervened on my behalf when witnessing some actions taken against me.
i spent a lot of time at friends houses and their parents became like mine, i was a totally different person in those environments, happy, healthy, more open and most of all, i felt safe.
i tried to get myself adopted out, but nothing came of that and being 13 they said id live in a group home( instead of with caring parents like i thought lol).
i figured early on that life as it is (at least my perceptions of it based on my experiences so far) isnt worth living and since we live over and over again, may as well kill myself and hope my next life was better.
i wasnt successful( obviously) and left home at 15 for 3 months and had to come back and do conditions in order to have a place to stay with my family. i lived with them for another 2 years till i was 18.
i borke down and called the covenant house 9 line (1-800-999-9999) and told them all about my life and what had happened to me and how i felt about it and they advised i go see a counselor, where i repeated what i told them, and they said i needed to see a psychiatrist.
hella hella scary, i didnt want tubes in my head or to be stabbed like a rat, but ultimately, i figured it couldnt be worse than anything that id been through before. so i went voluntarily and went into a psych ward.
my mom cried when she found out and said i was dead and a zombie when i told her i took medications and i got hella angry and had some choice words about me finally trying to get some real help instead of her scientology bullshit which fucked me up and served to make me feel like shit and how she never protected me from anything bad and only encouraged me to be quiet.
i met a girl there in the hospital and ended up getting together with her. she was a bit out there having had some serious shit happen to her as well, but she "loved" me and actually wanted me to be around without me having to be anything other than myself.
after some things occured, i eventually went to visited her mom in seattle for a month and the day before i was to come back to l.a., my mom informed me i was not allowed to live in her house anymore( recently i confronted her about it, and she said i always could come back as long as i wasnt taking "drugs" and when i said i was just drinking, and she said, you know what I'm talking about! which i take to mean the zoloft, and a side note as well, she was recording our conversation with her camera phone, to which i just stopped talking and said fine, you have your own reality and it has nothing to do with facts, so you go ahead and stay in your world and ill stay in reality, more power to you, peace).
i was very crushed, even though shit sucked there, it was familiar and i had friends at least, but i ended up staying in seattle for 7 years. had a lot of hard times out there, but as well, there wasnt a single person who had even heard of scientology that i met there, and i eneded up getting ssi and had some actual real therapy where they listen to you and help you see things rather than just blame you for everything bad that happened to you.
i learned about healthy ways of interactions and i learned they dont put tubes in your head and that medications can actually help and that there are people who arent like scientologists and actually want to help in a way that show actual quantifiable results (like not flattening the effect of traumatic experiences, but rather actually embracing them and working through them and gaining some acceptance instead of avoidance, so i actually felt better, not became disociated and disconnected from the experience).
i guess thts where ill end my introduction for now. sorry if its jumbled and run on and rambling, but thats how it is in my head, i left out a lot, but theres still connections that im making and im still healing, even now, im 34 years old.
i feel that all my experiences have given me insight into myself and others, even if its a tiny bit, its a lot more than scientolgoy ever did or could possibly do.
i still have the fallout from my childhood, but i have a better handle on it and have found happiness and peace (however fleeting, life is like that, we have good times and not so good times, and thats ok, i dont need everything to be perfect and i dont need to control anything or anyone, but rather i can go with the flow and let what is, be what is, and be responsbile for my own actions and have good boundaries and not have to beat myself up and make sense of shit that theres no sense to really be made).
thats a bit of my experience with scientology, i dont know if i ever was truly a scientologist, despite having a scientologist family since birth.
i think a fundamental thing about scientolgoy is the lack of critical thinking, or maybe its the presence of selective critical thinking as long as its not about scientology, and to be able to be a scientologist, you have to be willing to sacrifice your own willingness to think for yourself and find your own way in life. peace and blessings for now, thanks for reading ( if you read this far lol
ps. the most important thing a parent can do for a child is to instill a sense of being loved unconditionally, regardless of what happens, and a sense of being wanted and being worthy of being heard and being worthy of being protected from "bad" things
pps. thanks to the individuals who helped break it down into paragraphs, much appreciated.
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Here's a short( well proly not gonna end up being short, but we'll see) summary of my experience in scientology. Pardon the grammar, paragraph structure and such.
My mom was in scientology when she had me(1976). She went to the sacramento org. Most of the adults I was around were scientologists, except my extended family who lived in the sacramento area as well. I recall being the vampire family for a halloween party there.
I recall watching movies and such, like the meaning of life(or whatever its called, where this couple is trying to find the meaning of life or how to be happy and talk to all kinds of professions, architect, lawyer, and psychiatrist ). the psychiatrist i recall cause they had him like kinda pale faced with a pointy moustache and beard with a top hat if i recall and a rat in the maze and he ended up stabbing the rat over and over while saying phrases about what life is supposed to be about( he was obviously supposed to be insnae, but what an image for a 3 or 4 or 5 year old lol).
i recall having to have touch assists for a horrible ear ache and i was trying to fdo whatever i could to make them stop cause i was in so much pain and them touching me didnt help one bit, in fact made things a lot worse cause i couldnt sleep while they did it and we for some reason had to go to the org to do it.
i remember my brother wandering away from the org one day when he was 3( we went to the org a lot with my mom and/or stepfather when we we little and werent supervised) and i though he was gone forever and was pretty sad till they called the police and they said they found him a few blocks away and one of the mounted police that were around the downtown area asked him where his parents were and he said he didnt know.
I remember going to san francisco in the back of our station wagon with hella other people( 6 adults and 3 or 4+ kids ) for some kinda event, i was like 4 or 5 so i dont know what it was for, just we got to go to san francisco for "important" stuff. I dont recall what all happened that made this the next step, but my mom and stepfather decided to join the sea org in l.a. i remember they kept tewlling how awesome it was going to be in the sea org and how important and better our lives would be and we would be part of the greatest group on earth, for the earth and we'd learn how to handle degraded beings like bums and such.
(1984)My older sister and younger brother and i went down to l.a. first( well, my stepfather went down to l.a. first, i guess to get established or whatever). we all rode the greyhound together, i was 8, my older sister was 13, and my brother was 7. i rememebr being very sad cause i left all my friends behind and knew i wasnt going to see them ever again, but also kinda excited cause they built it up so much and it was like i was going to save the world, so losing friends was a small price to pay).
i dont know where htey had my older sister staying, i think she may have gone on the epf. my brother and i stayed in the complex with my stepfather, sharing a top bunk. things are a bit fuzzy around this time, a lot went on that i didnt understand( and still dont understand some and i dont think i can get a straight answer from anyone who was there).
my brother and i were in the ceo( bronson and franklin, across the ditch from the manor) and we learned how to steal from the mayfair market if we wanted candy. i remember yuri and serge were two other brothers that were kinda like us, and we played with star wars figures and played tag and threatened each other to become book one auditors and put ethics on whoever we were threatening lol.
i recall having to drink cal mag and we couldnt get fruit or whatever desert there was if we didnt drink it, and it tasted like death to me, so i poured it out when they werent looking or plugged my nose and chugged it like they taught me to do. i remember this kid named jaoquin( spelling?) whose mom worked at the ceo so he kinda had authority( in all our kids eyes at least, he could tell his mom anything and shed believe him) having a bullwhip one time and threatening us so i punched him in the head and got in trouble.
i recall them taking us to griffith park and serge saying his dad and him went up there and collected quartz crystals( which i havent seen a single one in all the hikes up there since and he never showed any).
there were a lot of stories about people who used to be at the ceo and went away, namely jeremy prefontaine i recall, he was a mad scientist a made a freeze ray and coould do all sorts of things (the freeze ray was flocking for christmas trees
and hed put batteries to circuit boards and melt them and i learned to do it to, was amusing to a kid). i dont remember when my older sister wnet back to sacramento and what all happened that made her have to go( we didnt see her much after we came to the complex). i remember when my mom came down to l.a. with my little sister, we waitied for a long while till we were able to gewt family berthing, first in the complex, then the place where they have the christmas thing every year on hollywood boulevard. the complex was just with my mom and little sister (2 or 3 years old at the time) and my brother and myself, and we loved the triple bunkbeds and hoped for a four story one( we'd only seen regular bunk beds before).
we wandered the complex and looked for the dead bodies that were still supposed to be there from before it was renovated and drank half and half with hot water in the canteen and played with the tar that melted on hot days on the roof and threw things off the roof as well. and in the ceo we ditched to the manor and wandered the parking place when they left it open and made secret hideouts in all the junk we found and wandered on the checkerboard courtyard( where one of our friends, i think his name was matt, fell and cracked his head open and there was a huge pool of blood and we never heard from him again after the ambulance took him away, i forget what they say happend to him though).
we'd go up to griffith park and eat berries out of the tree right at the entrance( the tree is gone now, or at least i havent seen any berries up there since coming back hella later) or we'd take the manor bus to the complex and steal candy and walk in the water at barnsdell art park behind kaiser permanente.
my mom worked at AO for a while doing certs and awards for a while then she worked at the ceo doing nanny duty and i recall boiling barley in bags for formula and watered down appkle juice so the babies teeth didnt rot.
i remember avoiding when i could the group showers at the ceo, i didnt like to shower with a bunch of other kids and the adults supervising.
i remember a dude from the ceo named jim, i think he may have a daughter named carly, but not sure, though i did know a carly from there. i remember a new dude named gayorg( spelling) who was there right before we left the ceo for good.
i recall a dude named jose( who i think became security later) who would hit us and "discipline" us.
i remember eating all the cherry vitamin c at the ceo, and working in the kitchen and getting paid $24 one week and the adults got half of that( for a 9year old, makes you feel pretty pimp to make more than people 2 or 3 or 4 times your age lol, though i think stats were down and that was like a humiliation for the adult downstats).
i remeber they sang a song on the bus a lot that got on my nerves , "we are the upstats, the mighty mighty upstats............". my brother and i would say, "we are the downstats the mighty mighty downstats".
i remember they bused us out to studio city to go to a public school called carpenter avenue elementary with about 5 other kids from the ceo. it was when there was an eclipse in 1985 or something.
then they sent us to baldwin hills elementary school when we lived right near selma elementary cause we were at the hollywood boulevard family berthings(the eighth floor in a room with no hot water or window, only a tarpt for the window).
we had a lot fo trouble at that school and got beat up a lot ( we stuck out hella like sore thumbs at that school, but taught me how it feels to be singled out for being different). we ditched school a lot and wandered the berthings and took a lot of things from peoples rooms and set off fire extinguishers and generally ran amok.
we told my mom about what was going on at school and she didnt believe us, or told us we brought it on ourselves and to just walk away( when you walk away from a fight, you get beat up from behind lol but maybe we just werent walkign the right way or needed to quit being out ethics and theyd stop teasing us and beating us up lol).
by then i figured that whatever happened, whatever i did, things would suck ass, so it didnt really matter what i did, "good" or "bad" there consequences were the same and we didnt have anyone to defend us or look out for us ( my mom and stepfather said we pulled it all in and we couldnt figure for the life of us what we had done to deserve it, no matter how hard i thought about it, i got good and making up stories that would satisfy what they wanted to hear, it wasnt about how you feel, its about what you say and how you act/ tow the line).
things escalated a lot and we ended up throwing a bunch of things off the roof of the fountain building (the berthings that were on fountain accross from the complex next to the parking structure), including a can of paint which splattered on a car, luckily it was a scientologist cause thered have been even bigger hell to pay( i think some of these things were what led to my mom and stepfather being kicked out of the sea org ).
i dont know where my mom was at the time, and my stepfather was on the rpf ( i have no idea why, and they wouldnt tell me, but ive read some of his overts and witholds, so i can only speculate). we did conditions for taking things in the hollywood berthings and ran up to the eight floor and back down i dont know how many times but more than i thought i was able to handle.
i remember hearing we had to leave the sea org and i was very very very very very( to save time multiply times infinity to get the full magnitude of releif of being away from that place) happy to be gone, and we had to go to the ceo one day and my brother and i were very hungry so went in and got some egg custard thing and my stepfather yelled at us cause we were stealing (we thought we were still part of the ceo, like no one explained things to us, well the reality of things, we just had made up stories from them).
then we lived in a station wagon my stepfathers brother gave us for a few weeks ( hella sucked riding up to school in the same clothes all the time in the car you obviously sleep in, didnt help one bit wit hthe teasing and such lol).
we stayed with some people on berendo at one time(l ron hubbard way now) who had a daughter named roxanne. eventually we started living with some dude named jack farmer who lived at the fountain arms. i remember he had a tandy and i started learning to program games like q bert and some desert text adventure game ( if you put commands it didnt understand, itd say "ra helps those who help themselves") and jack farmer had hella hella comics, archie and jughead stuff which we thought was cool.
we got our own studio apartment at the fountain arms eventually and then the thing in portalnd happened and we had to go fight for religious freedom cause some chick killed herself and her parents were suing scientology cause they blamed them ( ive heard it was another reason since, but thats what my understanding was at the time, i was 9 years old).
we stayed in portland for a good month, and i met some homeless dude who said that lrh wanted to start a religion to make money and he was a fraud and he actually knew him from back in the military, to which i promptly reported him to security and never saw him there again (maybe he found a different park or whatever, but i was pretty angry hed say those things about lrh).
i recall marching to salem, and passing out hella way to happiness books door to door thinking i was so special to bring such wonderful tech to people so they could be so much happier. we eventually got asked to leave portland ( my mom said it was cause what my brother and i had done while they were in the sea org).
we then moved to the shangri lodge accross from the manor (they said someone killed themselves in that apartment and we were lucky to have gotten it ) and thats when i did my purif at age 10 (i didnt want to but my stepfather got very very angry and physically brought us there and had the staff watch us so we didnt run away, though we did every chance we got, we had a bus pass and could ride the public bus any time and had been doing so since 8). my brother and little sister finished theirs first, so i said i was done, and they said no you arent. so i asked my brother and little sister what they told them, and then a few days later i said i was done again, and they put me on an emeter and i repeated what my brother told me " i feel so much more able and have so much more energy and my head is much clearer" , though to be honest, i didnt feel different one bit and i wondered what i was possibly detoxing from and if i did it at a young age, wouldnt the chemicals be back in my system if its just environmental stuff?
lots of things didnt make sense to me that adults did and said, and i thought it was me, and now i know it was them, trying to make sense of a scientologists logic is futile unless you can do a mental juggling act which allows you to believe things which your senses and mind tell you are blatantly untrue.
i recall as well some event going on, maybe new years and we'd huff ballons of helium and go into seizures and thought it was pretty funny and theyd just tell us to quit it. and feeling super uncomfortable almost painful hot from the niacin we had to take.
we went to hella events at the shrine auditorium and it was fun to wander around checking out the various rooms there and theyd have free food at the end, so even better.
i did the how to get along with others course, but i dont recall doing it at all until i found my old course book with my writing in it( i still remember doing it though, but it is my handwriting), then my brother and i did the success through communications course, again leavign and ditching when we could, but ultimately finishing it.
when i was 12, after i was getting in lots of trouble on a regular basis and we'd moved a lot and finally lived in some lady named sylvia bradford/morales' house, they sent me to flag to do the student hat, and it was supposed to be hella hella awesome (according to them) but my mom was crying and a limo picked me up at AO and i went to flag.
there was a lady with a french accent who had me word clear "bank" but with her accent i thought she said bunk, and i got in trouble for essentially saying "bank" is a place you sleep and it can be doubled up, one on top of the other, and some times 3 high.
i was very home sick and wished i could be home again (which sucked ass at home ,but at leat i was in familiar territory and my brother and little sister were there). eventually they put me on the learning book course and i finished it and they sent me home( they didnt want me to leave without a win, and i just wanted to leave so i did whatever i had to do).
while out there, that lady sylvia, repeatedly told me how lowly and how she couldnt take care of me and how i need to stay in florida and be on course and help her flip houses.
a lot of these things were making me question the value of being in or around scientology, and question myself and what i did to deserve such a crappy life and parents and such, i must have been a horrible horrible person last life to deserve this as a child.
when i got back to l.a. i found a lot of books on the occult and black magic in the garage underneath the house that i think belonged to pavone, sylvias daughter, and her husband who i knew nothing about other than they went squirrel or some such like that.
that became a good outlet for all my anger and frustration at life and the things i had to experience that as a child i had no power to stop or prevent and not having parents who would protect me from those things and actually put me in those situations at times and said i was a liar when i said what was going on.
shortly after i turned 13 i decided i wanted nothing to do with scientology. i didnt care about anything and again, life sucked ass no matter what you did or how hard you tried cause everyone was crazy.
even when i talked to police or firemen and such, they said i deserved it( i dont know what my stepfather said to them ), though there were instances when strangers intervened on my behalf when witnessing some actions taken against me.
i spent a lot of time at friends houses and their parents became like mine, i was a totally different person in those environments, happy, healthy, more open and most of all, i felt safe.
i tried to get myself adopted out, but nothing came of that and being 13 they said id live in a group home( instead of with caring parents like i thought lol).
i figured early on that life as it is (at least my perceptions of it based on my experiences so far) isnt worth living and since we live over and over again, may as well kill myself and hope my next life was better.
i wasnt successful( obviously
) and left home at 15 for 3 months and had to come back and do conditions in order to have a place to stay with my family. i lived with them for another 2 years till i was 18. i borke down and called the covenant house 9 line (1-800-999-9999) and told them all about my life and what had happened to me and how i felt about it and they advised i go see a counselor, where i repeated what i told them, and they said i needed to see a psychiatrist.
hella hella scary, i didnt want tubes in my head or to be stabbed like a rat, but ultimately, i figured it couldnt be worse than anything that id been through before. so i went voluntarily and went into a psych ward.
my mom cried when she found out and said i was dead and a zombie when i told her i took medications and i got hella angry and had some choice words about me finally trying to get some real help instead of her scientology bullshit which fucked me up and served to make me feel like shit and how she never protected me from anything bad and only encouraged me to be quiet.
i met a girl there in the hospital and ended up getting together with her. she was a bit out there having had some serious shit happen to her as well, but she "loved" me and actually wanted me to be around without me having to be anything other than myself.
after some things occured, i eventually went to visited her mom in seattle for a month and the day before i was to come back to l.a., my mom informed me i was not allowed to live in her house anymore( recently i confronted her about it, and she said i always could come back as long as i wasnt taking "drugs" and when i said i was just drinking, and she said, you know what I'm talking about! which i take to mean the zoloft, and a side note as well, she was recording our conversation with her camera phone, to which i just stopped talking and said fine, you have your own reality and it has nothing to do with facts, so you go ahead and stay in your world and ill stay in reality, more power to you, peace).
i was very crushed, even though shit sucked there, it was familiar and i had friends at least, but i ended up staying in seattle for 7 years. had a lot of hard times out there, but as well, there wasnt a single person who had even heard of scientology that i met there, and i eneded up getting ssi and had some actual real therapy where they listen to you and help you see things rather than just blame you for everything bad that happened to you.
i learned about healthy ways of interactions and i learned they dont put tubes in your head and that medications can actually help and that there are people who arent like scientologists and actually want to help in a way that show actual quantifiable results (like not flattening the effect of traumatic experiences, but rather actually embracing them and working through them and gaining some acceptance instead of avoidance, so i actually felt better, not became disociated and disconnected from the experience).
i guess thts where ill end my introduction for now. sorry if its jumbled and run on and rambling, but thats how it is in my head, i left out a lot, but theres still connections that im making and im still healing, even now, im 34 years old.
i feel that all my experiences have given me insight into myself and others, even if its a tiny bit, its a lot more than scientolgoy ever did or could possibly do.
i still have the fallout from my childhood, but i have a better handle on it and have found happiness and peace (however fleeting, life is like that, we have good times and not so good times, and thats ok, i dont need everything to be perfect and i dont need to control anything or anyone, but rather i can go with the flow and let what is, be what is, and be responsbile for my own actions and have good boundaries and not have to beat myself up and make sense of shit that theres no sense to really be made).
thats a bit of my experience with scientology, i dont know if i ever was truly a scientologist, despite having a scientologist family since birth.
i think a fundamental thing about scientolgoy is the lack of critical thinking, or maybe its the presence of selective critical thinking as long as its not about scientology, and to be able to be a scientologist, you have to be willing to sacrifice your own willingness to think for yourself and find your own way in life. peace and blessings for now, thanks for reading ( if you read this far lol
ps. the most important thing a parent can do for a child is to instill a sense of being loved unconditionally, regardless of what happens, and a sense of being wanted and being worthy of being heard and being worthy of being protected from "bad" things
pps. thanks to the individuals who helped break it down into paragraphs, much appreciated.
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Coyote. Really appreciate you sharing your story with us! 
((HUGGS))
to you for all you went through and all you accomplished despite that! 
