Beyond Belief (45 page)

I revealed that I had a cell phone, given to us by Dallas’s parents, which we used once per week to call our parents. Before I’d first gotten the phone, I had it approved, but now they told me that the approval was incorrect and I needed to surrender it. Meanwhile, they were also enforcing a slew of new rules: no food or snacks allowed in our desk drawers, even though we were up all hours of the night and had only fifteen minutes for meals; no music at our desks; no more civvies one day per week; nobody allowed to go home before midnight. Staff meetings were a long stream of insults and public humiliation for anyone who stepped out of line.

Still, I refused to turn over my cell phone. Five people confided in me that they were not going to give up theirs, either, so I figured we could make some sort of stand together. I wound up being the last person on the base who had one. I was told that the newly issued policy banning all cell phones and laptops was because people trying to infiltrate the Church could pick up on cellular waves and listen to our conversations; thus, it was for our own safety. I argued that this was ridiculous and paranoid. Then the next reason given was that some people looked at pornography on their phones. I told them that was equally ridiculous, and besides, it would be none of their business. Then, they gave the reason that they didn’t want family members calling with upsetting news. None of it convinced me to give up my phone.

All of their excuses were perfect examples of punishment and deprivation for their own sake. They didn’t care about the phone itself, and truthfully, by that point, neither did I. I wasn’t fighting about a phone; I was fighting about the principle of it. They were trying to take something that belonged to Dallas and me. It was our property, yet they felt entitled to take it. They had already taken away our room, confiscated our television, and removed food from our drawers. What made it even more hypocritical was that, by definition, one of the main characteristics of a Suppressive Person was that they had no regard for personal property.

It was the kind of object and the kind of argument that made both Dallas and me stop, think about our experience in Australia, and consider just how much we were giving up by living in the Sea Org. If they could take away something as meaningless as a cell phone and treat our belongings like their own, what would happen with the more important things? What about our relationship? They’d already tried to break us apart. Dallas still held out hope that one day they would lift the ban on us having children; what then? We’d learned for ourselves that there was a whole world of people out there who saw flaws with Scientology, and, increasingly, we were becoming like them. Maybe the real purpose for taking away our phone was to cut us off from the outside world, to control what information we were exposed to.

N
OT LONG AFTER WE RETURNED FROM
A
USTRALIA,
I
WAS TOLD
I couldn’t stay in the Landlord Office. The entire Landlord Office was moving to the Int base, but, since my parents had left the Sea Org, I was not authorized to work there. When I was asked what post I wanted instead, I chose auditor.

In retrospect, it was something of an odd decision, but, at the time, it made a lot of sense. For the last several years, I’d found myself constantly at odds with the Sea Org, their rules, and their actions taken toward me. I felt that Scientology was moving away from its mission to help people and becoming more about getting money from the public. Staff members were treated in demeaning ways, despite the fact that they were the ones who had dedicated their lives to the Church. A few months earlier, my Uncle Dave had named Tom Cruise the “world’s most dedicated Scientologist,” despite all the staff and Sea Org members who had sacrificed everything for Church. This was exacerbated by having to watch clips of Tom Cruise interviews during our fifteen-minute meal breaks, where he touted the amazingness of Scientology. Everything was upside down and backward. Nothing was for the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics anymore. The base was so dreary that I had heard of several people who had seriously considered suicide, and been routed out of the Sea Org because of it.

However, in spite of all these concerns with how the Church was being run, I still, somewhere in the back of my mind, held on to positive feelings about the practice of Scientology itself. In my more frustrated moments, times when I found myself questioning, I was always uplifted when I thought back to all the wins I’d heard over the years, and all the ways that Scientology had supposedly helped people. Those memories were the only positive things that I had left in Scientology. And they were all possible because of auditing. Auditing was the embodiment of the only thing in which I still believed.

As a result, I decided that if I were an auditor, I could finally be in a position to help people in the most direct way possible. Unlike security checks, during auditing sessions, the auditor was supposed to be nice to people, never becoming angry at the preClear. The objective in auditing was to listen and guide, whereas sec-checks were much more investigative and uncomfortable. With auditing, not only would I be helping to clear the planet, one person at a time; I’d also be helping people to help themselves.

I was excited when my auditor post was approved. I had to do some training before I started, and rose through my levels in a couple of months. For the first time in a long time, I enjoyed my studies, because they had a purpose. I was taken into auditing sessions for my own advancement. However, I started to notice that the sessions in which I was audited made me feel very anxious. They were too introspective and started to make me feel like I was going crazy. If a session didn’t go well, the auditor would assess list after list of what was wrong with me on the session, and it just started making me spin. This was not how auditing was supposed to make me feel.

Things only got worse from there. We’d start a session with her asking me if I was upset about anything, and I would burst into tears and start telling her how much the rules and restrictions on the base were just too much. My auditor would then ask me if a withhold had been missed because of my nattering. Her response never failed to frustrate me, and, usually, I just made up withholds, but after several sessions, I decided I was done accommodating. I was tired of being intimidated. I sat there for an hour saying “no,” while she grew more and more demanding.

“We are going to get to the bottom of this,” she warned. I wasn’t interested.

I stood up to leave, but she blocked me. I tried to push her out of the way, but she kept trying to force me back to the chair. After two hours, I threw the cans on the floor and squashed them with my foot. She still wouldn’t let me out. She tried to give me two more cans, but I smashed them, too. I threw my pc folder over the table, causing the papers in it to fly everywhere. She wouldn’t let go of my arm or let me out of the room. I pushed her, kicked her, tried to do anything to make her let me go. I was screaming at her, begging her, but she just kept saying, “We are going to get to the bottom of this. What have you done that you can’t tell me about?” She wouldn’t let me use the restroom. I was sure people outside in the hallway could hear the commotion, but nobody came to see what was going on. After several hours, she told me that we were going to go on a walk. We spent the rest of the day walking and decompressing.

The next day, I woke up bruised, exhausted, and very on edge. I was told that as a result of my behavior, I would not be allowed to audit. I was assigned lower conditions. I was told that I had disturbed the sessions of other people in neighboring auditing rooms while trying to get out of my room; this was a suppressive act. I insisted that denying my right to audit was not per policy, but they didn’t seem to care.

Meanwhile, because I had never given up my phone, people were going to see Dallas several times a day, telling him that he had to give them the phone. He would tell them that it was not up to him and that he wasn’t going to battle me for it. But they would harass him nonetheless.

Eventually, someone came to me for my phone. When I told him I was not giving it up, he said that he would physically make me. I threatened to call the police. Threatening to call an outside authority for internal issues was so taboo that I would hear about it again. After days of hashing it out with the Ethics Department, they finally got me to grudgingly agree to amends by paying for the cans, fixing the room, apologizing to my auditor, and apologizing to other auditors. Even then, I was told that I still could not audit.

At that moment, I decided I was done with the Sea Org. I had finally gotten to be an auditor, only to realize that the rules were not any better for that than they were anywhere else. All at once, everything that had been building for several years—it all just snapped. I wanted to be gone.

The first thing I did was run to Dallas’s office and tell him how I felt. As I suspected, he was okay with it; and he almost seemed relieved that I was the one who was saying it. But while I was ready to be gone, Dallas wanted to route out properly and cooperate with the Church. His method was the only way we could remain in contact with our Scientology family members still in the Church and continue to be Public Scientologists, paying to take services if and when we wanted. I agreed that I would do this for his sake and he told me that, as long as we did, he would leave with me.

In the weeks that followed, several people spoke to me. I was taken into session a few times, and people were trying to work things out so that I would stay. They even decided to move Dallas and me to the PAC Base, because we would be allowed to take libs there and have more time off, as things there were slightly more lenient. It didn’t work. I just knew that I needed to be out of there.

In my secret calls to my parents, they were extremely supportive. They told me that their disillusionment with the Sea Org had progressed in a way similar to mine. They didn’t want to go into details, instead choosing to stay vague and cautious, as they knew if they outright attacked the Church, it might turn me off to them and the idea of leaving, but told me that I could call them at anytime.

Over the next week or two, I started speaking with them more regularly; they would tell me about people who had been declared SPs, including my old friend Claire Headley and her husband, Marc, both of whom were out of the Sea Org and now SPs. Teddy Blackman, my brother’s friend, was also out. I knew that Marc, Claire, and Teddy were not Suppressive People. The “declare” was ridiculous. With my aunt Sarah having been recently declared, too, I felt that perhaps they were declaring people who they felt they could no longer control, regardless of whether or not they were actually suppressive people.

My parents also began to open up more about their experience leaving the Church. In the years since they’d left, I’d wondered about their reasons for doing so. Given how committed they once were, I’d assumed that things must have been bad, but I never knew that Uncle Dave had been a part of it. After Marc Headley left, he told my parents that my uncle physically beat staff. Mom said she knew it was true, because she too had witnessed him beating someone, and that had been one of the major turning points that led to her leaving the Sea Org.

This was the first time I’d heard something of this nature about Uncle Dave from someone whom I actually trusted. It wasn’t so much shocking as it was disturbing. Those in my circles never spoke badly about Uncle Dave, but people were afraid of him. I knew that my uncle had a bad temper, but, sometimes, in Scientology, a temper meant that you cared. Still, as much as I’d known that people feared him and that he possessed a domineering personality, I hadn’t thought him capable of physically harming people. According to my parents, he wasn’t afraid to use money to acheive his purposes. My father said that, when they left the Sea Org, Uncle Dave offered to pay my mother one hundred thousand dollars, as long as she left and my father stayed. He didn’t even make the offer to my mother; he made it to my father, who he must have figured was the more malleable of the two. Of course, my father declined, but they were both put off by the gall of my uncle in thinking he could buy people.

In the coming weeks and months, I’d learn even more about why my parents left. My mother told me about a girl, Stacy Moxon, who had died a few years earlier. The death was deemed an accident, but the circumstances suggested suicide. Her sister had been inconsolable; I wonder if she knew how depressed and desperate Stacy was. It was so hard hearing stories like this, because the environment of the Sea Org, with all its rules and restrictions, made it impossible not to get depressed and feel hopeless. At the same time, any kind of psychological ills were discounted and ignored, so those in psychological trouble had zero resources.

She told other stories, about long-married couples, parents of kids I knew at the Ranch, being forced to divorce because they were married to someone in a lower org. She finished by referencing several people who had been told to make a choice between an abortion or the Sea Org. It was during the course of these phone calls with my parents, that my father told me that Uncle Dave had told him that he had personally supervised the Lisa McPherson auditing, instructing that she be attested to the state of Clear shortly before her death. All this news served to reaffirm my suspicions. I believed my parents because I felt they had no reason to lie, and that these stories would be hard to make up.

The more they told me, the more it confirmed what I already knew or suspected. This type of coercive behavior was widespread. I had been at the Int Ranch, Australia, PAC, and Flag, and I knew how conditions were and how people were treated. I was glad that I had made my decision. Even Justin, who I hadn’t spoken to in a long time, started calling me as well, offering me support if I needed help getting out of there.

The pressure to stay came daily. Linda, who was a high-ranking member of OSA, was trying to convince me that I was a valuable asset to the Sea Org, and that I had just hit a few bumps. When I told her about some of the things I’d heard from my parents, her response was simple: “People make up lies to suit their own ends.”