Want To Learn to Communicate?

Don’t Try Scientology

Most people want to learn how to communicate better. It’s easy to be misunderstood. That’s why it would be interesting to know that the first course you are put on when you start Scientology is a fairly inexpensive one, and sounds like something anyone could benefit from, it’s called the Communications Course. Well, like most things in Scientology, the Communications Course does not deliver what it promises, in fact, it delivers the polar opposite.

You will not leave this course a glowing conversationalist, you will leave it with robotic speech patterns at the very least. This early in Scientology training, you are also taught how not to react to things. This does not mean that you are taught how not to get irrational or angry at things, and calmly carry on a conversation, it means you are taught to have zero reaction to anything you are told by anyone, good bad, or indifferent. This is also the course where one person is encouraged to say bad things directly to another’s face – oh, all in the name of training, so they say.

The course has been modified in slight ways since I did it in 1975, adding additional routines, but outlined are the routines I learned when I was first in Scientology training to be a brilliant conversationalist.

TR0

The purpose of this was supposedly to teach you how to be comfortable with anyone. The entire drill consists of you sitting approximately 5 feet away from someone facing them with your hands on your legs. You must do this without fidgeting, speaking, etc. You had to do this for hours. Your coach may flunk you if you fidget. The supervisor decides when you had done this enough.

Once the person passes this level of sitting comfortably, they advance to:

TR0 Bullbait: 

In this drill, you sit the same as you did in TR0, only your coach says things to deliberately make you react. They can yell at you, say mean things, do whatever it takes to make you not sit perfectly still and do nothing. If you react, you flunk.

TR 1

This was called “Dear Alice” back then. We were required to read passages from Alice in Wonderland to the coach. We had to say this naturally and not with good diction. We were not supposed to yell. The coach had to decide that the communication had reached him and we passed.

TR2:

Acknowledgments

This is similar to TR1, with a twist. The person reading the line waited for the other person to acknowledge what they had said. The coach had to feel like he was not over or under acknowledged. The standard “acknowledgment” was OK or Thank You. The person was flunked if the coach felt they were not encouraged to continue talking based on the acknowledgment.

TR3:

Duplicative Questions

The Student asks the coach either “do fish swim” or “do birds fly.” They have to ask each question a great number of times and vary how it is said each time as though it was a brand new question. Each time the coach answers yes or no. They cannot ask any variations of these questions or they flunk. The coach can also flunk them if they feel they did not ask the same question differently.

TR4:

Same as TR3 only now the coach doesn’t answer the question. The coach will see something in the room and change the subject, or talk about the time he went fishing or the time a bird flew into his house, something like that. If the coach doesn’t answer the question, the student has to say “I repeat the auditing question, do fish swim?” (or do birds fly)” the student cannot acknowledge any answer the coach gives except an exact answer to the exact question.

There are several other TR’s, they are called “upper indoc TRs.” they include having you mimic your coach’s hand movements, walking your coach over to a wall, having them touch it then saying thank you when they do, then repeating that drill while having the coach fight you while doing it. There’s also the always funny one when yell at an ashtray to stand up, then pick it up and tell it thank you, then tell it sit down and say thank you (but don’t you dare take this anyway but deadly seriously).

That, in a nutshell is what Hubbard says you need to do to be able to communicate. Scientology’s own website claims that on this course, you will learn:

“what good communication consists of and how to recognize the bad, what the component parts of communication are and how to utilize them, and why more communication, not less, brings the individual greater freedom”

The training routines outlined above are the components of communication that Scientology touts. They teach you that you are to demand that people act a certain way in a conversation and that you will accept no deviation from the conversation you originally started. This course, the initial course in Scientology teaches their adherents that they are to learn to accept any form of abuse and not react. This is where the people get the infamous “thousand mile stare” that Scientologists have.

Communication is hard enough. As with most things in life, there is no formulaic program which will allow you to suddenly be a master communicator. No two people are the same and drills where free communication is not part of the process certainly doesn’t teach a person the basics of starting a conversation. 

Although this is not the best way to learn, honestly you’re better off reading dialogue in a book and attempting to learn how people discuss things among themselves than train on the Communications Course. Unlearning those robotic behaviors and the thinking behind them will take years.