Trying to Reconstruct My Psyche

The Lies I Told Myself

For a few months now, I’ve stepped back from digging deep in what happened to me in Scientology. Any person who has been damaged by Scientology needs step back occasionally to maintain their equilibrium. That is one of the major side effects of having been in Scientology. The psyche is so damaged that sometimes there’s no way putting all the puzzle pieces back together. And sometimes it’s just too much to even think about.

With every personal thing that i have written in the last 10 months, it’s uncovered another piece. It may be a realization. Maybe a memory. And maybe a hurt I had forgotten. And I’ve been able to heal and grow. Even when growing, there are setbacks. My latest setback has been mental. I’ve been beating myself up for being a naive idiot. I’ve been blaming myself for ten lost years. I’ve been looking for pieces of me I haven’t seen since the 1970s.

Where is this coming from? I was thinking about the few people I trusted as friends. I identified what it was about them that made me trust them. Curiously, the people I admired were those who had a quality similar to someone good I knew before Scientology. And that made me take a good look at the lies I told myself back then. I won’t go into all of my self delusion, but here’s a quick snapshot.

When I was at ASHO, (American Saint Hill Organization), I knew very few people. Even the people I knew were, at best, acquaintances. Not friends. I had a job that paid $5/week on the weeks we got paid. This was what we got as the super elite executives of Scientology in the 1970s. Today, they get paid 10x that much – a whopping $50/week. Nothing has really changed.

Back then I had free housing. If you can call it that. Six of us slept in a room in an ancient motel with two sets of bunk beds stacked 3 high. I kept my personal belongings in one portion of one dresser drawer. Sometimes the plumbing worked. Sometimes the heat worked. I had no transportation. The free food we were served was at best institutional. Sometimes it was substandard.

Those meals we ate were rushed at best and a lot of times we just skipped them altogether. There was always something more important than eating. Or sleeping. Or taking care of my health,

I had to hide what little money I had because it would be stolen. For that matter, I had to hide anything of value. Value, however had a different definition back then. Underwear, laundry soap, toiletries snacks, socks, were high on the list. Anything of monetary value that could be sold or bartered disappeared. The cream of the crop of the “most ethical group in the planet” was riddled with petty theft.

I spent a lot of each day avoiding certain people. I did my best to look competent when I didn’t feel that way. I was never sure if something that had been okay the day before would be bad today. I was hungry, tired and mostly confused for the majority of my time there. And there was the abuse too.

I know I’ve said all this in prior stories I’ve told of my time there. So why am I repeating myself now? Because I’ve never really said how I felt about that time.

The mind is an amazing thing. If today I was told my life would contain those elements, I would say nope, not me. I would be horrified that that kind of life existed. I would flat out refuse to put myself in that situation.

But until I started writing my stories I didn’t see my past that way. A year ago, if I had been asked what my life at ASHO was like in general, I’d say good. I would be hard pressed to give specifics, but my brain told me I had fun there. In my brain, it had been a fairly lighthearted romp before getting sucked down into my marriage. I’m not saying my marriage was great, but ASHO was not fun. I have to get that through my head before I can heal. In Scientology lingo. I was not ok.