Why People Stay

What Keeps People in Scientology When it’s So Horrible?

This post is in response to the August 28, 2025 poll. Be sure to get your votes in on this week’s poll.

Scientology is notorious for abuse of its people. This occurs on many levels. The staff has substandard berthing, they work longer hours than anyone should ever have to endure with very little pay – which they may or may not get, depending on if the statistics are up that week. The food they get is barely edible. And, they may not get much food, only rice and beans rations if someone in upper management deems that they have done something wrong. The hours are brutally long. Sometimes there are days without sleep. The work is tedious and there is no attaboy for a job well done. As a matter of fact, no matter how well the job is done, it is probable that the person who did it will get in trouble for a real or imagined wrong with something they did in the job. It’s a dog eat dog world in there where if you make it to the top, you just become a bigger target to destroy.

A person in Scientology spends a great deal of their lives waiting for the next blow. It’s not a matter of if you’re going to get in trouble if you’re a Scientologist, it’s when. Scientology is a snitch culture. Parents tell on their children, unless the children beat the parents to it. There is no such thing as a friend. Nor are your coworkers your friend. If you say something that is deemed to be the wrong thing, a knowledge report will be written up on you. Sometimes several, depending on who you were with and who overheard what you said. The people in your group basically have to tattle on you because if they don’t they can get in trouble for not telling on you. They too will be punished if they are found out to have kept quiet about something other people tattle on.

And what I’m describing, as bad as it sounds, only scratches the surface. The internet is rife with stories of people who shouldn’t have died but they did simply because they stayed in Scientology. And the absolutely most horrific thing you read about on the internet are the horror stories of children and parents being separated because of Scientology.

Sometimes the children and parents are separated while they are all in Scientology. There is no respect for the family. Husbands and wives spend little time together. And children are shuffled off to the cadet org where they are ignored until they are old enough to sign a Sea Org contract and work for slave pay.

If a parent or child leaves Scientology, Scientology does its utmost to make sure the one still in doesn’t get to see the one who left. They make the person who left look as much like the bad guy as humanly possible. Parents and children go years without getting to see each other. Parents die without ever getting the chance to see their children again. Mike Rinder recently died. He had two children who were in the Sea Org. He was not allowed to see them. It is unknown if they are even aware that their father has died.

From the looking in, it’s really simple to say “just get out.” But it’s not that simple.

There are a lot of reasons why a person stays. I’m just going to itemize a few of them in hopes that the readers of this blog can get a better idea of why people might stay.

• Scientology gets a hold on a person’s mind. The person really believes that Scientology is their only salvation. They think that if they leave, they will destroy their “eternity.” Whether or not this is true, and no matter what doubts the person has, they keep getting told this if they express doubts. It’s a hard thing to escape because it gets drilled so deeply in their heads.

• If they leave, they will lose everything about the life they know. Even though Scientology will loudly decry disconnection, anyone inside Scientology is well aware that if they were to walk out the door tomorrow, they would no longer be able to talk to any friend or family member left inside that door. Because for the majority of people, their entire world is Scientologists, that would mean they would have no job, no social life, no family. They would be throwing away their entire life.

• They have paid a lot of money to get where they are in Scientology. That’s a given because it costs money to do anything in Scientology. Even if you do something in Scientology, it costs money because then you get sent to ethics and then you have to pay for security checks, which will go on until you leave or decide you want to stay. It’s hard to justify just walking away from all that money spent.

• Having protesters outside their building who are not acting sanely makes it more likely that they will stay. These protesters are not helping anyone. They are making the people believe the stories that people on the outside are not right. As long as there are protesters who are just making a fool of themselves and being loud and obnoxious rather than peaceful and kind, the people inside Scientology will be intimidated into staying. They see those people acting like that and it will only reinforce any negative stereotypes they already have placed on them about the outside world.

• They believe that the rest of the world is aberrated. They think that the only safe place is in Scientology because that has been drilled in their head. They think that there will be a place full of crime and horrible people if they hit the streets. They don’t understand that they are surrounded by criminals who are abusing them on a daily basis. They have been drilled to believe that all people on the outside are horrible and will take advantage of them. So they stay inside and let Scientology take advantage of them. It’s what they know.

• And the absolutely saddest reason is apathy. There are people in Sea Org who are just resigned to the fact that they will die there. They are doing poorly but have no hope of escaping. They believe that there is nothing that they could do if they left. They have been beat down so far that they truly believe that they deserve the punishments they are getting. These people probably wouldn’t leave if the doors were held open and they were invited to leave. That is the truth of abuse. If an abused person is abused long enough, they accept their fate and die believing it is their fault.

I sincerely hope that Scientology will end in the near future. There are people behind those walls who were my friends in my prior life. I’d like them to be free.