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I was honored a few years ago to host a comment by the illustrious Doug Kramer of the Dazed But Not Confuzed YouTube channel on my post detailing how the AntiCult Ideology Harms Ex-Cult Members.
It’s a candid and insightful comment which provides context to the Scientology experience – he shows how Scientology ideology can harm members, too. People do have mental breakdowns on the OT levels in Scientology, particularly on OT3, and I’m grateful to Doug for his courage to tell his story here.
In my many interactions with Doug, I have found him to be a fervent anti-cultist, who also shows occasional ideological courage and flexibility on certain points. That makes it fun for me to challenge him, as a brother would do.
Perhaps the answer is to never use any ideology of any kind to evaluate one’s own experience.
I value my interactions with Doug Kramer. I have my own Inner Hippie which lurks beneath my Outer Marketing Guy.
I’ve yet to attain the Virtuous Hippie status that Doug displays as a celebrity content creator on SPtv, tho.
Here’s his comment:
Doug Kramer
June 6, 2019 at 4:18 pmWell said, that’s pretty much the way I look at the experience from today’s perspective.
My father was the first one to get into Scientology and he then got my mother into it through threat of divorce – he told my mother he needed to do Scientology to fix himself, and if my mother was not on board he would have to go his own way. This was enough pressure to get my mom to artificially ‘go along with it’ while not being into it herself initially.
Over time, she too eventually considered herself a ‘Scientologist.’
When I would have problems at school, whenever I got into trouble, etc, my parents would sit me down and basically say ‘you can be punished for a month and not leave the house, or you can take a simple Scientology course for a week that we know will help you to get your ethics in.’
I knew Scientology was a ruse from the get-go and absolutely hated this manipulation from my folks. It was only after the course of years of falling for this that the ‘tech’ started to ‘make sense.’
Flash-forward 20 years later and I am a full-blown, completely indoctrinated Scilon on OT 3. I completely broke down on this level, couldn’t sleep at night for fear of ‘BTs talking to me all night long’, and had a nervous breakdown outside the AO.
I remember that day like it was yesterday. I called my father on the phone and told him the voices in my head (BTs) are trying to kill me, and he wore his hat well as a fully programmed Scilon (he is OT 8) to get me ‘handled’ and back on the auditing. Long story short, it took me a decade to understand and un-do all the lies and programming, and I haven’t seen or spoken with my parents since.
It almost killed me and it did drive me literally insane.
I didn’t know what I was really walking into, and I had a certain level of trust in my parents just by the fact of them being my parents and having control, knowing more, etc.
The entire experience was part of my own life path that I wouldn’t take back because of all that it taught me. It required me to go DEEP to get answers and to educate myself in areas that never would have interested me otherwise.
I ‘graduated’ from Scientology, and can’t be conned pr deceived anymore.
The only bone I have to pick with all this is: is it really necessary to be born into this kind of a world where such madness even exists to begin with? Could we not teach our children from the out-set the truth and not continue to indoctrinate future generations into such lies? Can we break the inter-generational, passed down insanity?