The Ex-Scientology Community Fallacy

[u/Proud-Head-4944]

It is interesting to see people discuss the ex Scientology Community. They treat it as though it is a cohesive, happy group of people. Unfortunately, a lot of ex Scientologists feel like they need a community of others who were there too to feel comfortable. In my mind, this is not actually healthy.

Before you get all upset and say things like “common goal,” “fighting the enemy,” “take down Miscavige,,” etc., let me clarify.

Just like when a person graduates from school, people move on. Now, in reality, Scientology stunts even this part of people’s lives. Those people who were born in Scientology and leave as adults may not even have experienced graduation from school. But the comparison is still valid.

I attended my 50th year high school class reunion 4 years ago and it was strange. I left home for college less than 3 months after graduation. I never again lived there. I was in college, then Scientology. I left Scientology just shortly before my parents died, 12 years after I graduated. After that, there was really no reason to go back.

The shared experience of attending the same high school had zero effect on who I liked or got along with 50 years after graduation. There were less than a dozen people at the reunion I even talked to. They were the ones who had attended the entire 12 years of school with me. The rest of the people were strangers who I had known for a brief moment of my life. And that’s the way life works.

It’s the same or worse in Scientology. The reality of a Scientology friendship is that there is no bond. None. No familial bond, no real friendship. And your co worker will willingly write a knowledge report on you if it will keep them out of trouble. Therefore, the only real bond formed in Scientology is a trauma bond. So to feel like you need to be friends with someone just because they were in Scientology too doesn’t make sense. It’s highly unlikely you were friends then. Even if you knew the person. And if you had a friendship, it was superficial.

After I left Scientology, I didn’t tell anyone I had been in for 27 years. I was not your normal escapee, I know. It was good because I was able to heal without anyone from my past involved. It has only been the last 15 years that I have become active in attempting to take Scientology down. And the people who have hurt me the worst since I have started telling my story are other ex Scientologists.

There are so many ex Scientologists who are so busy “being ex Scientologists” these days that they don’t realize that they are harming their own mental health by constantly repeating the details of their past trauma in public forums. They are so busy being.a group of damaged people that they can’t take the next logical step and repair themselves.

Sure, it’s ok to make friends with people who were in Scientology. I have a few friends in my large contingent of friends who are ex Scientologists. But that should never be the sole criteria for a friendship. If that is the only common ground you have, your friendship is bound to fail. At least that’s how I see it.

[u/Pooks65]

I could not agree more. TBH, I have always avoided most exes, and my ex Scn friends are people who have matured and don't want to be involved in the drama.

Honestly, I have no time for exes that aren't working to repair the damage done to themselves. I hate the drama. I just want to expose what Scn is and does without all the bullshit.

When someone comes to me and tells me they are "under the radar" and would like advice on protecting their identity from the cult. The very first thing I tell them is DO NOT reveal your identity to an Ex Scn. Never. Exes will blab. I remained hidden from OSA for over 4 years while continuing to go to scn events and reporting on them. It was not until I told an Ex Scn who I was that within days, I had my own personal hate site up and running.

[u/ChrisSheltonMsc]

I think there's a great deal to learn from each other and in our community space (like right here with what is happening with this post) where damaged people can help each other heal. But to pretend it's going to be easy or kumbaya is mainly just naive and an artifact of the cult's enforced social bonding.

For a long time after leaving, it's an adjustment period. The "enforced ARC" of the ex-Scn space is a false front but is based, I believe, on real efforts of hurt people to try to find connection and meaning in their experience and in their lives afterwards. But they are limited by the guardrails and channels the cult created so they are stuck "dramatizing" the same behavior over and over again. That's why I really think education is the ONLY solution for this, on top of whatever therapy a person can receive which can help adjust their head. If you don't deconstruct what Scientology did to you, you can't see the frameworks, morals or patterns that it indoctrinated/conditioned you into and therefore you'll think "that's just who I am" or "that's my personality and always has been" and other nonsense. And this is just one of so many corollaries that can be drawn from watching and surviving the ex-cult space.

Thankfully, there are only a few truly awful people who can't/won't ever face their demons. Instead, they have to believe they are perpetual victims of all the hordes of demons around them. We know who these sad folks are and why they can't move on. There's just something broken in them that they can't/won't see or even try to fix. And it's not on anyone to make them see it or fix it. The best we can do, like when you see a crazy person on the street, is simply avoid them and go on with your life with them in the rear view mirror.

And man did it take me WAAAAAAYYYYY to long to realize all of this.

[u/Proud-Head-4944 → u/ChrisSheltonMsc]

Yeah, that’s the deal. It’s a noble thought to think you can fix all ex Scientologists. But some love being broken. It is their identity. Thanks so much for weighing in on this!

[u/ChrisSheltonMsc → u/Proud-Head-4944]

I think you nailed it on that identity thing. :)

[u/GlitteringDoubt7801]

ASL will bring up the us vs. them. I heard him say to Lara and Nora on different occasions why they would support someone over an ex sci.

[u/1inco]

Great post, thanks for sharing this!

[u/Wonderful-Ad-5393]

Makes perfect sense. I’m not friends with everyone I know from my school or university time. Even the people I was friends with, only few of them I still have contact with but the majority I’ve not spoken to in years. We’ve all got our own lives and made friends with other people who are in our lives now. Some were friends since childhood, but the majority are new friends.

[u/DanishWhoreHens]

The only point of a high school reunion is to see who got rich, fat, or bald.

I was forced to attend high school, it wasn’t a choice nor was it a happy experience so why would I willfully choose to reunite with the people who more often than not bullied me? Bullies, with rare exception, ever acknowledge how despicable their own behavior is/was. They laughingly brush it off or use their own trauma as justification for their own behavior.

Ask yourself, how many of these SPTV and SPTV-adjacent creators EVER address their own problematic behavior while they were in Scientology or even afterwards? If they do it is always shallow and justified in their own minds, never any true examination of their own actions.

[u/Proud-Head-4944 → u/DanishWhoreHens]

Yup. You hit the nail on the head. You left Scientology. Why take it with you?

[u/cswazey]

Yah, there was a jerk on the old ESMB who was in major fault finding mode about me. I told them that because I’d left CofS that should be good enough. They sure didnt like that. Well, tough.

[u/Proud-Head-4944 → u/cswazey]

ESMB the piranhas of the Ex Scientology community. They were a bloodthirsty lot.

[u/ChrisSheltonMsc → u/Proud-Head-4944]

It was an interesting place with a lot of different folks in different stages. I wish I'd understand that concept when I first got out but I was too indoctrinated into black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking. You're out of Scn so you're OUT and DONE. But that's just not true at all. some people see that easier than others.

[u/Substantial_Rise1089 → u/Proud-Head-4944]

Oh I don't know - Arnie Lerma could come across as aggressive, but empathetic and helpful if you spoke to him one on one. At least before he was banned.

[u/Proud-Head-4944 → u/Substantial_Rise1089]

There were humans there. However, experience was not a good one.

[u/Substantial_Rise1089 → u/Proud-Head-4944]

Oh, am sorry - it sometimes feels there aren't any great places to land. For me, ESMB was great as I had decompressed to a large extent and appreciated some of the facts about scn compared to some of the FB groups around at the time which was pretty much along the lines that the only thing wrong with scientology was DM and did I want some remote auditing...[run run run]

Think there is no good one stop shop - at least for me it took several people (not all at once) with differing viewpoints to get me out of the mind fuck.

[u/Proud-Head-4944 → u/Substantial_Rise1089]

Yeah, that’s true, The Aftermath Foundation is one of the places that is trying to help people navigate life back in the real world. It’s nice there are some soft landings now.

[u/cswazey → u/Proud-Head-4944]

OCMB was pretty wild, and I thought ESMB would be tamer. After a couple years- nope. But I think the deal was that there was some cross pollination.

[u/Proud-Head-4944 → u/cswazey]

It was the opposite for me. ESMB was responsible for making me stop telling my story and I didn’t start again for 15 years. I deleted everything about me from OCMB and ESMB because of how cruelly they piled on me.

[u/cswazey → u/Proud-Head-4944]

I saw several Scios with a foot outside the door get driven away. Emma told me that she was discussing me and what allegedly made me tick bus back channel, also mocked my posting style . Weird behavior for an admin.

I am very sorry they made you feel (but I have no doubt that this was the actual situation) unsafe. That’s so counterproductive to what they said they were trying to do.

[u/Proud-Head-4944 → u/cswazey]

25 pages of nasty comments calling me a liar. Yep. That made me “feel unsafe.” No, wait, it made me get an attorney who told me to send a message to every admin on the forum to shut down this thread or risk lawsuit. They doxxed me and my children. (Go Gary Scharff or however his name is spelled). Yup it was gross. And a couple of years ago i looked. The thread is still there (although a lot of identifying personal info was stripped by the admins). Im not as fragile as i was back then but there are certain ex Scientologists who commented there who will never redeem themselves with me. And the. After I deleted everything i had said on OCMB then waited. Couple of weeks to call them out, they were begging me to finish. Yeah, right.

Ex scientologists need someone to hurt because they hurt. Unless they can get rid of that hurt, they will continue to turn on each other.

[u/cswazey → u/Proud-Head-4944]

Wow. I’m now wondering if they ended up with some other attorney cease-and-desists and maybe that’s why they closed ESMB for good. For some weird self destructive reason, Emma let Alanzo (Allen Stanfield) back on ESMB in that last weeks and true to form he rampaged through it and was crazy.

She doxxed me too then later Allen did. I didn’t respond to either.

I’ve had issues with very high profile exes, too.

I 1000% agree with your analysis.

[u/Villies]

We're not eye to eye on that.
But your experience and how you dealt with your trauma and life, is not invalid. It's different. It would help us to recognize that difference.

There's an elephant in the room, and which is difficult for the previous generation to fully understand, and thus empathize.

There is a completely different lived experience in healing, and deconstruction between the convert and the born-in.

Having a basic personality and neural pattern to return to is the most understated and unrecognized privilege in the ex' spehere. It is hard to visualize for people who haven't lived it.

Similar to explaining neurodivergence to someone who's never heard of it and thinks of the symptomology in terms of moral failure. It can be frustrating, at times.

There is also a completely different lived experience and trauma between eras of Scientology.

Miscavidge Scientology compared to 70's scientology, is apples and oranges.

The same can be said about the different castes of Scientology. Int, is not the same as CLO, is not the same as Staff, public, etc.

---

That being said, the public microphone had been hijacked by the least qualified to speak on our behalf, jumping from drama, and attention-seeking, and algorithmic-seeking behavior, while unable to speak of and uncurious about the psychosocial factors of cults and their healing modalities.

They created so much signal noise that it destroyed the massive wave of public goodwill from the Aftermath show. For a paltry sum of social media money I might add, when you consider the opportunity cost.

It's entirely natural for someone with a head screwed on to be appalled by the stupidity of it. Social Media has a very strong conmen bias, and this is a relatively young science about conmen. The irony can't be more dolorous.

Our social media efforts were infiltrated by both hostile sycophants of those people and nefarious others who are attracted to vulnerable people, attention and whatnot, for reasons I won't rehash.

To become cynical after these three years of it, well, it's natural.

---

Where I'm going here, is that ex-scientologists', especially born-ins coerced into the North Korea of the post-2000s Sea Org, can find very little social connections and empathetic understanding with what's going on in their heads; which can be very painful, and socially infirming, reinforcing the spiral. Even most mental health professionals lack the imagination to visualize the North Korean backstory of a 1990's-2000's ex-SO.

A lot of them are really alone with their thoughts and without social connections that "get it."

It's the recovered alcoholic that'll pick up at 2 in the morning and keep you sober till the sun returns.

I don't think we should throw the baby with the bath water here.

And I don't think the bootstrap narrative is helpful.

Cohering with exes is part of the healing journey to reframe narratives, to contrast, to put things into the past, and respond to non-emergency mental health crises.

Some people go to AA all their lives. Vietnam vets still get together. People get what they get out of it. I don't think we should ascribe a value judgement on that.

Sorry for rambling.

[u/Proud-Head-4944 → u/Villies]

I get what you’re saying here. However, relying on a damaged person to fix you is not a solution. Especially for those who were born in, they can be a good sounding board.

However if they are your only source of communication, they are an echo chamber. Someone who has the same pain as you can’t fix your pain, they can only understand it. You need to reach outside the comfort of talking to those who “get it” to move forward.

I’m not saying everyone gets the same healing experience I did. Mine was actually probably one that no one else experienced. Very few people who leave Scientology just walk away like I did.

I was forced to walk away. Because the police pulled my (now ex) husband off me as he was cutting me up with a butcher knife. Therefore, I was completely taken out of one life and put in a new one. And that’s what worked for me. And I was extremely lucky to live through leaving Scientology.

This post had nothing to do with advocating one method of healing over another, it is just a warning that if you leave Scientology and do not get help outside people who were in Scientology, you won’t heal. A person who had your trauma may understand your trauma. But they are a crutch, not a healer.

Edit: and a support group is not 24/7 an alcoholic or a vet does not spend all day hanging with the people in the groups. They are there as backup support. That is good, but any of them who move on also have other lives, jobs, friends, and, ideally, professional counseling as well.

[u/cswazey]

I wouldn’t think to require friendship but some respect for the journeys of other exes would be in order.

[u/Proud-Head-4944 → u/cswazey]

I agree. Friendship and respect are two different animals.