It began, as it does for many, with a personality test on a city street. A woman named Karen, then 22 and adrift in Los Angeles, was flagged down by a smiling volunteer holding an E-Meter. “Do you want to know the source of your stress?” the volunteer asked. Karen, an aspiring screenwriter with a stalled career and a fractured family, said yes. That test was the first thread in a web that would take her 12 years to escape.
First, she stopped paying for auditing. Within a week, a “Security Check” — a humiliating interrogative session — was demanded. She refused. Then came the “Ethics” interview: “Are you looking at forbidden data?” She lied and said no. Searching for- going clear scientology and the ...
One night, she watched Going Clear , the HBO documentary based on Lawrence Wright’s book. She had to hide in a friend’s apartment — a “blow” (escapee) who had fled the church. It began, as it does for many, with
It’s now three years later. Karen lives in a small apartment in Portland. She writes again — not screenplays, but a blog about coercive control. She has not reconciled with her mother, but she has learned that “clear” was never a state of being. It was a product. Karen, an aspiring screenwriter with a stalled career
She advanced up the “Bridge to Total Freedom.” The wins were real: the catharsis of confessing secrets to an auditor, the high of “exteriorization” (feeling separate from your body), the camaraderie of a group that saw themselves as the only sane ones on a dying planet. She reached “Clear” after four years — a ceremony with a plastic badge and a sense of arrival. But the elation lasted only weeks.
Inside: the story of Xenu. Seventy-five million years ago, an alien ruler brought billions of frozen beings to Earth (then called “Teegeeack”), stacked them around volcanoes, and blew them up with H-bombs. Their souls stuck to human bodies — “body thetans.” Auditing’s goal was to blow off those sticky souls.
The documentary’s climax — a former Sea Org member describing being locked in a chain locker for 23 hours a day for “handling his doubts” — made Karen vomit.