How a cult ruined my life: The pervasive damage of cult mentality
Cults are arguably one of the most insidious problems society faces. Nobody is aware that they are joining a cult the moment that they decide to join. Some people are made acolytes without them even knowing. Some people, like me, are fed the cult’s teachings since they are born.
Enter Scientology
Quite literally in my case, I was fed L. Ron Hubbard’s baby formula: 10 ounces of barley water, 10 ounces of homogenized milk, and 3 ounces of corn syrup.
If it weren’t for Scientology, I would have never been born. My father was recruited as he wandered the streets of Buenos Aires, and sent to Caracas, Venezuela as staff for their newly-opened centre there. My mother happened to pick up a Dianetics flyer on the streets of Caracas and, a few years later, they would go on to get married aboard the Freewinds.
Fast forward 8 years. Chávez, malignant narcissist and dictator, has a firm grip of the country. People pledge their undying loyalty to their “supreme commander” and his face is on every television channel, his voice on every radio station. My father, having lived through a dictatorship back in Argentina, decided to take us the fuck out of there.
We escaped to Spain, to a city which was fortunately free from Scientology’s radar. I was free from it — finally able to be a normal kid, at least for a while.
But my parents still thought like scientologists. When my father’s back pain refused to go away and in fact grew stronger over months, he never went to the doctor. He believed he had to “go through it”, just think it away.
By the time he went to the doctor, the thing had progressed too far. He had bone cancer.
Instead of fighting it, they decided to give my father “natural medicine”. Doctors were evil: They wanted to kill him with their “awful chemicals” and even pain medicine was off-limits. His body would get rid of the cancer naturally. He’d lay in bed, slowly dying, watching Scientology videos and reading their books.
The dark tunnel
I was around 13 when he was diagnosed. He was 48. All in all, he was bed-ridden for a little over a year.
I still wonder whether his faith wavered. I really hope it did. How can a person endure that kind of pain, blindly, not even having second thoughts? He wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t a fool. But he had been thoroughly brainwashed.
One day I came home from school only to find the house completely empty. The bed was empty. Something was wrong.
The cancer had metastasized all the way to his brain. He entered status epilepticus, then fell into a coma. He was transferred to a hospital close to my school, and I visited him every day after class.
My visits consisted of wetting his lips with a piece of cotton, as well as his tongue. I watched him, then watched out the window. Every once in a while the nurses had to move him around a little bit: It turns out you develop nasty sores when you are bed-ridden. When they moved him, he screamed like he was being murdered. I cried, utterly powerless, outside the room.
During my father’s illness, my life was beginning to come undone, though nobody really noticed. I was forced to repeat a year, then expelled from my school. In the next school I enrolled into, I got into a dramatic fight with another student. His friends wanted to retaliate — waiting for me after school, knives out. I ran. I ended up transferring back to my old school.
I frequently got in trouble with just about anyone. I pushed all my friends away and started hanging out with different people — probably because they knew nothing about my father or me. I could be a completely different -normal- person.
During this time, I found out I had already started having seizures. I’d always been told that my epilepsy started after the death of my father. It turns out I’d had at least one seizure while he was sick, from which I woke up thinking I had either fallen asleep while playing videogames or hit my head against something. My mother, unable to cope with both my father’s illness and mine, told me it was nothing, and I was never taken to a doctor.
My mother constantly fought with the doctors. They wanted to operate, they wanted to do a biopsy — she saw them as the enemy, because she had been told so for years. She ended up removing my father from the hospital as soon as he woke up.
After my father woke up, things were much more complicated. He obviously had brain damage (though my mother wouldn’t admit it) and would often ask where he was. He would not know who I was. He probably found himself asking why he was in so much pain… But he rarely ever expressed his emotions. Never cried once.
It was December 31st. I woke up to screams, but I couldn’t really make out what my mother was saying. Though I was alarmed, I waited a couple of minutes to come out of my room -because I had an erection… this would fill me with guilt and shame for years- and when I finally did come out, I walked into my parents’ room.
There she was, screaming and seemingly doing something to my father. What was she doing? Why was she hitting him? He was staring at the ceiling, mouth wide open. Wanting to find out what was happening, I came closer and called out to my dad. I held his hand, and that’s when it hit me. He was dead. His hand was cold and lifeless.
I recoiled, hit the wall, and fell. I don’t know how long I was there. I started crying violently and all I could do was watch as my mother tried to resuscitate him. I can’t remember anything else.
The aftermath
Plans were put in place immediately to go to Venezuela. After all, we had nobody in Spain and my father was the only one who ever worked to support the family. We sold all of our things, and we had left the country no more than 2 weeks after my father had died. There wasn’t even a funeral. The last time I saw him was in a casket, seconds away from being turned into ashes.
Life in Venezuela was complete hell. We were reluctantly given some space in my step-sister’s home. I hated her and she hated me; we fought constantly. My mother couldn’t deal with me and my poor performance at school.
School in Venezuela was much different. First, I had to cut my hair because boys don’t have long hair. Second, I had to wear a military-style uniform. The people were very different, and I was mocked, made fun of, and marginalized constantly. I made no friends, and even the teachers treated me with disdain.
Here, however, was Scientology. My mother brought me in for “grief auditing”, which is a kind of processing that is done to scientologists who have experienced the death of a close one. It was all incredibly bizarre at first, but at least people were treating me with some sort of deference (probably because my mother was paying huge sums of money).
Desperate to find a place to which I belonged, I devoted myself to Scientology. I neglected highschool yet I enrolled in every course Scientology had to offer, breezing through each book like there was no tomorrow. People admired me for my commitment to it: I was respected. I even made friends. My mother left for work and left me in a rented room in some scientologist’s house. I stayed there mostly to work on my processing and “the bridge to freedom” (the book courses), which I could have done in Caracas, where she had gone, since there was an Org there. The house was on its last legs. When you entered the kitchen at night you could hear whole groups of mice scattering into the darkness. To escape my further alienation -I had now no contact even with my closest family- I went head-in into scientology. I was a devoted believer.
Enter Epilepsy
Though memory fails to provide a specific time and place, during this time inside Scientology, my epilepsy started to get worse. I had a few seizures -grand mal, the whole thing- and I would bite my tongue so hard that I would be in pain when eating for at least a week after.
It was then that my mother decided to take matters into her own hands. She drove me from one place to another. The amount of things that I did and were done to me was quite diverse, to put it mildly.
Putting the Scientology Purif Rundown aside, which had me near-dying with niacin-induced physical breakdowns and prolonged exposure to heat, I was treated by many alternative medicine doctors. A lot of them were also scientologists.
In one clinic, I endured long hours of acupuncture and IV drips, which god knows what they were pumping into me. They also performed a very low-tech colon cleanse. A sloppy nurse pumped water into my colon — she had no idea what she was doing, and I didn’t have the courage to make it all stop. It was traumatic.
In another clinic, I was given injections all over my body. I have no idea what they were, although I suspect they were merely lidocaine injections. This place would also pump me full of god knows what which would make my veins feel like they were on fire. I remember an incident when they would take me into a dark room, lay me down and proceed to give me an injection — in my carotid artery, I suppose. I would feel the cold liquid in my brain seconds after, and would lay there unable to move or speak for almost an hour. This happened a few times.
Suffice it to say, I tried a whole bunch of different things. From weird diets and cleanses, everything failed to control my epilepsy.
It was years after, after many close-call seizures that I decided to take the medicine. It did not go over well with my mother: She refused to pay for it, and stopped talking to me for a while.
It turns out, all I needed was a low dose of this medicine to keep from having seizures. I had lived in fear for years; I have scars in my face and lost two teeth as a result of falling down during seizures. Something clicked in my head: Medicine does work. Doctors might actually be fine, and not evil monsters.
Eventually, I emancipated myself from my mother, my beliefs, and everything that was in my past. Almost a decade had gone by since my father’s life had ended, and mine too, in a way, and I was just now starting to get on with my life.
— -
It took me years to recover from all of this. After leaving scientology, I was completely alone. The family I had was completely brainwashed, and my scientologists friends didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. I became depressed, and I struggled to find a new identity for myself.
Somehow, I am still alive, and able to tell my story. I sincerely hope that this story helps people who are struggling with what I struggled back then.
Most importantly, I want to draw attention to the damage that can be done by cults like these, and the way of thinking in particular. Some people claim that they aren’t bothering anybody, or “to each their own”, but the reality is that lives are deeply, permanently damaged by cults.
My father’s ashes were spread by the Paraná River, as per his will. I miss him.
