Val Ross: Scientology draws you in so you don’t realize what it’s about until it’s too late

[Val at her desk back in the day, the Grade Chart on the wall]

The spring of 1972, I was 17 and in my senior year of high school. The school was in Grants, New Mexico, 12 miles away from where we lived. I only had one class to finish to graduate, and was taking courses at the community college in Grants in the evening as well as babysitting for an hour while one of the professors taught a night class.

Mornings, before going to school in the afternoon, I worked in the medical records department at Cibola General Hospital in Grants. Then I would drive to my dad’s work, pick him up, take him home, then go back and do college classes and babysit.

My parents had cosigned on a car for me because otherwise I would have been driving the family car from 6:30 a.m. until 8:30 p.m., and there were still four kids and two adults at home, all of us with varying schedules.

Sometime in early March, 1972, I was doing my usual rush to get to work by 7:00 a.m. and crested the hill which connected Milan and Grants. As I came over the hill, a semi driver ran the stop sign at the bottom of the hill and according to the skidmarks they measured, I broadsided him going 70 mph.

My brother was riding the school bus to go to junior high that morning about 7:45. As the bus passed the wreck, my car was so mangled my brother didn’t recognize it. He made the comment, “hmph, no one lived through that.” I don’t remember hitting the semi. I don’t remember refusing to let my boss (who saw the wreck) call the ambulance because I was dating the ambulance driver and I didn’t want him to worry. Nor do I remember going to the hospital in my boss’s car or the fact that I would not let anyone help me get undressed and get in a hospital gown. The first thing I do remember is about 10:30 that morning — my parents, little sister, and both brothers surrounding my hospital bed, and I’m freezing while covered by blankets. I was in shock.

The doctors told my parents that I had a broken skull and a broken back and that I would never walk again. They didn’t tell me. Three days later, when I was ringing for someone to bring me a bedpan and no one came, I got up and walked down the hall to the bathroom. A nurse ran after me screaming “you can’t walk, you can’t walk.”

My parents transferred me to Albuquerque 90 miles away for a good diagnosis (apparently the bones were messed up turned sideways, and I walk like Frankenstein to this day, but I walk), and two weeks later, I was back at school and working. I saw the car before I went back to school. There was no room between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat.

I tell you this because one of my secret goals in Scientology which I never told anyone was to get back those lost three and a half hours and to get over my fear of semis. I made it all the way to OT 5 chasing those dreams, and was never asked about those things.

Let’s get real, the only time you ever get asked any personal questions in Scientology auditing is during a sec check. The rest of auditing is just a series of rote questions, and asking you to look at pictures in your mind, asking you for earlier similars, earlier similars earlier similars, good, we’re through.

So, how in the world did I stay in so long? Why did I keep going back for more? You’ve probably heard that if you put a frog in tepid water then gradually bring it to a boil, you will be able to cook it, but if you put the frog into boiling water, it will immediately jump out. Well, I’m going to try to explain how Scientology boiled frogs back when I was in.

Hubbard set up the whole Scientology long con quite simply. It was a personal encounter type thing. The personal contact, coupled with groupthink is what made any growth occur. By the time the person realized they had been sucked into a con, they felt the need to stay to save face.

I was approached on the street during my lunch break by a young handsome man a year older than me. He came up and started talking to me and convinced me to come with him to the mission a few blocks away. He almost lost me because I didn’t have time to do the personality test and still make it back to lunch, but he and a couple of other cute guys convinced me to come back after work.

Yes, they gang love-bombed me, but hey, what naive young single girl wouldn’t be flattered by several young men begging her to come back? I took the personality test that night and signed up for the Comm Course before I went home. Everyone there was so nice. Besides, who doesn’t want to know how to communicate better?

The Salt Lake Mission was quite small, a couple of offices, a classroom that held 15-20, a couple of auditing rooms and the bookstore/reception area. There was also a basement course room for more advanced training after students finished the Comm Course and Student Hat. It was clean but cluttered and had people coming in and out the doors constantly. I was drawn in by the camaraderie, the atmosphere: the feeling of being part of a “happening” group.

If someone had shown me a video monitor in a bright sterile building, I would have been uncomfortable and gone back to work and never gone back. These days, also, I would have looked them up on the Internet before I stepped foot in their building. Without the initial intense personal contact, there was little or no chance I would have gone any further.

But I did come back. And I started my journey.

As people often say, the beginning courses in Scientology seem quite benign, up to a point. The deal is, you think they are so benign, you miss the truth. As early as the Comm Course, you are being trained to be compliant, to react, and, more importantly, not react, in certain ways to certain stimuli. In other words, you are being taught not to feel from the moment you walk in the door. You sit there with your eyes closed, not moving. Why? Because supposedly that will help you communicate better. Why? Well, that’s a good question, but the fact that you believe that it puts you in tepid water, and you’re sitting there learning how to do the things you are told to do in a specific order.

But, even while you are getting “gains” from these beginning courses, you are also becoming trained to react, or not react to certain stimuli. Bullbaiting teaches you not to react when you are told bad or unacceptable things. Why is that a good trait? Why doesn’t someone say, “why should I learn how not to respond to someone who is saying bad things to me?” But, having paid for the course, and bought into the “Scientology can help you with that” phrase that is thrown at you at every possible opportunity, it becomes quite easy to question your knowledge of the world and believe that you are learning things that will help you.

Auditing is similar. I had never had any type of counseling before Scientology, so had no comparison point, but from the beginning, somewhere in the back of my mind, I wondered how rote commands could help you fix anything. Mind you, the E-meter was easy to operate, a very simple piece of equipment — before Miscavige, someone who didn’t know how to operate the E-meter, changed simple things like the definition of a “floating needle.”

But my mind was saying things to me like, how was my childhood the same as a person who grew up in a broken home? How could the same phrases repeated over and over get to what they wanted handled when their experiences were nowhere like mine?

Looking back at these red flags that were popping up even then, I should have gotten out. However, those people were so charming, smart, and oh so motivated. Obviously what I didn’t see was just around the next corner.

The next corner was a wrong turn that, in all reality should have made me walk out the door and never go back. I was still a public student, still working days, studying nights and still had great insurance at the time this event happened. The smart move in the situation described below would have been what the people at the mission let me do as a last resort. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

A group of us were walking downstairs to the advanced courseroom. Whoever was behind me said “hurry, we’re going to be late for roll call” so I did what any sane person would do, I jumped down the remaining stairs. Okay, I didn’t quite jump down the stairs because there was a low ceiling three steps from the bottom with an exposed piece of metal on it. Yep, my head hit there.

I made my grand entrance into the courseroom with blood gushing out of my head and was immediately rushed into a bathroom for a freaking touch assist! Anyone operating under the misconception that sitting on a chair having someone say “feel my finger” “thank you” a couple hundred times will stop your head from gushing blood and heal a cut, please reconsider.

After about 20 minutes, with blood still dripping off my head, I pretended I was fine and, of course, they put me on the E-meter to attest. I guess exasperation makes you have a floating needle because I had one, thank goodness, and was allowed to leave the courseroom. I promptly drove myself to the ER and got 12 stitches in my head … and was back on course the next night. Sigh. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I would not look good with a shaved head. It is a roadmap of bumps and stitches. But hey, I’m alive.

I should have been seeing so many red flags by then that I was out of there, but, no, they were just turning up the heat.

Here’s an interlude that, at the time seemed like a fun excursion, the time when I almost had sex. OK in hindsight, even this wasn’t fun, it was really insanely stupid. A group of us went on a campout, some of the staff of the mission and their 2Ds. I was going to share a sleeping bag with Steve. There were six of us in the car. Driving, drinking. We had both wine and beer. I know I was drinking wine because I still can’t tolerate beer. I never drank much, still don’t, maybe once or twice a year, so, of course, I was matching everyone drink for drink that night.

All of a sudden there were red and blue lights flashing in the rear view mirror. Steve was driving. The rest of us scrambled, throwing cans and empty bottles (so many cans and bottles) into the back where the backseat passengers shoved them under the seat (Rattle rattle rattle crash bang boom). Steve pulled over and got out of the car to talk to the policeman. He was so drunk we could see him swaying while talked to the cop. When he got back in, he had gotten a warning for driving too slow in the fast lane, that’s all. We laughed at the situation and drove on.

Shortly afterwards, we found a camping spot. I spent the night puking my guts out, as did most of the people who were there. We had drunk so much booze! Needless to say, there was no romantic interlude. Two weeks later, Jack Dirmann and his mission showed up.

Here’s the thing about my overblown sense of guilt and Scientology. Twice when I was in, I apologized to people for my actions: first in 1978, we were at Jack and Irene’s house meeting with Reed Slatkin (pre EarthLink days, it was some other scheme of his), and I apologized for leaving the Briefing Course in the lurch, I was met with blank stares. Again in 1982, I ran into Steve on a trip to Colorado and I apologized for not considering his feelings when I joined Sea Org. He looked at me like I had grown two heads. Thinking back, that was another thing about Scientology: the only people I ever saw admitting wrongdoing were those on ethics actions.

But back to the story. Here I am at a crossroads. I have been asked to join Sea Org, quit a good job with great advancement opportunities and benefits, and move to LA where I will be doing — well I wasn’t even told what I was going to be doing actually — just “helping to save the planet.”

Sanity should suggest that I take a deep breath and consider my next steps, so of course I dove right into the deep end.

So far I’ve ignored:

— My emotions being tamped down through rote training. Well, me paying to learn how to be emotion free if I’m being honest about it.

— Wondering how auditing can help anyone if all the questions are pre-asked.

— The fact that I was encouraged to not get medical help when injured.

— The fact that no one even cared we were all blind drunk driving down the freeway, we laughed when Steve got back in the car and talked about trying not to burp while talking to the cop.

— And last, but not least, a person who doesn’t know me from Adam convincing me that I am so important after only doing a small bit of Scientology training and even less auditing that I need to immediately join “the elite” and race off to LA to help save the planet in the Sea Org.

So, by then I was in deep enough that I quit a good job, and after a quick pitstop in Albuquerque to get dental work done (and I honestly can’t remember why I went to Albuquerque to do this) I packed up and moved 600 miles away to an unknown future.

After getting to LA, how red should the flag have been that I showed up for a job they knew I was coming to for two months, and no one knew where to put me? I mean, really, why would anybody show up for a planned appointment and wait nine hours to be accommodated?

I look at scams these days with obvious outpoints; misspellings, bad grammar, odd syntax, and immediately turn away from them. It makes me wonder if that was part of the plan, see just how willing I was to be abused from the start before they bothered getting me a room. I had enough money at that time to buy a return ticket. Instead I stayed and waited. For a dark, stinky dumpy crowded room with a dresser drawer to store my belongings.

We didn’t have buses to haul us to the org back then. We lived in the Hollywood Inn and ASHO was on 2723 West Temple Street, in the Fairfax District, a 10 minute or so drive on the 101, but about an hour and 45 minute walk. After the first week, I was on my own for transportation to and from the Org. Some staff members owned cars, we would chip in $1 a week (20 percent of our pay) for a carpool, (gas was about 50 cents a gallon then). That meant if we were lucky and the person wasn’t detained we would get to the galley (which was attached to the org) in time for breakfast before course started.

Bear in mind that were getting $5/week when I started, on weeks we got full pay. The entire org’s statistics had to be in affluence or above to get full pay. Some weeks we got part pay, some weeks none. Our meals reflected the amount of pay we received that week. We had to provide our own clothes and they had to be navy blue pants and white shirts. And we did our own laundry. I was one of the lucky ones. Fifty years ago, 5’10” was tall for a girl, and it was next to impossible to find pants long enough to fit my legs, but, my mother sewed me a bunch of pants and shirts and I had new underwear, shoes and socks when I started Sea Org.

We were recently packing for a trip and my husband said “did you used to have trouble with people stealing from you?” He had just come upstairs from the basement from getting luggage and yes, even my kneeler pad was labeled with my name. I label my cameras, my lenses, my luggage, etc. Why? Because almost 50 years ago, when I lived in a dark dumpy room with almost a dozen of “the most ethical people on the planet” even my underwear was stolen. I had to put my name inside my clothes. My underwear, my socks, every damn thing. The most ethical people on the planet, in the top positions on the planet, stole everything that wasn’t nailed down.

Of course, when you are spending 20 percent of your weekly salary (if you got paid that week) for the privilege of going to the job where you will wear yourself out working longer hours than you can possibly tolerate, a lot of your critical thinking, your sense of right and wrong gets fuzzy at best.

Staff training was really fun for me. First off, I’m a nerd. I loved school. They were desperate for someone to supervise the Briefing Course so I got up, got to the org, ate breakfast), went to muster, trained, ate lunch, trained, went to muster, ate dinner, checked to see if I could get a late ride home, if so, trained some more, if not, headed back to berthing. Most nights I studied until 11 pm then came back around 8 the next morning.

There was only one interruption in my study schedule. One day our CO Irene Howey called an all-hands muster in the middle of the day and went off on all of us. Why? Because Central Files wasn’t up to date. We had to pull an all-nighter to get it up to date. Yep. CF has always been not up to date. Scientology, with all its’ brilliant admin technology, cannot figure out how to get its files in order. I was training on allegedly the most advanced administrative training on the planet, and they couldn’t get their files in order.

By then I was so much a part of the group that I just pitched in and got CF in shape, or better than it had been when she went off on us at least.

The longer I stayed, the more I felt like a fraud — and the more I was convinced that I was the only one who had no clue what I was doing and that everyone else had it all figured out and that I was just pretending I was doing it right, but that’s a story for another day.

— Valerie Ross

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