Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [158]
Natalie was miserable. "I started hanging out with the wrong kids," she said, with a flick of her cigarette. "You know, the typical story." Yearning to fit in, she made friends with the drug crowd—"basically the only people who were nice to me"—and began smoking pot. Before long, she'd entered what she called a "pretty heavy drug phase" that would last for two years. "Looking back, I see it was an interesting experience," she said. "I'd taken a lot of things for granted because I'd lived in that bubble of Scientology—I didn't know anything else. But when I went to high school I started hanging out with these kids and seeing the way they lived and how different their lives and families were from mine ... it blew me away."
Some of Natalie's new friends came from broken or dysfunctional homes; others were underachievers and struggled in school. Natalie, who'd managed to do well in school despite partying on weekends, would look at them and think, God, this is so horrible. But what could she do? "These kids didn't know how to, you know, look up a word in a dictionary," she said. "They didn't know why they didn't understand things. They didn't know why they would fail tests." Some kids she knew had been diagnosed with ADD and took Ritalin or Adderall. "They would fail and fail, and they wouldn't pay attention in class because they didn't understand, and so they'd be prescribed these drugs. Meanwhile, nobody was actually helping them." (In one desperate effort to help a friend who was failing a science class, Natalie said she grabbed a dictionary and made her friend look up everything she didn't understand, which she said ultimately helped the girl pass that class, and several others.)
Like that of many teenagers, her rebellion lasted only a few years. Drugs, she realized by her sixteenth birthday, were not only unhealthy, they were "counter-intentioned": Scientologists not only eschew mind-altering substances but cannot be audited if they have imbibed. They are also expected to maintain a high level of ethics, which, quite obviously, ruled out taking cocktails of pills and staying out all night. This is not who I am, she thought. Why am I doing this?
She had no idea. With great trepidation, Natalie went to her father, a dedicated Scientologist for thirty years, and told him that she had a drug problem. Her dad's reaction, as she recalls it, was not atypical for Scientologists. "He just sat there and he looked at me. He didn't freak out. He didn't even ground me. Nothing. He just said, 'We are going to fix you.'"
The next day, Natalie started the Purification Rundown. Every day for the next three weeks, she went to a local field auditing group that offered the program and spent up to five hours a day in the sauna, alternating lengthy sweat sessions with half-hour runs on the treadmill. The experience, as she recalled, was almost mystical, far more intense than any other detox program she'd ever heard of, and way beyond what friends experienced doing juice fasts or high colonics. "I used to feel like I could never see the real colors of the world because I was so dulled out," she told me. But during the Purification Rundown, she began to see things clearly, with almost psychedelic vividness. Afterward, Natalie felt renewed. "It was amazing how much better I felt. I could think faster, process things faster. I was more there."
This was step one of Natalie's fix. The second phase was the Life Repair auditing program, which she did the summer after her junior year. It began with a complete purging of her transgressions, which Natalie found tremendously therapeutic; the entire package of auditing sessions similarly impressed her. "I had some really amazing revelations in auditing," she said. "I got a much clearer idea of who I actually was."
By Christmas, she'd gotten rid of her drug-using friends, "disconnecting" from them in the way