Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [160]
And yet Kendra spent her childhood in one of the most diverse metropolitan regions of the United States. Kendra lived in a spacious home in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Glendale, and later in Burbank. Growing up there in the 1990s, Kendra had what she considered to be a typical suburban life. "I rode my bike, I used the computer, I watched TV, just like any other kid," she said. On weekends, she and her friends rented videos, shopped at the Glendale Galleria, ate at In-N-Out Burger, and went to the multiplex (Kendra was a diehard fan of The Lord of the Rings). No matter what day it was, they communicated via their pagers and chatted on AOL.
But her everyday reality was Scientology and the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, whose framed portrait hung in her home, much as a Christian family might display an image of Jesus Christ. Hubbard's maxims arose frequently in her family conversations and those of their friends, and his theories and policies affected every facet of their lives. When Kendra misbehaved, she was assigned a condition—"danger," for example—for which she would have to do amends, like cleaning her room. When she skinned her knee or bumped her head, Kendra's mother would give her a "contact assist," a holistic healing technique that involves repeatedly touching a wounded area of the body until it feels better. Like all Scientologist children, Kendra was raised to believe that, as a thetan, she had not only lived before, but had chosen her own body. "When I was little, my mom would tell me a story about how she was playing the piano one day when she was pregnant, and felt my thetan inhabit her," said Kendra. "She said there were lots of other thetans kind of hovering around, but I was strongest: I picked her." Kendra's family unfailingly followed church policy so that they would be "sessionable"; they stocked their home with vitamins, organic vegetables, and fruit and slept for at least eight hours every night, a prerequisite for auditing.
Kendra's parents spent a part of each day auditing, hooked up to their own personal E-meters, which cost around $4,000 apiece. Because they were at the top of the Bridge to Total Freedom, they could "solo audit," or audit themselves. Kendra never knew what went on in her parents' auditing sessions, just that they would sequester themselves in a room and hang a little sign on the door reading IN SESSION. During these periods, Kendra would tiptoe around the house. "You weren't supposed to make a peep," she explained; according to Hubbard, disturbing someone's auditing session was not only damaging to that person's spiritual well-being but also was a suppressive act.
Kendra worshiped her parents, who she believed had extraordinary psychic powers as OTs. She was particularly fascinated by their claim that they could remove the pain of death from the spirits of friends or family who'd recently died; they could telepathically connect with their thetans and give them a supernatural auditing session. As a child, she would watch, transfixed, as her mother sat on the living room couch, silently communicating with the spirits of the dead. When Kendra was six, her favorite great-aunt died. Reassuringly, her mother told her daughter that she had spoken to this great-aunt's thetan, which had agreed to go to hospitals and look for pregnant women who were Scientologists, so that it could be born again. The same was true when it came to the death of Kendra's