HOW THEY KEEP EVERYONE HUSHED UP.

BUSHKA!!! I love it. Your story is awesome and detailed. Thanks for that.
I don't know if anyone has heard of "Rollback" technology or "RB" . Its basically where if you say something that is negative about the church, some tool puts you on the e-meter and asks who was in your ear giving you that idea. And once they get the name of that person, they then get them on the meter and ask them where they heard it. Of course 95 percent of the time, you got the idea from yourself and your own eyes and ears. So a rollback session ends up being an hour long interrogation, where you eventually end up saying that it was some random person who looked at you funny one day and they could have maybe with the farthest stretch of the imagination have been insinuating that negative idea of the Church.
Anyways your story reminded me of the time when I got "RBed" from a lovely lady in OSA. But the question they asked me was, "Where did you get the idea to marry Dallas? ", (my now husband, then fiance).
I was like, "Uh, my heart???".
Talk about F#@*ed up! Of course they thought us getting married was some great big conspiracy to bring down the Church. Talk about paranoid!
Well now I can only thank them for giving me the idea

[Grundy]

I can tell you a funny Rollback story.

When I was finally getting ready to leave the Sea Org, I had to have some RB sessions and the subject of Gold came up and I was asked where I got the idea that Gold staff members will "never change".

I was honest with the Gold MAA who was doing the RB and told them that I got that idea from DM.

He told me that I could not have gotten it from DM, because he would never say that and besides, the person who you supposedly rollback too is supposed to be an "SP"! (I was right after all!)

Anyway, I told the MAA, that I was there many times when he said it, having worked for DM for several years and I gave him time, place, form and event of what happened and when DM said this! This viewpoint of DM's was well known amongst the top execs of Scientology.

Needless to say, this MAA was taken off of "handling me".

I was too high above his pay grade!

This is actually something that I am touching upon in the article that I am writing right now... which has more to do with how the whole thing holds itself together. Every story I have heard about somebody getting out of Scientology has involved a long and/or difficult process... especially ex SO peeps. My girlfriend asked me the other day, that if people wanted to leave, why didn't they just leave? In some few cases, there are physical and human barriers but what is relied on the most as I see it, is the culture and the nearly identical ideas of the consequences and the fact that some things are actually un-thinkable.

I can't do it justice ATM but I am working on it.