Bonus Sample: Growing Up in Scientology pt 2 (w/Sarah)
Part 2 of Matthew's conversation with Sarah. Sarah grew up in the Church of Scientology. But she also grew up in a small town. And, in a neurodiverse family. We come from so many places. Exploitative, hierarchical, hypocritical. Generous, tender, and odd. It is an honor to present this installment of Listeners' Stories. We're tickled to learn that Sarah's awakening from Scientology was quickened by that South Park episode. And we're humbled to learn about how her mother, despite being deeply enmeshed in a coercive cult, still managed to kindle both compassion and common sense in her children.
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Thank you for your support.
You do have an extraordinary amount of compassion for your parents.
And, you know, I don't know how consistent that is for you.
I don't know if that's a baseline for you.
I don't know whether, you know, that's your best self speaking.
And then you have other moments where it doesn't feel that well.
But I'm just wondering whether really feeling into their lives and trying to understand where they were at, if that's been helpful for you.
Yes.
With regard to your own self-perception?
Yeah, it has.
It's given me a little more leniency, right?
Like I've given myself some slack, I think, in general, when I finally started to really step into self-compassion.
Um, was after hanging out with a lot of six-year-olds.
So I was a first grade teacher.
And, and truly six-year-olds are, are, are unbelievable, um, favorite age.
They're the kings of their universe.
But when you look at a six-year-old who's like going through some stuff, never, never would I say, this is your fault.
You've pulled this in, you know, like, and so I started to collect These stories of just tons of people who have things happen to them as children.
And I promise this connects.
And I got a really strong compassion muscle.
And I was trauma trained.
So I started to be trained in trauma.
So then understanding, looking back and thinking of my parents as six.
Because all of us are just giant six year olds, right?
Running around with Some of the same injuries we received as children allowed me to think like, oh, how would I handle them as a educator, as a trauma-informed educator?
Like, how would I, what care would I give them?
What would they need?
What, you know, what would I do to speak to them and how would I speak to them?
And never in a million years would it be the rhetoric of Scientology.
I mean, so far from that completely.
Like, you are the hype man of six-year-olds.
And that has kind of helped me look at myself as well, of like imagining myself as young and how would I speak to someone my age who would say the things I say.
And that's really helped kind of add that cushioning of just like, oh baby doll, oh chickadee, like you had no control and you were trying to find agency and control where you could.
And I think that a lot of our lives are trying to find agency and control where we can to make sense of crazy stuff that happens, you know?
Well, as somebody with a six-year-old in this very house, I completely concur.
It's hard to look at any of their travails and their confusion and their wonderment and their awe and not see that the world is surrounding them and making them who they are, including my own care and the way in which I speak to them and the way in which I provide resources or I answer questions.
There's no atomized six-year-old who is alone and isolated and came from another place and is somehow living out a journey like they are reading a script from a movie that was already written.
That's not who they are.
They are moment by moment growing in relationship with everything around them.
And to blame them for anything is just so cruel.
It's so counterintuitive to actually experiencing their six-year-oldness.
Yeah.
And I mean, like, as an educator, the more Not leniency, but like, you know, like the more I treated them as fully capable, you know, entities with love and compassion, the more freedom I kind of gave them with a few like hard boundaries, the more I saw them, you know, like the more I could see them arrive and show up.
And it's really fun.
I mean, six-year-olds are the best.
They're hilarious.
They're great.
They make decisions that make sense, right?
When they're trying to, like, trick you or cheat, all of it makes sense.
You're like, oh, cool.
I like what you're doing there.
I see your brain working.
I see how you're doing this.
Genius.
Genius.
You know, and I learned that, like, One of the best things to ask kids is how is if you want to like know if they know a concept is how to cheat on a game.
Like if you do a math game, be like, so how would you cheat?
Because it's like a formative assessment.
If they can tell me how to cheat, then they understand the premise of the game.
Therefore, they understand the mathematical principle.
And that actually is true in a lot of social situations, too, of like, well, how would you make her feel bad if you could?
And then they'll tell you and you're like, oh, This person knows what's going on in that girl's life, you know?
Like, you can learn a lot from them about just humanity, right?
Because I, again, like, I see a lot of us as just giant six-year-olds.
And a lot of us who've been hurt early, we're carrying around a lot of that.
And my parents did too, you know?
My mom was in fourth grade and she was really chained.
And my dad had a lot of nannies that were really, really abusive.
And Elrond created a military school, basically.
He created a military school for people who were never allowed to be more than six.
Yeah, I mean, 100 percent. And he used our own...
Even down to, even down to, here, you sign a contract for a billion years.
I know.
Which is what a six-year-old would say to another six-year-old.
It's so true.
Like, you're not coming to my birthday anymore.
Exactly.
You're not going to come to the next billion birthdays, actually.
Yeah.
And like, reading Going Clear, he's also very compassionate towards Elrond.
You know, he talks about how, like, You know, he probably was trying to just save himself.
Like, there's some evidence in the beginning he was just trying to, like, figure his own stuff out.
But then, clearly, there was, like, a distinctive line where it changed, and it became like, oh, I'm gonna profit off of all of these people.
He kept writing to the VA asking for psychiatric help, and he never got a response.
Right.
And then, weird, psychiatric society is, like, the enemy!
