Jeff Jacobsen
OK. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Let’s Be Clear, a program about interesting information about the church of scientology from a critics point of view. I want to thank Maggie Council for letting us use her introductory music there and you can get more from maggiecouncil.com. Today we’re going to be talking about the introspection rundown. Let me see if I’ve got DB on here. DB, are you there? Is that you? Hello?

Maureen Bolstad
Hello. This is Maureen.

Jeff
Oh, Maureen. OK. Sorry. This is Maureen Bolstad. She’ll be our guest today. We’ll be discussing the introspection rundown. And then I have, hopefully . . . let me try this one. Hello? Hello? (radio frequency (RF) audio) OK. Bizarre thing. OK. Anyway

So, today’s topic is going to be the introspection rundown, as they say, and we have chat area where you can get on and then the phone; you can call in with questions. That number is 347-215-8957. And I’m Jeff Jacobsen in case I didn’t say that. Hopefully I’m going to have someone helping me with chat, because sometimes some of these people get on chat and then I can’t keep track of what’s going on over there.

Just a little topic is the future of the show. I’m probably just going to be doing it whenever there’s a good topic coming up.

So you’re still there Maureen, yeah?

Maureen
Yeah.

Jeff
OK. Alrightie. DB, I don’t see you on Skype. So I’m not sure what’s going on there.

The introspection rundown – could you kind of explain what that is perhaps, within scientology, as much as you know?

Maureen
OK. Yes. Well there’s a quote at the end of the first bulletin that Hubbard wrote (HCO Bulletin of 23 January 1974R, The Technical Breakthrough of 1973! The Introspection RD – link to a file containing this bulletin and others on the introspection rundown: http://file.sunshinepress.org:54445/introspection.pdf ) where he says, “You have in your hands the tool to take over mental therapy in full. You need not fear the insane or the psychotic break any longer. Here also is the cure for the continual self auditing PC who is dug into his bank. It works on all PCs, in fact, with rave results. Do it flawlessly and we all win. This planet is ours.”

So this rundown is basically a cure for people in a psychotic break or who are continually introspected, and this is what, scientology, what they use as their counseling methods to cure these things and it actually really doesn’t work that well.

Jeff
Scientology is essentially anti-psychiatry so that what they are trying to do there is find a replacement for how to handle somebody that’s gone psychotic.

Maureen
Right. Yeah, I mean basically the idea is that; I mean I was on staff for about eighteen years in scientology management and one of the things that we were taught to believe or that we were involved in is that we were going to save the world by getting rid of psychiatry. And so, on a personal level, for me, when the rundown didn’t help me and actually made me feel worse. I thought, well what are we doing, if this is the cure and it’s not great. It’s actually very bad. So, what were they doing? I mean what really is the end result of scientology then? If they’re going to get rid of psychiatry but they actually don’t have any other solutions then what are they trying to do?

Jeff
Right. Hang on, let me try this one more time and see if I’ve got . . . Hello? Who do we have on here? Hello? OK. Well, we’re losing DB apparently here.

Let me go through just briefly, I’m trying to write down sort of a history of this attempt by Hubbard to handle psychotic people without taking them to a psychiatrist, as they should be. In 1955 there was a Republic article (17 May 1955, House Owner Sues Church http://www.lisamcpherson.org/news/1953-59/newspaper_1953-59.pdf#page=11) about a woman who sued Dianetics Foundation and L. Ron Hubbard in Phoenix for wrecking her house, because, basically, they had people . . . Let’s see it says in here, “They had persons, the suit charges, with seriously deranged minds who were destroying her house.” This is the first example that I’ve ever found of Hubbard trying to handle psychotic people. And this case was settled out of court. The newspaper doesn’t say how much or anything.

All through the history of scientology there’s been cases where people were held like this. In London, 1967 a guy stood up in Parliament and told about a woman who, in his district, had problems. (Hansard, vol.742, cols. 1216-1228, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Cowen/audit/debate67.html)Her name was Miss Henslow. And it said that after she worked at East Grinstead, which is St. Hill in England, she became confused and her mental health deteriorated, and then the church dropped her off at her mother’s house late one night dressed only in a nightgown and coat, in a completely deranged condition. So that was a failed attempt I guess.

Monica Pignotti was on board the Apollo ship in 1973 and she said that she saw the beginnings of the introspection rundown on the ship with L. Ron Hubbard. 1988, Stacy Young, at the time, Stacy Brooks said that she was helping guard someone that was on the introspection rundown. 1995 you have Lisa McPherson’s case, which is the most documented. 1996 after Lisa McPherson died, Karsten Lorenzen says that he helped a woman in Denmark that was on the introspection rundown, helped guard her. 2001, the church of scientology comes out with, ‘The Lisa Clause,’ as we call it, which basically scientologists sign to say “it’s OK to put me in isolation like that, ‘cause I don’t believe in psychiatry. So if I flip out go ahead put me in isolation.” 2008, a case in Sardinia where two scientologists were arrested for kidnapping; there was a French lady that was being held.

So this has gone throughout the entire history of the church of scientology, even before. Well, scientology started in ’53, so I guess yeah, from the very beginning.

When you, Maureen, when you were in, when was the first time you ever heard of this process, the introspection rundown?

Maureen
I think it was around . . . it was probably around June of 1995 I saw somebody getting that rundown.

Jeff
Oh, OK. Where were you? This was at Golden Era Studios?

Maureen
Yeah, right. I did see some people who seemed to have minor good results with it, and I don’t know what the difference was between them and me. Maybe they weren’t as distressed as I was perhaps, or obviously not as stressed as Lisa was. But there were some people I saw do it and they seemed to improve a little bit afterwards. It didn’t entirely cure them of whatever was bothering them but it seemed to make them act less crazy.

Jeff
OK.

Maureen
So, but there is another point I just want to bring up really quickly and that is that the determination whether somebody needs to be put in isolation should not be left up to amateurs. Because I was never a danger to myself or others and so I did not deserve to be put in isolation. And I don’t really know that Lisa was either. I mean obviously she was clearly distressed but whether she actually deserved or warranted to be treated as if she was dangerous, I don’t think that that’s a determination to be made by amateurs.

I mean, currently, the way psychiatry works is someone gets put on seventy-two hour hold there has to be a 51-50 form filled out by a law officer or social worker or something before they can actually get committed into an institution like that. Otherwise you can’t just walk up to somebody and put them in isolation just for anything.

Jeff
Right. When people that hel . . . well, let’s say anybody that runs this process, the case supervisor down to the guards at the door, what kind of training do you think they’ve had?

Maureen
They could have hardly any training. I mean some of the guards that were watching me were just fairly new in scientology. They didn’t really have that much scientology training at all. They were just trained to follow whatever orders they were given.

Jeff
OK. Also in scientology there’s another case . . . fortunately we have Google nowadays . . . but also I made a web page, it’s lisamcpherson.org/isolate.htm which is a collection of related documentation about the introspection rundown. Also, scientology, there’s another thing called baby watch, PTS type three?

Maureen
Yeah, that’s a slang term for keeping an eye on somebody who is in isolation or getting that rundown.

Jeff
OK, so if you hear those two phrases then you figure out somebody’s being in isolation, being held against their will probably. Correct?

Maureen
I don’t know that they’re being held against their will or not. They may not have any will at all. They’re just being watched. It depends on how distressed they really are or why they’re being held or why they were considered to be crazy, you know.

Jeff
Yeah, OK. And also there’s other cases. Dennis Erlich mentions that he was put in the basement of the Fort Harrison Hotel, which does exist, by the way, in Clearwater, for ten days because he told a joke against somebody that didn’t like it. Also I’ve heard of cases where people claimed that they were held in a room until they agreed to pay so much money for a course or process or whatever. That was essentially kidnapping if that was true, too. So it’s not only the introspection rundown where they’re holding people against their will, as far as these people have said.

Who’s the person that decides to put another on this introspection rundown? Is it that person’s case supervisor or could it be someone else?

Maureen
The case supervisor has to authorize the rundown to be done on the individual but the case supervisor does not order the security guard so there’s somebody else higher up who has to order it, administratively because the case supervisor isn’t the one who is with the person administering the rundown. The case supervisor is sitting in another room somewhere doing a lot of other things at the same time and they just look at a folder and read what’s being done and writing notes to the counsellor.

Jeff
OK. So let’s go through just the basic steps of what should an ideal case, if there is one, of an introspection rundown would be, where, OK, we’ve got someone that’s apparently flipped out. Someone above, their case supervisor has decided, OK, this person needs to go onto the introspection rundown. So let’s do that. That person is put in isolation somewhere and then what would be the ideal steps from there?

Maureen
Well, first of all in order to get that person and put them into isolation the case supervisor has to communicate to, say, the security guards or the HCO personnel. HCO is, I guess, their human resources division. I don’t know how better to explain that. It’s just the personnel department. And so people from that department that also get involved and there are people from the qualifications division that have to get involved with the counseling aspect of it to pick a counsellor for this person and get that counsellor over to that person. All these people have to get together and be working together and get this person into the room.

Jeff
OK.

Maureen
And then at that point once the rundown is started the case supervisor supervises it and the case supervisor would then answer up to the senior case supervisor international, which would require, I suppose, faxing the information or maybe even sending the information in a Fed Ex or something like that so that the senior case supervisor international also knows what’s going on. And also a religious technology center staff to this rundown is supposed to be done very strictly and very closely and it gets supervised closely because of the nature of it.

Jeff
Right. OK. So the person, let’s just say for now, seems to be getting better, then what’s the process from that point?

Maureen
Once the person is in isolation and they rested a little bit and they’ve calmed down somewhat, they’re ready for some counseling, one of the first steps is they would get checked over for any recent wrong indications or wrong items or things that they may be overly concerned about or worried about in their own minds that have made them just stop paying attention to their outside surroundings and they’re just deeply involved and thinking over these things. And so the counsellor would try to help them find these points that made them mentally go down the rabbit hole and try to get them back out by pointing these things out.

Someone could have walked up to the person and said, “You’re no good. You’re always causing trouble.” and the person may have taken that really seriously and thought, ‘Well I’m no good. Why am I no good?’ maybe just thinking this over and over in their head and they’re not really paying attention to their outside surroundings any more. So if the counsellor and the case supervisor can help find these points they can just point them out to the person and say these are some points that made you start introverting and get the person to realize what he’s feeling, what he or she is doing that they’re introverting or they’re introspecting and why and get them to see that and get them to quit overly thinking about these things.

Jeff
OK, so once the case supervisor feels that this person has successfully done that then what goes on . . . How do you exit from the introspection rundown?

Maureen
Well, you can do most of the steps to the point where you’re supposed to be able to say, “Well I’m no longer uncontrollably introspective and I’m controlling my attention and now I’m able to pay attention to my environment and communicate with it and the people in it and I can control it and so I’m no longer so destructive I can’t function.” That’s sort of the general idea. I mean the theory behind it isn’t wrong. You want people to be aware of their environment and able to control it and not just overly thinking about things in their head that they’re never going to resolve.

Jeff
Yeah. I’m going to try one more time with DB here. Is this DB?

DB
Yeah, it is now.

Jeff
Alright. OK. Well welcome. DB is going to be my assistant today, watching the chat, which is difficult to do, on this program to watch chat and do everything else at the same time. Thank you, DB.

Maureen let’s get to the specifics of your case then. First, how long were you in scientology?

Maureen
Twenty-five years.

Jeff
OK and you were in the sea org. How high up did you go in the training, like did you get clear or OT?

Maureen
No. I really didn’t get anywhere. I thought I was like a past life clear but that really didn’t make any sense to me so I had that cancelled. So I really didn’t make it really to anything, any level. I was mostly just a work horse in the sea organization. I worked for them and that was mostly what I did.

Jeff
OK. What year did you first have to be on IR and what was the situation that brought it about?

Maureen
In December of 1995 I was sitting in my office and I was upset because I’d requested a transfer. I was in the film crew at the time and I did a lot of . . . I handled a lot of heavy equipment and it was hurting my back and it was . . . I was having difficulty physically with lifting the equipment, the long hours, and I requested a transfer and it was denied. And I was basically told, “No, you can’t have a transfer.” And I was just in so much pain that I didn’t know what to do. So I got really upset and I thought well this pain must be my case. Because I’d been in scientology for so long I really didn’t know how to deal with this pain. I didn’t know what it was and I thought well if my superiors don’t think it’s a problem then maybe it’s my case, so I’ll just figure it out in my head, what this is and I’ll try to resolve it. So I was writing these really long notes this one day and I just . . . I guess someone said, “Oh she’s introspected so we’re going to put her on this rundown.”

So I guess the senior case supervisor for Golden Era Productions, which is where I was working, decided to have me do the introspection rundown, ‘cause she’d read one of my notes. And so her . . . I guess her senior came down . . . Yeah, he was her senior. He came down and told me, “Look, you’re going to do this rundown.” He talked to my senior and said that I was going to go somewhere else. I was going to go to a house at their ranch. They had a ranch property out by the Soboba Indians at the time. They don’t own that any more but they used to. And so they said they were going to take me out there and I was going to get this rundown. And I just was crying. I just started crying just uncontrollably. I didn’t know what was going on. I guess it’s just all these emotions and feelings were built up inside ‘cause I had been taught to ignore them my whole life and they just sort of burst out from all the long hours and a lot of other things.

And so I just started crying and then they brought me out to this house that was out on this ranch. And it was actually a nice house. It was a lot better than the place Lisa had to stay. I mean Lisa was in a small hotel room but I stayed in this ranch house. It had a kitchen and I was allowed to walk around outside. And the first step, of course, is to get the person to rest and relax and I had insomnia and so that was tough for me the first three or four days, I just couldn’t sleep. Eventually I was actually able to sleep and I started to get some of that rundown.

Now, from what I heard about what happened to Lisa she actually was never . . . she never got to that point where she was able to sleep or actually get enough sleep. And so I don’t think she actually did any of the further steps to the rundown. I think she was just kept in a room and told, “Get some sleep.” I didn’t study it really, really close but I’m under the impression that’s what happened to her.

But for me I actually did get some sleep, which was great ‘cause I had insomnia and I’d also been working so many hours that my sleep cycle was messed up. So getting some sleep actually made me feel better, just that alone. And then the first step I was read this list that the case supervisor put together of points of introspection or points of introversion. And I had to look up the definition of introversion and I had to look up the definition of introspection. And my counsellor had me do little demonstrations with paper clips and stuff to make sure she understood that I understood what it meant. And then we talked over these points.

And I didn’t feel that anything had improved in my life mentally from having been told these points because they didn’t make any sense to me that that’s what was going on with me. To me I was in pain and I wanted help with that. I wanted some medical care. I wanted to see a doctor. I wanted to see somebody that would help me with the pain in my body.

But they were more concerned with the two points that I had written in a recent report about the long hours that I was working and about how I felt that some of David Miscavage’s management decisions were incorrect. And I was basically complaining a lot about my work conditions. And so some of these had been put on the list as my points of introversion and that sort of upset me.

Jeff
OK. Now the difference then it seems to me you were reasonably cooperative with your handlers at the time.

Maureen
Yeah, I wasn’t really . . . At the time I wasn’t really feeling like I was being held against my will. It wasn’t until later that I was held against my will. At this point in December 1995, my first introspection rundown, I wasn’t really particularly being held against my will.

Jeff
OK. That’s the difference between Lisa then because Lisa pretty much fought the whole time.

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
She was, coincidentally in November, late November of ’95 that she was held.

Maureen
Yeah. Yeah that is a strange coincidence. But I have a feeling that possibly I was treated better than her because of her, because of what happened to her, you know.

Jeff
Yeah. Possibly, yeah. I would assume that her case, as you said, had to go up above the case supervisor to some higher person to decide to put her in isolation in the first place as well then.

Maureen.
Right. Also I don’t think I was as distressed as she was. You know I wasn’t taking my clothes off and walking down the street or anything like that. I was just having difficulty sleeping. I was crying a lot and writing notes a lot and that was sort of what I was going through.

Jeff
OK. How long does this take, by the way, from the time you get your start ‘till the time you end this process?

Maureen
Well, my whole first introspection rundown took about a month; less than a month.

Jeff
OK. And it was all at the same place, the same location?

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
OK.

Maureen
But I finished the whole thing and I felt worse after that, because, like I said, I wasn’t that distressed to begin with. But after I did all these steps I was more distressed. And that’s when I got put in isolation and was having people watch me more.

Jeff
OK, but that was after this time?

Maureen
Yeah, after the first rundown I got more distressed and I was put under guard at that point.

Jeff
OK, so the first one you kind of graduated from.

Maureen
Yeah, I thought I’d graduated from it.

Jeff
Yeah, OK, so then they put you back in?

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
Second time, let’s say, but this time you’re sort of angry at them, huh?

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
Not as cooperative?

Maureen
Right, ‘cause I couldn’t understand what was going on. I thought, well I did the rundown. I did the steps they asked me to do. I didn’t like them. They didn’t make any sense to me. I got in arguments with the counsellor on them, because some of these steps were more introspective because they ask you to list out your intentions. They try to find evil intentions and then audit them out. And so it was being implied by that that my sort of a breakdown was not because I wasn’t getting enough sleep or because I was being mistreated as a staff member. It was, in fact, because I had evil intentions, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t think that was right. I felt that I was being abused and mistreated as a staff member and that’s why I had a breakdown, and that the people who needed to change were my seniors and management in relationship to my work assignments and pushing me to work so hard with no sleep. Yet, and also being denied medical care when I needed it. And that was my argument but their argument, the case supervisor’s argument was that I got upset and I got introverted because of my evil intentions.

And if you read the rundown, the bulletin that was written in 23 January, 1974, after the initial steps of the rundown, which are supposed to help get the person more in present time and quit introverting then they continue the rundown by checking for intentions, listing for intentions. You word these points of introversion as an intention and then you list out what was . . . you audit out that intention in the person in different flows and how they maybe saw it in others or seeing it between two other people or in how they themselves had that intention.

And so that’s what it boiled down to and I didn’t . . . this made no sense to me at all. So after the rundown I was not sent back to my post, which I thought would happen. What happened was I got placed on the deck project force and I had somebody watching me and I had to do work assignments separate from the rest of the crew and I was told that I was going to get more counseling but I had to wait. And so I did six months of just doing gardening and taking care of trees. But I was being treated like I was some kind of a criminal because I couldn’t go anywhere on the property. I was back at the main international headquarters base at Golden Era Productions in Hemet. And I was doing the gardening and stuff like that but I wasn’t with the rest of the crew. I had to eat by myself. I had living quarters, I had to stay by myself but somebody was always watching me. And then in June I was put on the rundown again. I had to do some of the steps over on the introspection rundown and so I had to redo some of these steps. That upset me even more because the steps were . . . I’ll tell you one of the steps.

There’s a step where you’re supposed to find out one of the thing that the person’s got their attention fixated on and then you have to do these mental drills to get them to unfix their attention on this thing. And so one of the things my attention was fixated on was on my body ‘cause I couldn’t understand why I was in so much pain and what was going on. And so they wanted me to put . . . the counsellor wanted me to put my attention on my body then put my attention off my body. And so I’m mentally thinking, well, why? How is it wrong for me to be worried about my body? I mean it’s in pain. Something’s wrong. I need to fix it. Why do I have to ignore that? I mean, can’t they just send me to a doctor and help me figure out what’s wrong?

I mean I had three herniated disks in my neck and I had no idea that my disks were herniated. I just thought, well my neck hurts and I have no idea what this is. If this is a, you know, a dianetics engram or something like that that needs to be run out then why don’t they just run it out because it was driving me nuts? But you know I still could never figure out what was going on. Also I had to keep doing this manual labor despite the fact that my spine was injured. I was doing this manual labor and it was really . . . I don’t know . . . it was a bad experience.

So then I basically got more of that and I stopped eating. I just went on this thing where I just was eating carrots. I don’t know why I chose that. I mean maybe I thought, well carrots are good for me and that’s one of the things I’m not allergic to. ‘Cause I was having trouble with food allergies at the same time as all this was going on. So I just started eating carrots and I got this protein deficiency. And I was losing all this weight and I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat solid foods anymore and I thought I was going to die.

So I walked up to somebody out there. I was doing gardening all by myself out on the northwest corner of the property ‘cause I wasn’t allowed to mingle with any of the other staff members or work with them. So I was sort of on my own and I thought well I could just die out here and nobody would notice. You know so I had to really force myself even though I had very little energy. I’m going to walk up to somebody and say, “Look, you know I need some help ‘cause I think I’m going to die out here. I mean I haven’t been eating. I can’t eat solid foods any more. I tried it and I threw up.” Finally somebody said, “OK. Let’s get her back out to this other place, the house at the ranch, ‘cause she was doing better out there.”

Oh wait; let me back up a little bit. When I was at the Gold Base doing gardening and stuff and I was put on my second introspection rundown the restraints were a lot worse. I mean I was behind a chain link fence with razor wire around it and the guards that were watching me were security guards that were armed. Even though they never actually personally threatened me with a gun or anything like that I found it very intimidating and it caused me a lot of anxiety. I thought, why am I being treated like this after all my years of dedicated work to scientology? Why am I being treated like a criminal because I have done nothing wrong?

Jeff
But at that time you were more uncooperative though; the second time though, right?

Maureen
Um, the second time?

Jeff
Yeah.

Maureen
Uncooperative, you mean in what way?

Jeff
In saying, “Well, I don’t want to do this or you just did it anyway?

Maureen
OK, well, you can’t do the rundown unless you’ve had enough sleep and enough food. So the fact that I stopped eating and sleeping, yes, that was uncooperative. It was probably exactly what was going on with . . . one of the things that was going on with Lisa. You know she wasn’t sleeping or eating and that’s what happened to me. I just stopped sleeping or eating. I didn’t feel that I was doing it intentionally to particularly avoid doing the rundown. I just was so distressed with how I was being treated, with being guarded by security guards, not being allowed to see my husband or my sister or any of my friends; being basically treated like I was a criminal. And so that distressed me and I stopped eating and I couldn’t sleep and I needed to be treated better. That was the only thing that would have cheered me up but the rundown was what they were trying to do on me.

Jeff
Yeah. Just a second, looks like our chat broke, which I don’t know how to fix, so I’m sorry about that. People want to call in with a question, it’s 347-215-8957. We’re talking with Maureen Bolstad. The topic is the introspection rundown, which is the Church of Scientology’s response to psychiatry and the hope for the replacement of psychiatry, so when people go psychotic in the Church of Scientology they put you in isolation and try to run this process on you. The way I understand it is you’re supposed to figure out why you went crazy and then that’s the cure.

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
Is that kind of it? Yeah. So that was the goal of this process. Lisa McPherson . . .

Maureen
Oh and they use the e-meter. They try to use the e-meter to help guide you.

Jeff
OK. The first I ever heard of this was about a year and a half after Lisa died. It came up, I believe, from the police investigation. I’d never heard of the introspection rundown before that. So to me, I always relate it to someone being held against their will in a room and fighting to get out but in your case it kind of shows it’s not necessarily that that has to happen so long as the person is cooperating . . .

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
. . . to a degree.

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
So actually in Lisa’s case it was that she refused to go the next step, which was to get sleep and eat and start cooperating. Would that be a good way to look at it?

Maureen
Yeah, and I guess they just kept her in the room and didn’t change anything they were doing to get to the bottom of why she wasn’t cooperating. I mean I actually got treated better when I stopped cooperating and I was about to . . . I mean I felt I was going to die from starvation but I don’t know if I really would have. I got treated better. I got taken to a different nicer place and the people around me weren’t in uniforms. They were friendly. They made protein shakes for me and took me for walks without a fence around me and I felt intimidated and less harassed and so I calmed down and I was actually able to eat and sleep.

But then at that point . . . you want me to just keep telling my story . . . I mean it’s really long. I spent four or five years doing various different attempts at this rundown and things in between.

Jeff
Oh wow. Well, I don’t think we can compress five years into . . .

Maureen
Right. Well I mean ‘cause basically you know I couldn’t do the rundown because I couldn’t sleep or eat during it and then they put me on a different rundown. They wanted me to do the rehabilitation project force and I tried to do that for a year.

Jeff
So they tried to build you up so you could do the introspection rundown?

Maureen
I guess, I don’t know I mean I . . . Maybe they figured I was OK, you know, after I started using . . . you know I was good enough for the RPF but then when I ran away from the RPF I got put back on the introspection rundown stuff later.

Jeff
OK. So the third time was it the worst of the three I guess?

Maureen
Not for me because basically I was, like, how can this rundown help anybody? And it made me lose faith in scientology and I made the decision that I didn’t really want to be involved anymore, so for me it was actually a wakeup call and I decided that I didn’t want to be on staff anymore and they eventually let me go. I mean it took a long time for me to get out of there and there were a lot of attempts to salvage me and get me to stay, that rundown being one of them. But it didn’t work and I could see clearly that my whole reason for getting involved in scientology was to improve psychiatry and psychology ‘cause I’d seen how poorly my mother was treated by psychiatrists and I thought there had to be a better answer. And I was told when I joined, “Oh scientology has a better answer.” And here I was, you know, being intolerably stressed and needing help and this answer was making me feel that worse. And I thought, how could this be? How could . . . I’ve been working this hard since I thought supposedly scientology had all the answers to psychiatry and they don’t.

Jeff
When you were on . . . in Lisa’s case, which makes me think now that she really didn’t get far enough to be on the introspection part of it, ‘cause she fought all the time . . .

Maureen
Yeah, it sounds like she was just on the first step. You’re supposed to just isolate the person with all attendants completely muzzled and give them vitamins until the break stops.

Jeff
So when you were in the isolation part kind of not cooperating what kind of treatment did you get and did people check on you a lot to make sure you’re OK?

Maureen
There was always somebody watching me. There was either . . . I mean even sometimes even in my room with me, which really annoyed me ‘cause I had trouble sleeping and if someone was there snoring or whatever I couldn’t sleep. But there was always somebody watching me or guarding me. I couldn’t go anywhere by myself.

Jeff
OK. So if you were in physical distress they would have known, in other words?

Maureen
Not necessarily.

Jeff
No?

Maureen
No, I mean, I was saying that I was in pain. That’s what I’d been saying since December 1995 and nobody would let me go see a doctor. I mean, I didn’t have enough money to go see a doctor on my own. I had to get permission. I had to say, “Look, please, take me to a doctor and pay for it.” And I couldn’t get that from them. I was told, “No. You don’t need to see a doctor. The problem is your case. The problem is in your head.” And that’s what the argument was and so whenever I asked for that, whenever I said, “Listen, I don’t want to do this manual labor anymore. I don’t feel like eating.” Even if I was throwing up my food it was because of me and my case. It wasn’t because of there anything physically wrong with me but there was something physically wrong with me. And I think that there was something wrong physically with Lisa and so whatever reason the people attending her were told, “Oh, she’s crazy.” So therefore when she was acting like she was stressed out and distressed they had an answer. They didn’t have to find out what was wrong. They were like, “Oh, she’s crazy.” You know. And that was the same thing that was going on for me. I had a really hard time communicating with the people around me and getting the help that I needed because they already seemed to know what was wrong with me.

Jeff
So, yeah. There’s a quote by Hubbard.

DB
While you’re looking that up, I have one question for you, Maureen

Maureen
Yes.

DB
When you were on Gold Base over there did you ever once see anybody who received any medical training on that facility? Is there a nurse or anybody or is there even a . . . I mean I know it’s a pretty big place. Is there any kind of medical facilities there at all?

Maureen
They have first aid kits. They have three people . . . they had . . . well when I was there they had three people who were trained as nurses. Their certificates were not kept up to date but they did have initial training as nurses. Also, some of the security guards apparently did some paramedic training. I don’t really know to what extent. I mean they were capable of dealing with emergencies that were obvious like a broken bone or someone, you know, cut themselves or something like that. But if the ache or pain is not clearly obvious, you know, what source that’s from, they weren’t set up to do those kinds of tests. You know for example one day I was having chest pains and I had to get taken out into town to see a heart specialist to get my heart tested to see what was going on there. And they did take me to that, the first time I complained of chest pains, you know, and I did get some help with that. But when I was complaining of pain in my neck and my spine that’s when things kind of broke down at that point for me.

Jeff
Yeah, I think that’s throughout scientology they rely on their own processes more than medicine, and of course, they don’t believe in psychiatry at all so they try to handle that, too . . .

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
. . . without much training and, I think, much skill. Here’s the Hubbard quote I was looking for, which is HCOB policy, 24 November 1965. He says . . . He’s talking about PTS type three, which is basically a psychotic person. He says, “. . . but there will always be some failures (about the treatment) as the insane sometimes withdraw into rigid unawareness as a final defense, sometimes can’t be kept alive and sometimes are too hectic and distraught to ever become quiet.” So he’s saying that there’s going to be failures even up to death in this process of how they handle type three. I mean he’s flat out saying that himself, which is amazing to me.

Maureen
Yeah.

Jeff
I think that’s what happened in Lisa’s case. They just kept saying, “Well, we’ve got to get her up to the point where we can start processing her and she kept not cooperating until the very end, you know. And she’s thirty-six years old, in good health and then after they have her in isolation she’s dead.

Maureen
Yeah, it’s tragic.

Jeff
That’s a scary thing. That’s the thing to me: scientology does things that they’re not really prepared or skilled to do and claim that they’re the ones that are the smartest. Like Tom Cruise said, you know, “We’re the ones, when we come upon a car accident, we’re the ones that know what to do.”

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
It’s that that gets them in trouble and gets their members in much distress as you were in as well.

Maureen
Right. There was a point where I was being held against my will. It was in . . . around February 1997. I said, “Look, I don’t want to be on staff any more. I don’t want to do the RPF program. Please, let me go.” And they wouldn’t let me go. And I tried to walk away and I was tackled. I tried to walk away on three different occasions. I was tackled each time by larger men, you know, larger than me I mean. And I continued to try to get away.

I finally did get away at the end of 1997 and I was talked into coming back. I was told, “Look, we’re sorry for everything we did wrong toward you. We’ll change. Come back and we’ll be nice to you and we’ll let you see your husband and we’ll let you see your sister.” And you know I was just dumb and I went back and I ended up getting stuck there for another three years. During that time I tried to jump over the fence and walk away. I didn’t get out of there, basically, until much later in 2000.

So as far as getting my head straightened out I actually had to see a psychologist later when I got out of scientology. ‘Cause I was still having trouble with eating disorders and having problems sleeping. And I saw a psychologist for that, so I was able to deal with that.

Jeff
So the outside world was better to handle your problems than scientology?

Maureen
Absolutely, and it’s really ironic, too, because, my psychologist told me that a lot of the distress that was going on with me had to do because I was in pain. Like I had seven herniated disks in my spine from work related injuries and I wasn’t getting treated for it. I wasn’t getting the anti-inflammatories or pain killers or the physical therapy or decompression that I needed. And so that pain was just building up and making my life miserable. And so, yeah, I had some other things going on with me in my life that resulted in eating disorders as well but basically when I did actually go see a spinal specialist and get some treatment for the injuries in my spine, that’s when I started feeling happier and more sane, when I was able to address that.

Jeff
Yeah. Let me just . . . so I don’t run out of time anyway . . . I’m going to read what scientology calls their [i[General Release Regarding Spiritual Assistance[/i], which has a copyright of 2001. I’ll just read two little parts about it. This basically is just a cover for them, to me. I’m not a lawyer but it looks like, to me, just to specifically refer to the introspection rundown. So I’ll quote here, “I understand that the introspection rundown is an intensive rigorous religious service that includes being isolated from all sources of potential spiritual upset including but not limited to family members, friends or others with whom I might normally interact.” And a little farther down it says, “I further specifically acknowledge that the duration of any such isolation is uncertain, determined only by my spiritual condition but that such duration will be completely at the discretion of the case supervisor.” Now there’s a little part in there, I further specifically acknowledge that the duration is determined by spiritual condition, not physical condition. It doesn’t even mention physical condition in here. So that seems to me that the case supervisor is not even as concerned about your physical condition as your spiritual condition or the way he sees your case.

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
You know, so that just kind of blows my mind . . .

Maureen
Right

Jeff
. . . how all this worked out. Did you see other people? I think you, at the beginning; you said you saw another person on the introspection rundown.

Maureen
Yeah, I saw several people that did the introspection rundown. I mean they seemed to improve. I didn’t really see the way they were before they started it. So you know it didn’t seem to bother them as much as it bothered me.

Jeff
OK. When you left scientology . . . I just want to make sure I get all my questions. Well we’ve got about ten minutes yet. When you left scientology what was the thing that helped you the most kind of to go back into the outside world, let’s say, to fit in?

Maureen
I think really, the thing that really helped me the most was making friends with non scientologists who seemed to have a great deal of compassion towards me. And I think compassion was really missing in the last few years that I was in scientology. So getting that from people I’d just met was amazing. Plus, I found a psychologist who was really good at dealing with people with eating disorders and she really was . . . I mean I had two or three sessions with her and I felt better, and I felt happier, and I felt, “Oh! That was what was going on.” And that was sort of what I wanted in scientology. That’s what I was sort of expecting when I tried to do my scientology auditing. But in scientology, Hubbard felt that psychosis had to do with evil intentions. The problem is that they don’t define, “evil.” It’s sort of left up to whoever’s in charge to explain to you what evil is, or decide what an evil intention is.

For example a staff member wanting to have a child, in the sea organization or on staff for scientology, was considered evil as it was against the rules. But, to me, it’s not evil to want to have children. And so to be in a group that thinks it’s evil is going to put them in a conflict and make them stressed out. And you can’t run that out. You can’t say, “Oh, that’s an evil intention. Let’s get rid of it.” I mean you can change your mind about it, sure. But in scientology they think that your intentions are somehow ingrained in your reactive mind and they can cure you of them using the e-meter. They don’t think of you as a human being who can change your mind, you know, based on being reasoned with or whatever.

Jeff
Yeah. When you were in, just coincidentally you were in the rundown the same time as Lisa McPherson. I assume the first time you heard of her was after you left the church?

Maureen
Yes.

Jeff
Or when did you hear about her case?

Maureen
I heard about Lisa McPherson in . . . Let’s see. When did I hear about her? Probably around 2004, 2005.

Jeff
OK.

Maureen
Yeah. It was a while before I read her story.

Jeff
When you learned more about her case . . . I mean to me I think hers is the most documented case like this throughout the history of the church. It went through court. You know the court got some documentation out of the church that I’m sure they didn’t want to release.

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
And it’s pretty clear what happened to her from the notes that the people who were caring for her made, from the testimony that came out and the police investigation and all those things. So from studying her case what does that make you think of the introspection rundown that maybe you hadn’t thought of before or whatever?

Maureen
You know I haven’t studied the whole thing, like in full but I can say from what I did study I think that this step of isolating people is wrong, especially if there’s no medical professional involved and if it’s totally determined by scientology staff members, especially if the person may not want to be involved in scientology any more. Like me for example, I decided I didn’t want to be involved in scientology in the middle of 1997 and yet I was kept on their compound for years after that. So at that point when a person says, “I don’t want to be in scientology anymore,” they should be able to get rid of that agreement they’ve made to be giving scientologists the right to isolate them.

Jeff
Yeah.

Maureen
But that’s not the case. I mean once you sign that waiver and you’re on the scientology compound they seem to think they have a right to keep you even if you’re not cooperating.

Jeff
Yeah, in Lisa’s case, I think it’s pretty clear that she was planning to go back home to Dallas from Clearwater and maybe not leave scientology altogether but start a different kind of life. Her best friend that she had a phone call with not long before she died mentioned that and then Michael Pattinson has recently said that that’s what she said to him as well. So I think that’s the case also where she was saying, or planning at least, to leave her situation and then was prevented from leaving.

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
You know the thing about scientology that I keep being a critic about is they hurt people. I mean they have this notion that they’re smarter than everybody else. They’re smarter than psychiatrists. They’re smarter than doctors. And yet the results demonstrate that they don’t know what they’re doing even just superficially. I think in Lisa’s case, too, it was the things that they were feeding her were actually hurting her, so they didn’t even know how to feed her correctly.

Maureen
Right

Jeff
You know.

Maureen
Yes. She wasn’t being fed properly. She shouldn’t have been there at all. She shouldn’t have been in that environment where she was so stressed out. I mean being kept in a hotel room without any way of like going for a walk or as far as I know they didn’t even have any books or TV in there either. I mean that would be just, I mean someone could just die from sheer boredom, being stuck in a plain room like that.

Jeff
Well, she was breaking a lot of things. So, you know, they had trouble with her from the beginning. I think she . . . that’s the main difference I can see between her case and your case is that she was, from the moment they took her there, uncooperative to the extreme.

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
You know, she didn’t want to eat. She spit up on them; spit her food at them. She’d break things in the room, you know, on and on and that I think is the main difference there.

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
But I think fortunately the results were at least better in your case.

Maureen
Yeah. I’m glad I’m alive. I mean there were times when I got stressed out and I was throwing things at people and spitting up my food but I at least got away from it. I wasn’t kept in a room and kept at with . . . I mean the people who were antagonizing me didn’t keep antagonizing me, you know.

Jeff
Correct, yeah. DB, do you have any other questions?

DB
No. I’m good.

Jeff
OK. I covered most of what I wrote down, I think. That’s pretty good. Yeah, so I think the main thing that I want to get people to understand today is that this is something that scientology has done from the beginning. They’ve held people in isolation thinking they can run these wacko processes on them to make them better, when all they maybe needed was like Maureen you just said was helped with a food disorder and somebody that knows what they’re doing helps you quickly. And yet scientology thinks that they’re better, and no, they’re going to keep you from these other people because they’re evil and “we’ll run these wacko processes on you instead.” I mean that’s the thing that just drives me crazy because it hurts people and it’s just non-logical, you know.

Maureen
Right. I mean, the last rundown, the last attempt at the rundown, I was actually feeling suicidal. I mean I wasn’t feeling like, “Oh, I’m going to kill myself,” but I sort of lost my will to live. I just didn’t want to eat or anything because the counseling had led me to believe that I was just evil, that I had all these evil intentions and that was behind all of my problems. And so . . . and scientology didn’t help me with any of those; such a horrible case and I was somehow a suppressive and I was badly influencing the people around me. And I’m like (sigh) I’m just a really horrible person so why should I even be alive, you know.

Jeff
Yeah.

Maureen
And that was sort of the state of mind that this type of counseling got me into. That all the pain I was in and all the troubles I was having around me were not because of scientology or because that the rundown was wrong or that the people administering it were doing it wrong. It was because I was a bad person.

Jeff
Yeah.

Maureen
And you know that was the problem that I had and it wasn’t their problem at all.

Jeff
Yeah. The tech is pure so it’s got to be your fault.

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
Yeah.

Maureen
And so it was good for me to finally get out of there and actually get into the real world, where you know, most of my friends and family think I’m a pretty cool person.

Jeff
Yeah, good deal. Well congratulations and welcome back to the real world.

Maureen
Right.

Jeff
And I guess we’ve got about thirty seconds or something to go.

Maureen
Wow.

Jeff
Maureen Bolstad, I want to thank you for today and for clearing up information about the introspection rundown, scientology’s answer to psychiatry, which apparently fails almost every time they use it, so. Thank everybody for listening today. I don’t know when the next show will be. It’ll just be whenever it works out and that we need one. Also I hope someone else likes blog talk radio and stared their own show ‘cause I think it’s a pretty useful tool. So anything else, Maureen before you leave here?

Maureen
No.

Jeff
OK. Well, thanks very much for being the guest today.

Maureen
You’re welcome.

Jeff
We’ll see the rest of you all later on. Thanks for tuning in and talk to you later.

Maureen
Bye.

Tom Cruise (taped with music)
Is that an SP? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!