| «"Emotionally and mentally I went through quite a trauma adjusting to
the outside world," says Anne
Rosenblum, 25, a seven-year church member who left in September 1978
and now lives in California. IT TOOK ABOUT two months and a lot of "TLC" (tender loving care) by
her parents, Ms. Rosenblum says, for her to "come out of the daze I was
in."
"I was 23 years old," she recalls, "and I didn't know anything about
opening a personal checking account, taxes, investments, buying a car,
shopping, Social Security (that was a word I heard that had something to
do with retirement).
"Watergate was something that I remembered hearing about, but I only
had a vague impression that the President was impeached or resigned
because of something he did to the Democratic Party."
Ms. Rosenblum says she experienced a mental "void" after leaving the
church, "where everything you believe in all of a sudden vanishes, and
it leaves you with nothing to hold onto."
"It is a very strange feeling," she said. "I went through a long
period where I simply didn't believe anything — TV, books, newspapers,
etc. I didn't believe because, if I had been so wrong before, how could
I trust myself again to believe anything was right?"
THE MASS SUICIDES of 900 followers of Rev. Jim Jones in Guyana in
November 1978 came a month after Ms. Rosenblum left the church. That
sealed her determination to stay out of Scientology, she says.
"I realized that if at any point LRH (church founder L. Ron Hubbard)
had handed me a glass of poison and told me to drink it, I would have,
with no questions asked and no second thoughts," she says.»
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