Blog: Selectively Numbing and Thought Stopping - 2012-07-26
Selectively Numbing and Thought Stopping July 26, 2012,
At chapter ten in What Is Wrong With Scientology?, I discuss the thought stopping process that Scientologists are conditioned to engage in. I have subsequently recognized a couple more insidious by-products of that thought stopping process. They might in fact explain the substantial 'decompression' process period corporate Scientologists seem to need to feel human again. I got to thinking about this after viewing an extraordinary talk that a friend sent me the link to. It was given by Dr. Brene Brown, research professor of Sociology at the University of Houston. I highly recommend you watch and listen to this in full when you have got 21 minutes to spare:
In order to acceptably thought-stop in corporate Scientology, don't we also stop (or numb) our emotions? I think Brown is right that people cannot selectively numb emotion. Instead, they numb themselves so as to wall off, or not-is, emotion. After engaging in the process enough we make ourselves incapable of experiencing spontaneous - and appropriate - emotion. Perhaps the same mechanism occurs with thought.
In either event, I think - irony or ironies - that Scientology communication training routines (including mood drills) do wonders in rehabilitating the damage done by years of thought-stopping and emotion-numbing within corporate Scientology. That is, when they are done as they were originally designed to be practiced. And that is, as a fun, decidedly unserious, activity.