Part VIII:The Beginnings of Idenics

With this new form of processing, John discovered that much of the creative processing was unnecessary, and only a small portion of it was incorporated into this new format. Additionally, our perspective on the necessity of the bridge began to change with John's breakthroughs. If Hubbard's formation of the bridge had been based on an incorrect "why" regarding gradients, then how much of that bridge was now necessary? We would soon have an opportunity to get this question answered.

Our initial clients were people who had completed OT 7 or Advanced Level 7. But as the word of our successes got out, we had individuals who had not completed the existing bridge who wanted to receive our new service. The first of these people were clients who were on their NOTs but not yet finished. In fact, two of these NOTs clients had stalled, stuck in a NOTs case phemonenon called, "over-restimulation". People had serious upset and overwhelm in this state, and the NOTs handling for such cases was extremely delicate. Before being taken into session, the person had to de-stimulate. Only then was he taken into session and carefully run on certain NOTs processes.

We had not yet coined the name "Idenics", and simply called what we were doing, "identity processing". Even though it was still in a very rudimentary state, we decided to try this new processing on these NOTs-restim cases. Within a couple of hours of identity processing not only was the "over-restimulation" handled, but also there was no more NOTs-type phenomena to be addressed! Similar, fast results were accomplished on other people in the middle of their NOTs.

Next, we started getting clients in the "non-interference zone" coming to us for our service. These were people between Clear and OT3. It was called the "non-interference zone" because the only major actions permitted by Scientology tech on these people were OT 1, 2 or 3. According to the tech, such cases would be messed up if handled otherwise. However, processing these people with our identity processing produced the same fast, high-quality results as we had gotten with those clients who had completed OT 3.

When we started getting the same magnitude of results working with individuals who had only done part of their lower bridge and people never having had any Scientology auditing, we began to realize the scope of John's breakthroughs and discoveries. In looking for a "next step", John had actually come up with something that "undercut" the entire Scientology bridge.

During most of the period between 1985 and 1987 when John was delivering creative processing and developing identity processing, the rest of our technical staff was still delivering other services. While our new service was still in its' development stages, John was not yet able to do the necessary codifying with his research to properly train others in what he was doing. As my attention was primarily on John's work, most of the other technical staff became disillusioned and left Survival Services. Without the additional delivery I had to let all but one of my administrative personnel go.

When the development of John's work made the delivery of other forms of processing obsolete, I felt that it was no longer ethical to continue to deliver anything but identity processing. In an effort to maintain the viability of the company, John wrote up what he could on his new techniques and trained the few technical people who had remained. However, this training was ineffective.

To a large extent, John was still improvising in the sessions he was delivering, and coming up with questions as he worked with clients. Even though the other practitioners had years of experience working with people, they were not able to achieve the same kind of end products as John was getting. Obviously, there were things that John did in session that the other practitioners were not doing, but we were not yet able to discover what these actions were.

Unable to get the quality of results John was accomplishing, the other practitioners started reverting back to old techniques with their clients. When these clients started complaining, the practitioners became frustrated and quit. Survival Services staff was now only John, one other administrative person and me.

This was a very difficult time financially for Survival Services. Not only did we have just one person delivering service, but also the identity processing worked so fast and effectively that individuals didn't need too many hours to achieve their desired results. To be viable, we had to have a volume of clients coming for service. But getting the volume also presented its difficulties. Identity processing was so new that we hadn't yet had enough clients to produce a large enough word of mouth. Additionally, promoting our service was difficult, as I had not yet developed an effective way to communicate what we were doing to others.

Aside from the financial problems, this research and development period was very exciting. The clients we were getting were doing extremely well. As John's guinea pig, I was receiving a lot of processing and handling things that I'd never been able to handle on the bridge. John's development of the subject was progressing well. And, I was learning all I could about identity processing.

Unlike what many other groups in the independent field were doing, our work was not a re-hash of Dianetics and Scientology. Ours was a new subject that had evolved out of our earlier knowledge and experience. But the name "identity processing" was very limiting, as it seemed to only connote some kind of auditing rundown. Feeling that we needed a better name, we racked our brains trying to come up with a proper designation. Finally, a client coming out of session with John made a suggestion that really grabbed our attention. With a minor adjustment in the spelling, we finally had a name for our subject: IDENICS.

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