In Scientology, the true reason has been found for sudden and unexplained departures from jobs, families, locations and areas. These departures are called blow-offs.

This is one of the things Man thought he knew all about and therefore never really looked into. Yet this gave him the most trouble. Man felt it had all been explained, but his explanations did not decrease the amount of trouble that came from the feeling of “having to leave.”

For example, Man has been frantic about the high divorce rate, about the high job turnover in factories and many other things resulting from sudden or unexplained departures.

We see a person who has a good job, who probably won’t get a better one, suddenly deciding to leave and going. We see a wife, with a perfectly good husband and family, leaving it all. Or a husband, with a perfectly good wife, breaking up with her and departing for no logical reason.

Man explained this to himself by saying that so many bad things were done to him and he could no longer put up with such suffering, so he had to leave. But if this was true, all Man would have to do would be to make working conditions, marriages, jobs, training programs and so on all very excellent and the problem would be solved. However, a close look at working conditions and marriages shows that improvement of conditions often increases the amount of blow-offs.

You can treat people so well that they grow ashamed of themselves (knowing they don’t deserve it), so they feel they have to leave. On the other hand, you can treat people so badly that they have no choice but to leave. But treating people so good or so bad that they are forced to leave still does not answer why so many people leave their job or marriage. For example, a wife is doing her best to make a marriage and the husband suddenly wanders off to be with another woman. Or a manager is trying to keep the business running and the worker just leaves without saying why he departed. These unexplained departures destroy organizations and lives and it is time we understood them.

PEOPLE LEAVE BECAUSE OF THEIR OWN OVERTS AND WITHHOLDS.

That is the fact. A man with a clean heart—who knows he has done right actions and is honest—cannot be hurt. The person who says bad things were done to him and then departs from his marriage or job is departing because of his own overts and withholds. It doesn’t matter whether the person is departing from a family, a marriage, a town or a job. The cause is the same—overts and withholds.

Almost anyone can solve a problem or correct a bad scene if he really wants to. But when the person no longer wants to correct it, it is his own overt acts and withholds that have lowered his ability to do something about it, which makes leaving seem like the only possible answer. To make excuses for his departure, the person who is leaving dreams up things done to him. To make his overts seem smaller, he also will say bad things about those persons he has harmed.

When a person threatens to leave a town, marriage, job or training program, the only kind thing to do is to have him disclose his overt acts and withholds. Otherwise the person ends up leaving, falsely feeling that he has been harmed, but he’s actually feeling bad about himself and his own actions.

It is amazing how small, unimportant overts will cause a person to suddenly leave.

When a person believes he can’t stop himself from injuring someone who has helped him, he will defend that person by leaving. This is the real cause of the blow-off. Therefore if you were to improve a person’s working conditions, you would make his overts seem worse to him, so it will then be more certain that he will leave.

The answer to this problem is to use Scientology procedures to move the person up to a high enough level of responsibility where he can take a job and carry it out without all the weird ideas of “I’ve got to say you are doing things to me so I can leave and protect you from all the bad things I am doing to you.”

That’s the way it is and now that we know the basis of this problem, we can do something about it.