The Church of Scientology helped Tom Cruise beat dyslexia.

At age seven, the 46-year-old acting vet was diagnosed with the language-based learning disability that can include problems in reading, spelling, writing, and pronouncing words.

Tom says it was not until he discovered the teachings of the controversial faith that the condition began to dissipate.

“I asked myself if I was normal or an idiot. I would try to concentrate but I felt anxiety, frustration, boredom. When I graduated from high school in 1980 I was functionally illiterate,” he told XL Semanal, the weekly magazine supplement of daily Spanish newspaper ABC .

“Nobody gave me a solution and I wanted to know why the system had failed. Finally, as an adult I learned to read perfectly through the method of [Scientology's late founder] L. Ron Hubbard.”