Ashleigh Freckleton

And I was physically pinching myself, going, am I in a dream?

This feels too horrible, too confusing to be real.

I must be in a nightmare.

And I was just pacing the city and I went and sat with a view of the Eiffel Tower and it was just so surreal.

I was like...

Here I am in Paris.

This doesn't feel real to me.

And I just wanted someone I knew to kind of walk along the street and just see me and, like, pull me out of the lie, pull me out of this nightmare.

And eventually I just made a snap decision to book a one-way flight back to Australia and got on that flight and...

Not immediately.

I took a month or so just back at my parents' house and I didn't work.

I was just trying to

collect myself I had to lie to everybody and tell them that I had gone to a retreat in Denmark because they have a retreat center there so I'm going on a silent retreat which was something I had done before with the school I'd gone and done a silent retreat turned my phone off for a week and I wasn't reachable and I said yeah I came home I just you know I just wasn't feeling it I just kind of started to feel a bit overwhelmed with it all and yeah I just gave them a very vague response for why I came home

And then I was quietly in my own time doing lots of reading about cults and coercion and human trafficking and just basically gathering as much information as I could and trying to make sense of what happened.

But I was initially too scared to talk about it because I was afraid to break the vows because we'd made these vows on the Bible, on our health and our spiritual evolution.

And

if you believe that you're working with energy and if you believe in the weight and the power of the words that we say and the weight of that, then I was scared to break those vows.

I was scared of what would happen to me if I had told people what had happened.

Yeah, exactly.

And I was, you know, it was really, it's really hard to make sense of what's going on when you can't talk to anyone about it.