life after leaving a cult

By Sophie Hanson

At the end of every year, the church Bek Condello grew up in ran a Christmas camp where kids from different congregations would come together. It’s one of the only fond memories she has of her childhood. Most years, though, she’d arrive to find that someone was missing. Someone she’d spent the previous camp with, gone. A friend she used to write to just stopped replying. The children didn’t talk about it; they weren’t allowed to. You were “never allowed to mourn people who left because why would you? They’re going to burn in hell, they turned their back on God, you can’t be sad about it,” she says. “I don’t know a lot of people who’ve physically died in my life,” Bek reflects now, “but I feel like I’ve lost hundreds of people.”

Bek spent 27 years inside the church, a doomsday Pentecostal community known as the Geelong Revival Centre (GRC), which has been the subject of a Victorian parliamentary inquiry into coercive control and abuse in cults and organised fringe groups (leader Brian Griggs has denied such allegations to the ABC). Her memoir, Can You Handle A Girl Like Me? — out now through Penguin — retells the trauma of her childhood, but more importantly, focuses on what came after: the slow, often brutal work of learning to trust, to date, and to live as an adult on her own terms.

cont’d below…

from the desk of junkee editor-in-chief soph, here’s my media diet this week.

watch: insidious: out of the further (in cinemas aug 20) | gemma just wanted to raise her kid in the house she grew up in, not become the further’s unofficial demon courier. we’ve spent five movies watching characters fight the shit going on behind the red door, but what happens when those horrors come to find us?? OH and elise rainier’s back. group chat, opening week, absolutely mandatory.

play: magic the gathering: the hobbit | i really got into mtg during covid as a way of like… getting away from screens, and hadn’t dabbled much since. i’m trying to pick up analogue hobbies again and have become a lil bit obsessed with this card game. what timing because they just released this precious (heh) collaboration with the hobbit, featuring absolutely stunning artwork by ethan fleischer and his team.

“It’s been a trip,” Bek says, of the month since the book dropped. She’d been braced for exposure, but not for the specific strangeness of it — random strangers recognising her from the news, her gynaecologist asking why her name sounded familiar. After her first press interview ran, she says she had “a mini meltdown” and nearly called her publisher to pull out of other opportunities entirely. “It wasn’t even about my story,” she says. “It was more just not knowing who was going to suddenly have access to me.” It’s worlds apart from her sheltered upbringing.

Bek was homeschooled until she was 10 (not the church’s doing, she adds, but an additional level of control wielded by her mother). There was no TV to watch cartoons on, and when she finally did attend school, she wasn’t permitted to go on sleepovers or attend formals with her peers. She remembers owning a Hottest 100 CD once: her mother snapped it in half because it had ‘Californication’ by the Red Hot Chili Peppers on it.

Through her mum and the GRC's philosophy, impossibly high standards for women were established at an early age. Proverbs 31 was often recited, describing “the virtuous woman” who was judged entirely on her exhaustive service to others, her obedience, and “praised for her fear of the Lord.”

“As kids, we were taught to be so small and compliant, never question adults,” Bek says. Later in life, this messaging was repurposed as instructions for the obedient wife. When she finally left the church 27 years ago, and her marriage at age 32, no one in her family or community spoke to her directly about it; they communicated only through her ex-husband. “I have such a visceral, lived experience of feminism now,” she says. “It’s not abstract.”

I was curious how she felt about the tradwife movement, and Bek, like me, has a complicated view of it. “Obviously a huge part of feminism is women being able to choose their own path,” she acknowledges, but the representation of traditional gender roles hits a nerve. “That’s all I got told I could be — a wife and mother.” She notes the well-documented pattern of these movements gaining traction whenever women make gains economically or socially elsewhere. “It’s not a coincidence,” she says.

Bek was pulled out of school at 17. “Why would I need an education, as a girl?” she says. Men in the community were steered toward blue-collar work rather than careers — nothing wrong with that kind of work itself, she’s careful to note, but the discouragement of higher learning wasn’t incidental. “God’s going to return any day now. What do you need to be going out on a career trajectory for?” Keeping people under-educated, she says, was one method of control.

Lately, Bek’s been watching the Apple TV series Silo, which is about generations of people living underground sold on a story none of them think to question, and sees her own upbringing reflected back at her. “Generation after generation is telling the next generation something, and the initial amount of control doesn’t even have to happen anymore, because it’s so insidious,” she says. “It’s almost just the expected way of living.”

That’s the thing about so many of these groups, especially if that’s how you were raised. You tend not to see it as coercion because you were never shown an alternative. You don’t know what you don’t know, you know? Bek agrees. “People ask, ‘Did you ask questions?’” she says. “Yeah — but you can only ask questions you know are potential questions.” It wasn’t until much later that she stopped to properly interrogate the basics, like how the church didn’t believe in medical treatment; illness was meant to be resolved through prayer alone. “I don’t remember anyone being healed of cancer. Or growing a leg back,” she says.

As she recounts in her book, control wielded by those in the church was also through violence and fear. Her father physically abused her as a child, and later left the church himself once it stopped serving him, leaving her and her mother behind. He’s also never taken ownership of his decision to bring them into the GRC in the first place, or his treatment of her. She acknowledges that he likely carries his own inherited trauma, but she’s unwilling to let that stand in as an excuse. “I’ve consciously made decisions to become a better person,” she says. “As humans, we have that responsibility.”

Bek has a theory about why men so rarely reach that same point of accountability. “No one really questions them. They’re at the top of the food chain,” she says. “Men don’t listen to other women. They listen to other men. And men aren’t calling each other out.” It’s a case she’s made directly to her own male friends, and one she sees echoed in the comment sections of social media, where men periodically frame themselves as the wronged party, or that those touting toxic masculinity don’t represent them. “Maybe ask yourself why women hate men,” she says, “instead of just going, ‘Poor me, I’m a good guy.’”

As for her mother, she’s still inside the GRC. She’d be in her 60s now, having joined as a teenager, with — in Bek’s view — little waiting for her on the outside. People sometimes suggest that her mother must secretly be proud of the book, but she doesn’t accept that. “She would be so deeply ashamed of me,” Bek says. She reads her mother’s devotion less as faith than as a need for certainty and a higher purpose. “By not talking to me, she’s going to heaven. If she talks to me, she might not.”

Bek had spent her whole life being told she was too much: too curious, too naughty, too lazy, too… whatever the accusation required. So against this backdrop, the book’s title makes perfect sense. Dating and building friendships for the first time in her 30s, she kept running into people with “very limited world life perspectives” and kept assuming, out of old habit, that she was the one at fault. Working out that she wasn’t took years. “There was something really empowering for me to be like, ‘Actually, no — can you guys handle it?’ I know who I am. I’ve walked through fire to get here.”

The acknowledgements of her memoir paint a hopeful future, and Bek gives thanks to the sprawling chosen family she’s built to replace the one she lost. It’s only in the last 12 months, she says, that she’s experienced something close to unconditional, familial love with a couple in their late 50s she met while travelling in Mexico.

They insisted on paying whenever they went to dinner, and didn’t love her any less on the days she showed up feeling low. “I just learned to wear so many masks to make other people feel comfortable,” she says. “That was the first time I’d experienced love where I didn’t have to perform.”