Catherine Coldstream, a former Carmelite nun, says she fled her monastery because she feared the pressures of its highly controlled life would break her psychologically. Her account, published alongside her memoir *Cloistered: My Years as a Nun*, offers an insight into the demands of a contemplative religious order and the personal cost she says it imposed.

After her father died when she was 24, Coldstream joined a rural northern England monastery and spent 12 years there, following a regime of silence, prayer, work and obedience beginning at 5.15am. She says emotional coldness and deliberate humiliations left younger nuns vulnerable to breakdowns; she briefly ran away, returned for two years, then left formally and later studied theology at Oxford. She recalls both missing the intensity of monastic life and valuing the freedom and fuller life she found outside it.