Having been a willing -- or unwilling, but investigative -- participant in quite a few cults (including the evangelical religious, Asian meditation and human potential types), and having studied the way they operate to the extent of reading all these books through the lens of extensive, post-graduate education in clinical psychology and sociology, may I suggest a fairly typical succession of events in the experience of the member who was not born into the cult, but who joined in late adolescence or pre-middle age adulthood?
Dissatisfaction with life leads to a...
Predisposition to appeal & seduction, which leads to being...
Ripe for recruitment and attachment, which leads to...
Euphoric belonging in the "honeymoon phase" and...
Distracting (or even dissociative) addiction, which opens the door to...
Acceptance of new values & ideals, and then...
Conditioning of cult-serving, controlled behaviors, leading to...
Unquestioning belief & energetic evangelism, leading to...
Obsessive involvement & investment, leading to...
Loss of self and complete identification with the cult, as well as
Exploitability and deployability, leading to...
Righteously suffering for "The Cause," resulting in...
Mental & physical burnout... often along with financial poverty.
The model here is typical of the human potential, large group awareness, radical political, and Asian-style meditation cults listed in this article with little (if any) functional variation. The models typical of the evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic, pseudo-Christian and Jewish, as well as multi-level marketing, criminal street gang and terrorist cults vary somewhat from the model above in select ways, but are essentially similar. The pseudo-Christian cults, for example, tend to manipulate the pre-conditioned Learned Helplessness & Victim Identity with "wrath of god," "don't get left out on the day of reckoning" and other anxiety-inducing Emotional Blackmail messages to an extent not (usually) as forcefully utilized by the other cult types. All cults use "prospect qualification" maneuvers to see how far members will be allowed to climb up the side of their Cultic Pyramids.
Resources: Abgrall, Atack, Conway & Siegleman, Cushman, Galanter, Hassan (both), Meerlo (1956), Ofshe (2000), Ross, Sargant, Singer (1995), Stein, Taylor, and Tobias & Lalich in A Basic Cult Library
See also:
Cult Membership as an Addiction Process... and a Process Addiction
After Effects of Being Groomed into Learned Helplessness
A Free online BOOK on How Cults Work
How Cults use Benign Portals to Seduce new Recruits in my reply to the OP on that thread
Sargant, Wesley & the Evangelical Method
Why is the "cult playbook" so ubiquitous? in both the OP and ProcessFiend's reply thereto
