There was a time when any small, highly motivated religious group was attacked as a bunch of exploitive mind controllers. But apart from the occasional flak Tom Cruise or Kirstie Alley still get over Scientology, or maybe the negative publicity Madonna and Britney get for having protective red Kabbalistic bracelets, there's not much heard about the cults today. You have to attend a mosque run by a bearded fanatic with nerve gas stored in his basement before the term gets trotted out. It's become highly uncool to badmouth minority religious beliefs. Today, if The Process re-emerged, all the neocons, or at least those who are not hiding their red faces over Iraq and the US' swelling deficit, would leap to defend it.

In the late 1970s and early '80s, there was a significant number of books that came out about the cults of the previous two decades. Even The Process had one (Satan's Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult, by William Sims Bainbridge). People slagged the Moonies (the Unification Church), Osho (Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh and his organisation) and a whole load of much less colourful outfits. Often, it was depressing to find that people had given all their time and money for something so shallow and cliche-riddled, but you couldn't ignore the passion in it all.

The other side of cults is the positive effects they did have. Anyone who joined one was seeking certain things: companionship or understanding, a sense of empowerment, an end to confusion, or whatever energising of life seemed to be on offer. For most recruits, the outcome was mixed, but there was usually a phase of exaltation and fulfilment.

It's a perplexing fact of human life that the patterns each of us carries are with us till we die. Those who claim to have transcended their patterns through will, meditation, counselling or a self-help guru's book are in reality enacting one side of their patterns, not escaping them. We all have times when the power just flows through us, as we have times when it seems wholly absent.

The gift a cultic experience bestows is that it gives us such a time of power. We get a lasting memory of feeling alive and aware, of being strong and beneficent (we are never very beneficent when we are weak) and of sharing in an uplifting passage through life. The mischief comes when this wave subsides, and we simply re-encounter our own shadow side. Suddenly, the guru's bad breath and lechery become too obtrusive, the dishonesty of his or her underlings becomes too obvious, and the everlasting emphasis on money (what cult considers itself rich?) repels us.

This phase needs far more careful digestion. True empowerment involves understanding this process, not denying what it reveals. We have to come to terms with the inflated human foibles and failings of the cult's founders. If we can find a way to accept those, and in turn learn to see our own projections onto these people (who may be very troubled specimens of humanity), then the two or four or ten years we spent in the cult were not wasted.

If we can't reach that point, but repeatedly struggle to move back into the good times, then the cultic passage becomes a crippling one. I doubt there's been much sociological follow-up with people who left their cults twenty or thirty years ago, but their growth (or paralysis) since would be a tale worth the telling.