For me, “look before you leap,” is always the gold standard before jumping onto any organization’s gravy trade. Steven Hassan devotes an entire chapter to this phase of preliminary investigation for those interested into some kind of cult liberation scenario for a friend or family member.
            Now, I was not so fortunate as to be immersed in cult activities during a time when family or friends would be able to mount any kind of intervention. My family, many of which lived in Haiti at the time, neither had the expertise nor the money to afford that kind of approach nor do I believe that most of them realized the extreme danger I was in psychologically because of my association with AMORC.

            I think this kind of evaluation is useful for any cult member or their family or friends, regardless of whether they can embark on a cult rescue effort through the Strategic Interactive Approach advocated by Hassan.  This kind of evaluation is quite potentially complex and comprehensive but I think it might be useful to mention the high points.

            If someone had interviewed me during the first ten years of my involvement with AMORC, perhaps without completely giving away the purpose of the interview, they would have seen someone, at one point, absolutely committed to the rituals, psychic exercises, breathing and sleeping practices of the Rosicrucian group, AMORC, including its relentless, time-consuming reading program. They would soon find that I was extremely fatigued by attempting to work continuously under the aegis of deep poverty and continuing my practices, often laid of night. The investigator would see me as driven, committed and relatively unquestioning about the organization.

            Later on, a shrewd investigator’s profile would undoubtedly contain reports of spontaneous and uncontrollable bursts of anger, irrational swings between hating and loving the organizations, what might appear as a propensity for hallucinogenic experiences, a ridiculous gullibility when it came to accepting the authority of the organization and, yes, even uncontrollable black-outs.

            It would not be well over twenty years that a profile would contain a picture of someone who was now aware of some of the conditions of their imprisonment mentally in the cult and the reasons that Mind Control had made an unassisted exit strategy a difficulty of mammoth proportions. Considering my own situation, you can see why I agree with Hassan that it is important to know exactly how the cult member got into the cult, but also if he was experiencing doubts, fears and various symptoms related to the destruction of his ordinary, normal personality with a ferociously tenacious cult identity. From this information, a cult member profile could be drawn up which would indicate some of the strategic paths to be undertaken to push forward with the process of cult liberation.