The research, honestly

Why a healer has a citations page

Because the alternative is asking you to take my word for it, and you have no reason to. This field has a serious credibility problem, and it's largely self-inflicted: vague appeals to "quantum energy," borrowed scientific vocabulary used decoratively, and studies cited by name but never actually described. It's very easy to sound evidence-based and very hard to be it.

So here is my rule. Anywhere on this site I invoke research, you'll find the actual authors, the actual journal, the actual year, and an honest sentence about what the study measured. Where the evidence runs out, I say so rather than reaching for a metaphor.

1. The practitioner relationship

The single most consistent finding in the psychotherapy literature is that the quality of the working relationship between practitioner and client predicts outcomes — and that it does so across wildly different treatment approaches. The 2018 meta-analytic synthesis by Flückiger and colleagues pooled more than 300 studies and found a modest but highly reliable association between alliance and outcome, stable across methods, settings and measurement approaches.

2. Slow, paced breathing

Breathing at roughly six breaths per minute — near what researchers call the resonance frequency of the cardiovascular system — reliably increases heart rate variability and indices of vagal activity. Lehrer and Gevirtz's 2014 review lays out the proposed mechanism; Zaccaro and colleagues' 2018 systematic review pulled together the psychophysiological and neuroimaging work and found consistent associations with reduced arousal and self-reported anxiety.

The box-breathing exercise on the home page runs at four seconds per phase, which works out to 3.75 breaths a minute — slower still. It's the most evidence-backed thing on this entire website, and it's free.

3. Ritual

Brooks and colleagues (2016) ran a set of experiments in which participants performed a short, arbitrary sequence of actions before a stressful task — singing in public, or a maths test. Those who performed the ritual reported less anxiety and, in the physiological measures, showed lower arousal than controls. Critically, the effect appeared even when participants were not told the sequence was a "ritual," and among people who did not believe it would help. Norton and Gino (2014) found related effects for rituals performed after losses, including the loss of a relationship or a lottery prize.

4. Context, expectation and the open-label placebo

The Harvard Program in Placebo Studies ran a now well-known three-arm trial in irritable bowel syndrome: no treatment, sham acupuncture alone, or the same sham acupuncture delivered by a practitioner instructed to be warm, attentive and unhurried. The third arm did substantially better than the second. Later work by the same group tested "open-label" placebos — where patients were explicitly told the pills were inert — and still found benefit over no treatment.

This is the most interesting literature on this page, and also the most misused. It does not mean "it's all placebo, so anything works." It means that the relational and contextual parts of a healing encounter produce measurable effects that are not reducible to deception.

5. Affect labelling

Lieberman and colleagues (2007) found that putting feelings into words was associated with reduced amygdala response and increased activity in regions involved in regulation. A large follow-up literature, summarised by Torre and Lieberman (2018), supports affect labelling as a form of implicit emotion regulation — with the caveat that effect sizes vary and the mechanism is still debated.

Practically: a meaningful portion of any session is you saying the thing out loud, sometimes for the first time, to somebody who doesn't flinch and doesn't rush to fix it. That's not filler.

6. Awe

Piff and colleagues (2015) found that experimentally induced awe reduced self-focus and increased prosocial behaviour. Stellar and colleagues (2015) reported an association between dispositional positive emotions — awe most strongly among them — and lower levels of the inflammatory marker IL-6.

Where the evidence stops

Completely, and I want to be blunt about it:

• There are no randomised controlled trials of soul retrieval.
• There are no randomised controlled trials of spirit releasement.
• There is no measurement instrument that detects what I am describing when I describe it.
• The anthropological literature on shamanic practice is rich and serious, but it studies these traditions as human culture — it does not test their claims about the world.

What I do in a session rests on my own practice, my own experience, and my own belief. Those are not nothing, but they aren't evidence in the sense this page has been using the word, and I'm not going to blur the two to make a sale.

If you're a skeptic

Then you're in good company, and you're welcome. Here is a version of this you may find easier to accept: you would be booking ninety uninterrupted minutes of paced breathing, structured ritual and undivided attention from someone who is fully present with you and has no agenda beyond your wellbeing. Every one of those components has an evidence base. Whether anything else is going on is a question you're entitled to leave open.

I've never once needed a client to agree with me about the mechanism.

Full source list

1. Flückiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., & Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 316–340.
2. Lehrer, P. M., & Gevirtz, R. (2014). Heart rate variability biofeedback: How and why does it work? Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 756.
3. Zaccaro, A., et al. (2018). How breath-control can change your life: A systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 353.
4. Brooks, A. W., Schroeder, J., Risen, J. L., Gino, F., Galinsky, A. D., Norton, M. I., & Schweitzer, M. E. (2016). Don't stop believing: Rituals improve performance by decreasing anxiety. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 137, 71–85.
5. Norton, M. I., & Gino, F. (2014). Rituals alleviate grieving for loved ones, lovers, and lotteries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 266–272.
6. Kaptchuk, T. J., et al. (2008). Components of placebo effect: Randomised controlled trial in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. BMJ, 336(7651), 999–1003.
7. Kaptchuk, T. J., et al. (2010). Placebos without deception: A randomized controlled trial in irritable bowel syndrome. PLoS ONE, 5(12), e15591.
8. Kaptchuk, T. J., & Miller, F. G. (2015). Placebo effects in medicine. New England Journal of Medicine, 373(1), 8–9.
9. Lieberman, M. D., et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.
10. Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116–124.
11. Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2015). Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(6), 883–899.
12. Stellar, J. E., et al. (2015). Positive affect and markers of inflammation: Discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatory cytokines. Emotion, 15(2), 129–133.