The research
Ten years working with Dr Terence Palmer
From 2011, a working partnership between an academic who wanted to investigate this material properly and a practitioner who had been doing it for years. What came out of it is the protocol every remote session on this site still follows.
Two paths met. He brought the academic and research background. I brought the practical experience.
What made Terry unusual was that he wanted to investigate these experiences rather than ask people to believe in them. That is rarer in this field than it should be, and it is the reason the work stood up.
We did not agree on everything, and that was part of the value of working together.
Who he is
Dr Terence Palmer holds a doctorate from Bangor University, completed in 2012. His thesis was titled “A Revised Epistemology for an Understanding of Spirit Release Therapy Developed in Accordance with the Conceptual Framework of F. W. H. Myers”.
His academic work spans spirit release therapy, psychology, hypnosis, dissociation, possession and psychical research. In 2014 he presented Telepathic Hypnosis, The Neglected Concept to the Society for Psychical Research.
How the work was structured
This is the part people find most surprising, because it is the opposite of how psychic work is usually described.
The method was never about a practitioner deciding what was present and then attempting to remove it. That approach is unfalsifiable. The practitioner asserts, the client cannot check, and nothing is learned. Instead the Remote Spirit Release protocol splits the job across three roles:
The facilitator
Holds conscious oversight of the session, directs the questioning, and keeps the structure. This is my role.
The medium or scanner
Works in an altered state and reports what they perceive, without being told what to look for.
The spirit guide
Provides the guidance the other two are working from. For me, that is Chen.
Separating those roles is what makes the work checkable. The person perceiving is not the person directing, so the perception cannot simply be shaped to fit what the facilitator already expects to find.
The case record
Terry built a structured recording system that kept four things apart: confidential client information, the presenting symptoms, the method of intervention used, and the remedy and outcome. Interventions were classified by type: intuitive, interactive, direct interactive, remote and group, and cases were examined across mental, emotional, behavioural and physical categories.
That sounds dry. It is the single most important thing about the whole decade, because it means there is a body of evidence rather than a collection of anecdotes.
What else we looked at
- Auditory hallucinations and hearing voices, where the medical explanation ends and something else may begin. This is the subject I am most careful about, and there is a whole page on it.
- Earthbound spirits: people who died and did not move on.
- Survival of consciousness: the question underneath all of it.
- Psychological versus spiritual explanations of unusual experience, and how to tell them apart honestly.
A timeline
- 2008: Chen begins working with me
- 2011: the collaboration with Terry begins
- 2012: Terry completes his PhD thesis at Bangor University
- 2014: he presents Telepathic Hypnosis, The Neglected Concept to the Society for Psychical Research
- 2019: he presents an overview of Remote Spirit Release covering 472 cases
- After 2019: the work continues with additional mediums; the case record passes 1,000
What this does and doesn’t prove
I want to be careful here, because overclaiming is the disease of this industry.
A decade of structured case recording is not a clinical trial. It has not been through the kind of peer review a drug goes through, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What it is: a documented, repeatable method, examined over ten years by an academic with a doctorate in the subject and no financial reason to flatter me.
That is a good deal more than most of this field can show you, and a good deal less than proof. Both of those things are true at once, and you should weigh them yourself.
The protocol is now taught through the Spirit Release Academy, which is the point. It was always meant to outlive the people who built it.
Also worth reading
The Science of Spirit Possession
Terry’s book, to which I contributed. If you want the academic treatment of this subject rather than mine, that is where to go. It is considerably more rigorous and considerably less comfortable than most writing in this area.
If you have read this page and want to learn the method rather than have it done to you, the Academy training pathway is where it is taught.
