For Professionals

Most professional training
didn't cover this.

Spiritually transformative experiences are more common in clinical and research populations than most training programs acknowledge. This site was built to be useful to the professionals encountering them, whether in a therapy room, a research lab, or a classroom.

The gap

A significant phenomenon, largely unprepared for

30–40%
of adults report at least one profound non-ordinary experience in their lifetime, on population surveys by Gallup and the International Social Survey Programme. That makes it one of the more common significant life events a clinician's clients may have had.
Rarely disclosed
The vast majority never tell a mental health professional about these experiences, fearing dismissal, pathologizing, or simply having no language to describe what happened.
people
studied here, across long-form interviews, each one read independently by two readers working from a single written rulebook.

The clinical and research infrastructure for spiritually transformative experiences is still being built. The DSM includes V62.89 (Religious or Spiritual Problem) but it's substantially underutilized. The literature is growing but fragmented. And most graduate training in psychology and psychiatry gives these experiences little to no attention, despite their frequency and the significant impact they have on the people who have them.

The result is a professional gap that shows up concretely: clients who can't find language for what happened, clinicians who aren't sure how to respond, and researchers working with small samples because large first-hand datasets are hard to come by. This site doesn't close that gap, but it's a contribution to the growing body of work that is.

What this offers

Depending on your role

For Clinicians
A picture of what clients may be navigating

The people studied here span the full range of spiritually transformative experience, from gradual awakenings through years of practice, to sudden and unexpected shifts with no prior context. The data gives clinicians a detailed picture of what clients describe, in their own words, across what the experience was like, what the body did, what was hard afterwards, and what helped.

  • The categories of experience, with the language clients typically use
  • What the body did (energy, sleep, sudden release of emotion), and how often
  • What was hard afterwards, what makes life more difficult following an awakening, and for how long
  • What helped people settle, and what they said made things worse
  • Clinical frameworks for differential assessment, including STE vs. psychosis
  • Referral resources and professional networks specializing in this population
For Researchers
A documented collection, read twice

The collection was built with research utility in mind: the same written definitions applied to every one of the interviews, a second independent reader working from a byte-identical rulebook, and public documentation of every methodological decision. Reporting what both readers recorded and what only one of them did makes the disagreement visible rather than hiding it inside a single point estimate.

  • Full methodology: source selection, screening, the coding pipeline, and how it was validated
  • How common each feature is across five dimensions: the experience, what set it off, the body, what was hard afterwards, and what helped
  • Agreement between the two readers, reported per feature with an interval, including the of features that clear the conventional bar
  • Honest accounting of limitations: who ends up in an interview archive, English only, and a hand-checked error rate
  • A replicable framework for systematic analysis of qualitative first-hand accounts
Mental health professionals
For Clinicians
Clinical orientation for therapists, psychiatrists, and counselors, what STEs are, how to recognize them, how to differentiate from pathology, and how to support integration.
For Clinicians →
Academics & researchers
For Researchers
Methodology, data access, and documentation for researchers studying spiritually transformative experiences, including full transparency on how the accounts were read and what the method cannot show.
For Researchers →

The independent researcher behind this site, Andy Johns, is available for conversation with clinicians and researchers who want to discuss the collection, the methodology, or the broader landscape of professional work in this area. If you're building something in this space, or working with a population where these experiences are showing up, he'd be glad to hear from you.

Get in touch →