Joseph Nicolosi Jr. contends in a new paper that recent research provides scientific support for psychotherapy that may change unwanted sexual attractions. He points to experiments involving memory, sexual fantasy, arousal, mindfulness and trauma treatment, and proposes neuroscience—particularly memory reconsolidation—as an explanation for how such changes might occur.
New research: “Bioethical guidelines of sexual-attraction change in psychotherapy,” by Joseph Nicolosi Jr., in The New Bioethics, 28 Aug 2026.
It sounds like an important new scientific case for sexual orientation change efforts, commonly called conversion therapy. But look closely at the studies Nicolosi cites and a problem emerges: Much of the research didn’t actually study sexual orientation change.
The sexual orientation change movement’s terminology has changed. Its problem with the evidence has not.
Does SAFE-T or Reintegrative Therapy Change Sexual Orientation?
The central problem with Nicolosi’s argument is that he treats several different things as though they were interchangeable:
- changing how someone reacts to a sexual memory
- changing arousal to a particular sexual fantasy, and
- changing the sex to which someone is attracted
Evidence for the first two does not establish the third.
Consider a 2024 experiment by Nicolosi and Jacek Szanduła. The researchers asked 144 participants to recall two unwanted sexually arousing memories. Participants then underwent one of three eight-minute interventions involving breathing, blinking or bilateral stimulation, or a placebo procedure.
The results were real enough: Participants receiving the experimental interventions subsequently described those memories as less vivid, emotional and arousing, with effects persisting at follow-up.
But nobody’s sexual orientation was measured before and after treatment. The researchers (including Nicolosi himself) did not demonstrate that gay participants became more heterosexual, heterosexual participants became less heterosexual, or bisexual participants shifted in either direction. Nicolosi and Szanduła’s own published conclusion is considerably narrower: their procedures reduced the arousability, vividness and emotional intensity of unwanted sexual memories.
Yet Nicolosi now presents this experiment as part of an emerging body of evidence that therapy can change sexual attractions.
Changing a Sexual Fantasy Is Not Changing Sexual Orientation
Other studies undergo a similar transformation in Nicolosi’s retelling.
A 2018 experiment by Ross Bartels, Leigh Harkins, Samantha Harrison, Nikki Beard and Anthony Beech found that performing eye movements while imagining a sexual fantasy could make that fantasy less vivid and arousing. A 2023 study by Andrew Allen, Nadine McKillop, Mary Katsikitis and Prudence Millear similarly examined whether eye movements could weaken sexual fantasies, including participants’ intentions to act upon them.
These are potentially useful findings. But neither experiment demonstrated a change in sexual orientation. Making a fantasy less vivid is not the same thing as changing whom someone is attracted to. But curiously, dulling fantasies does potentially make counseling clients lonelier, less inspired, and more discouraged.
Nicolosi’s new study also counts a 2013 report by Christopher Cornine as evidence. But Cornine’s paper was a case study of one 40-year-old man receiving EMDR for a complicated history involving childhood abuse, depression, anxiety, shame and “sexual confusion.” A single clinical case cannot establish that a treatment changes sexual orientation.
Counting it alongside controlled experiments to arrive at Nicolosi’s total of “281 participants” gives that number more scientific weight than it deserves.
A Mindfulness Study Actually Undercuts Nicolosi’s Argument
The case becomes stranger with a 2020 brain-imaging study by Janna Dickenson, Lisa Diamond, Jace King, Kay Jenson and Jeffrey Anderson.
Nicolosi cites the experiment as evidence that mindfulness produced spontaneous changes in sexual attraction among predominantly heterosexual women.
That is not what the researchers concluded.
Their experiment examined how mindful attention affected heterosexual women’s responses to sexual images. Attention increased their reported arousal to images matching their orientation and decreased their reported arousal to images that did not.
Far from demonstrating voluntary sexual-orientation change, Dickenson and her colleagues concluded that sexual orientation appeared to be maintained by differences in attention that “cannot be voluntarily altered.” They specifically warned that changes or flexibility in sexual orientation should not be confused with voluntary control.
That makes this an exceptionally odd study to cite in support of a therapy intended to help clients experience changes in sexual attraction.
The Main SAFE-T Study Cannot Show That Therapy Caused the Change
The strongest apparent evidence Nicolosi cites is a 2021 study by Carolyn Pela and Philip Sutton, which followed 75 men receiving SAFE-T and reported decreases in same-sex attraction and increases in opposite-sex attraction.
Unlike the experiments involving individual memories and fantasies, this study actually measured reported attraction over time.
But it did not have a randomized control group. Participants were already psychotherapy clients who reported same-sex attractions and wanted to experience attraction change. The study therefore cannot tell us what would have happened to comparable men who did not undergo SAFE-T, nor can it establish that the therapy caused the reported changes.
There is another reason for caution. The study appeared in the Journal of Human Sexuality, published by the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity. That organization adopted the term SAFE-T in 2016 specifically because it considered older terms such as “conversion therapy,” “reorientation therapy” and “sexual orientation change efforts” scientifically and politically disadvantageous.
That history matters when a new name is presented as evidence of a fundamentally new form of therapy.
Newer Research Finds Sexual Orientation Change Efforts Don’t Work
There is now a particularly important and newly published piece of evidence that Nicolosi’s article could not have considered.
A 2026 study by G. Tyler Lefevor, Christopher Rosik, A. Lee Beckstead, Ty Mansfield and Mark Yarhouse, published August 15, 2026, in Archives of Sexual Behavior, followed people over two years after some had begun self-initiated sexual orientation change efforts.
This study is notable because it was prospective and preregistered, rather than asking former conversion-therapy clients years later whether they thought they had changed.
It is also difficult to dismiss as research produced solely by opponents of sexual orientation change: Co-author Christopher Rosik has long written in support of allowing clients to pursue change, and he coauthored a 2021 pilot study of reintegrative therapy with Joseph Nicolosi Jr..
Yet the new study did not find evidence that people undertaking change efforts became more heterosexual or less same-sex attracted than people who did not. Those pursuing change also reported more depression and less social support at the two-year follow-up.
The authors concluded that their findings support the view that trying to change sexual orientation is ineffective and harmful, while appropriately cautioning that their data cannot establish that this is true for every person or that change efforts always cause harm.
That is a considerably stronger research design than most of the evidence Nicolosi offers for change.
What Does the Research Say About Conversion Therapy and Harm?
Nicolosi is also selective in discussing evidence about harm from conversion therapy.
He cites sociologist D. Paul Sullins’ 2022 reanalysis of research on sexual orientation change efforts and suicide as evidence that change efforts may actually reduce suicidality.
But the researchers whose data Sullins reanalyzed—John Blosnich, Robert Coulter, Emmett Henderson, Jeremy Goldbach and Ilan Meyer—subsequently published a detailed response. They argued that Sullins had treated a participant’s age at the last conversion-therapy experience as though it established when all such therapy occurred.
The underlying survey did not contain the information needed to construct that chronology.
Ilan Meyer and John Blosnich made the same fundamental criticism in a separate 2022 commentary: people can undergo sexual orientation change efforts multiple times, making the last reported exposure an unreliable way to decide whether suicidal behavior occurred before or after conversion therapy.
Sullins and the original researchers disagree about how the evidence should be interpreted. Nicolosi presents one side of that scientific dispute as though it resolved the question.
Sexual Attraction Can Change. That Doesn’t Mean Therapists Can Change It.
None of this requires believing that sexual orientation is permanently fixed.
People sometimes report changes in sexual attraction over the course of their lives. Psychotherapy can also legitimately help people address sexual behavior they do not want, compulsive behavior, trauma, relationships, conflicts between sexuality and religious beliefs, or distressing memories.
But there is a crucial difference between sexual attractions changing and a therapist knowing how to change them.
That distinction disappears repeatedly in Nicolosi’s paper. A sexual memory becomes less arousing, and the result becomes evidence for changing sexual attraction. A fantasy becomes less vivid, and it joins the evidence for changing sexual attraction. An experiment changes heterosexual women’s responses to sexual images, and that too becomes evidence for changing sexual attraction—even when the researchers themselves caution against interpreting their results that way.
Put all of these findings into the same basket and it is possible to describe a growing evidence base for SAFE-T, reintegrative therapy or other forms of sexual orientation change therapy.
Take them back out of the basket and examine what each experiment actually measured, however, and the case largely disappears.
Conversion therapy has acquired new names and a neuroscience explanation. What it still lacks is convincing evidence that therapists can reliably change whom their clients are attracted to.