Effectiveness of Compassion Therapy on Self-coherence, Post-divorce Adjustment and Negative Automatic Thoughts in Divorced Women

Divorce reduces the health of each couple, especially women and one of the treatment methods derived from the third wave of psychotherapy which about that has been done little research is compassion therapy. Therefore, present research aimed to determine the effectiveness of compassion therapy on self-coherence, post-divorce adjustment and negative automatic thoughts in divorced women.

This study was semi-experimental with pretest and posttest design with control group. The research population was the divorced women referred to Ahvaz city counseling centers in 2019 year, which from them 40 people after reviewing the inclusion criteria were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly replaced into two groups. The experimental group was trained 8 sessions of 90 minutes with compassion therapy and the control group was placed on a waiting list for training. Data were collected with using scales of self-coherence, post-divorce adjustment and negative automatic thoughts and analyzed by tests of Chi-square, independent t and multivariate analysis of covariance in SPSS-23 software.

The mean and standard deviation of the self-coherence pretest of experimental group 16.00±2.71 and control group 16.45±2.89 and their posttest was 20.10±2.88 and 15.90±2.80, respectively. The mean and standard deviation of the post-divorce adjustment pretest of experimental group 205.60±16.48 and control group 201.70±15.53 and their posttest was 224.40±14.27 and 199.80±13.61, respectively. The mean and standard deviation of the negative automatic thoughts pretest of experimental group 76.70±9.44 and control group 75.55±13.16 and their posttest was 68.45±7.68 and 76.10±13.07, respectively. Other findings showed that the experimental and control groups didn’t significant difference in terms of education, age, number of children and duration of divorce (P>0.05). Also, groups in the pretest stage didn’t significant difference in any variables of self-coherence, post-divorce adjustment and negative automatic thoughts (P>0.05), but in the posttest stage there were significant differences in all three variables (P<0.001). In addition, compassion therapy led to increased self-coherence (F=263.18, P<0.001) and post-divorce adjustment (F=289.95, P<0.001) and decreased negative automatic thoughts (F=90.70, P<0.001) in divorced women.

The results indicated the effectiveness of compassion therapy on increasing self-coherence and post-divorce adjustment and decreasing negative automatic thoughts. As a result, clinical psychologists and therapists can use from compassion therapy method alongside other treatment methods to improve health related traits, especially increase self-coherence and post-divorce adjustment and decrease negative automatic thoughts.