The effectiveness of patience training on reducing grief and facilitating posttraumatic growth

Everybody experiences the loss of a dear person and grief in their lives. Sincemissing a proper grieving time naturally reduces individual and social performanceof people, efforts have been made to find techniques and skills for passing throughgrieving. Here, religion and spirituality have a great therapeutic and preventive role.This research aims to study the effect of spirituality (patience method) on reducingthe impacts of grief and post-traumatic growth in disaster-stricken families. In thisresearch, the authors used quasi-experimental study (pre-test and post-test withcontrol group). There were 20 subjects who were selected from the grieving familiesthat were supported by the Imam Khomeini(Mm) Relief Committee of Tehranprovince and were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. For theexperimental group, the authors hold 8 one-hour-long training sessions of patienceon the basis of spiritual therapy one day a week. The tools of experiment wereHogan Grief Reaction Checklist (HGRC) and post-traumatic growth questionnaire.The results showed that the experimental group that participated in the trainingsessions of patience showed a significant reduction in the effects of grieving incomparison with the control group. Moreover, teaching patience method is effectiveon all the subscales of the grief effects including personal growth, frustration, angerand blame, panic, confusion, and withdrawal. Also, those who participated in theexperimental group showed a more post-traumatic growth in comparison with thecontrol group. Therefore, patience training is effective on all post-traumatic growthsubscales including new practices, communication with others, personal strength,value of life, and spiritual change. Considering that patience method can have apositive and constructive effect on reducing the effects of grief and post-traumaticgrowth, and considering that this method is based on the Islamic-Iranian model, theauthors suggest it to be developed among advisors and to be used for grievingpeople.