Comparing the Effectiveness Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy on Emotional Cognitive Regulation in Patients with Chronic Pain

Living with chronic pain imposes a significant emotional burden, diminishing a person's emotional and cognitive abilities. Consequently, this research aimed to compare the impact of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy(MBCT) on emotional cognitive regulation among chronic pain patients, with a two-month follow-up period. The clinical trial study was conducted in 2022 at the specialty and physiotherapy clinic of Imam Reza (AS) Hospital in Islamshahr City, Iran. Participants with chronic pain were selected through purposive accessible sampling and randomly assigned to three groups: ISTDP group, MBCT group, and a control group, each consisting of 15 individuals. To gather data, the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) by Garnevsky et al. (2002) was employed. The results indicated that both ISTDP and MBCT led to improvements in cognitive-emotional regulation scores, including acceptance, rumination, positive refocusing, refocusing on planning, positive reappraisal, and catastrophizing (P<0.05). These positive effects were observed during the follow-up stage as well. However, ISTDP did not significantly impact the self-blame component (P<0.05). Also, there was no statistically significant difference between ISTDP and MBCT in catastrophizing, positive refocusing, and positive reappraisal. However, MBCT demonstrated superior effectiveness in acceptance, rumination and refocusing on planning compared to ISTDP. In conclusion, both intensive short-term dynamic therapy (ISTDP) and cognitive mindfulness therapy (MBCT) can serve as sustainable interventions in healthcare centers to mitigate cognitive-emotional dysregulation in patients with chronic pain.