The effectiveness of short-term intensive dynamic psychotherapy on emotion regulation and prevention of relapse of recovering addicts

Drug addiction is one of the main problems of human life today and imposes a great cost on societies. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of short-term intensive dynamic psychotherapy on emotion regulation and prevention of relapse of recovering addicts.

This research was a quasi-experimental study with pre-test, post-test and control group. The statistical population of the study included recovering addicts in Yazd in 1400. 39 people were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups (19 in the experimental group and 20 in the control group). For the experimental group, short-term intensive psychotherapy was performed weekly in the form of 8 sessions of 90 minutes, and for the control group, no treatment was performed. The Wright's relapse prediction questionnaire and the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire in the pre-test and post-test stages were completed by the participants. Analysis of covariance was used to analyze the data.

According to the results, after short-term intensive scanning psychotherapy, the scores of adaptive emotion regulation strategy and relapse prevention in the intervention group had a significant improvement compared to the control group (P<0.05).

Based on the results of this study, it seems that short-term intensive scanning psychotherapy can be effective in increasing the adaptive strategy of emotion regulation and prevention of relapse in recovering addicts.Keywords: Emotion regulation, Relapse prevention, short-term intensive dynamic psychotherapy