The Effectiveness of Compassion-focused Therapy on Pain Catastrophizing, and Resilience in Skeletal-Muscular Patients

This study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of compassion-focused therapy on pain catastrophizing and resilience in Muscular - Skeletal (MS) patients.

Method and Materials: 

The method of the study was semi-experimental in nature with a pre-test-post-test design with control group. The studied population was all people with musculoskeletal pain in the first six months of 2022 in Tehran, Iran. According to this, 40 patients with skeletal-muscular pain were selected voluntarily and randomly placed in intervention and control groups (each group n=20). The Questionnaires included Sullivan et al.`s Pain Catastrophizing Pain (1995) and Connor and Davidson `s resilience (2003). The experimental group received eight 90-minute sessions of compassion-focused therapy, but the control group placed at waiting list. The data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance by SPSS-26.

The results indicated that the group of compassion-focused therapy significantly decreased components of pain catastrophizing (rumination, magnification, and helplessness) and increased resilience in women with MS (P<0.001).

The findings of this research emphasized the effectiveness of compassion- focused therapy on pain catastrophizing components and resilience in skeletal-muscular patients. Since who experienced many problems with skeletal-muscular pain, it is necessary to measure the improvement of mental and physical health.