effectiveness of emotion focused therapy on anxiety sensitivity and pain catastrophizing in Patients with chronic pain and alexithymia.

Chronic pain is one of the most common medical problems that affects the lives of patients from biological, social, professional and educational aspects.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of emotion focused therapy on anxiety sensitivity and pain catastrophizing in Patients with chronic pain and alexithymia.

  This research was a experiential study with pre, post-test and follow-up with control group. The statistical population included all patients with chronic pain in Isfahan city in 1400. Sampling was done by available and voluntary sampling method and in two stages. In this way, 24 patients with chronic pain who scored above 60 in the Tronto alexithymia questionnaire (1994) were selected and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups (n = 12). The experimental group received online emotion-focused group therapy for 12 weekly sessions and the control group did not receive any intervention. Instruments were Sullivan's pain catastrophizing scale questionnaire (1995) and Taylor and Cox's anxiety sensitivity questionnaire (1998), which were completed in three stages of the research. data were analyzed using repeated measure analysis.

The results of data analysis showed that there is a significant difference between the adjusted averages of anxiety sensitivity and pain catastrophizing in the two groups (P<0.05). Therefore, it can be concluded that emotion focused therapy is effective on anxiety sensitivity and catastrophizing pain in Patients with chronic pain and alexithymia (P<0.05).

Considering the effect of emotion focused therapy on research variables, this treatment method can be used to improve Patients with chronic pain and alexithymia.