The Effectiveness of Compassion Focused Therapy on Depression and Rumination after romantic Relationship Breakup: A single case study

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the efficacy of compassion-focused therapy on Depression and Rumination after a romantic breakup. The present study was carried out using the single-case quasi-experimental method and a simple baseline method. For this purpose, three female participants were selected through targeted sampling and they were treated through an individual Compassion-focused Therapy (CFT) during eight 90-min sessions. Participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) and Rumination (RRS) questionnaires in the baseline stage (pre-treatment) during the second, fourth, sixth and eighth sessions, and in the one-month follow-up stage. Moreover, in the pre-treatment stage, the participants completed the Love Trauma Inventory (LTI) and the MMPI-2RF questionnaires to identify the severity of disturbance after breakup and to detect the serious disorder in axis, respectively. Then they were interviewed in order to identify their personality disorder. For data analysis, clinical significance method and the recovery percentage index were used. The results showed that compassion-focused therapy has a significant effect on the reduction of Depression and mental Rumination. The percentage of non-overlap data (PND) on the Depression Scale was 100 for the first and second participants and 75 for the third participant; it was 100 on the rumination scale for all three participants. The rate of recovery of depression in the first, second, third participant was 65%, 72%, 25%, the rumination rate in the first, second, third participant was 47%, 42%, 33%, respectively. Therefore, it can be concluded that people who experienced a breakup after a compassion-focused therapy look at themselves with a new and compassionate look at their own.