Post Traumatic Stress: A Case Study

Summary
The Effects of Forgiveness Therapy on Depression, Anxiety, and Posttraumatic Stress for Women after Spousal Emotional Abuse by Gayle L. Reed and Robert D. Enright presents a study which compares forgiveness therapy with an alternative treatment (anger validation, assertiveness, interpersonal skill building) for emotionally abused women who had been indelibly separated for 2 or more years (Reed and Enright, 2006). The study included 20 psychologically abused women. Participants lived in Midwest cities, ranged in age from 32 to 55 and self-reported themselves ethnically as European American (90%), Hispanic (5%) and Native American (5%)(Reed and Enright, 2006). The participants were self-selecting volunteers of whom 90% responded via newspaper advertisement and 10% via recruitment flyers and time since spousal separation ranged from 2 to 10 years (Reed and Enright, 2006). Authors hypothesized that participants would demonstrate less negative features such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms and more positive features such as self-esteem, environmental mastery, and finding meaning in suffering when treated with forgiveness therapy than participants who engaged in an alternative treatment.
Participants of this study were paired with a counterpart, as

I am also interested in research being done to examine the effectiveness of forgiveness therapy on any suffering population other than emotionally abused women. With this, I plan to continue to read articles related to forgiveness therapy as I find this therapy treatment as being one that has potential to be considered a universal method in the field of human service