Narrative group interventions to reconstruct meaning of life among chronic pain survivors: A wait list RCT study

Abstract

Chronic pain, is a challenging health condition, often with no discernible physiological cause, nor treatment that reliably eliminates or mollifies the pain, but imposes detrimental impacts towards individuals’ psychological well-being. Viewing people as the experts in their own lives, and assuming people have many skills, abilities, beliefs, and values that will assist them to change their relationship with problem, narrative therapy (NT) is used to externalize the dominant problem-saturated experiences, and open diverse possibilities for reconstruction of identity, to re-author subordinate storylines to address the problems in ways that are powerfully connected with their meaning and purpose of life. Double-blinded randomized controlled trial was adopted for the present study. Eighty survivors were randomly assigned into intervention (narrative therapy) or waitlist control groups. Each participant received 6 weekly NT interventions of 2 hour each over a 1.5 month period at a community centre within their neighbourhood. Chronic pain survivors in the intervention group reported lower depressive symptoms after treatment, experienced significantly improvements across various outcome measures, including mastery, hope index, meaning in life, and life satisfaction compared with their baseline performance, and its counterparts, and sustained 4 months post intervention. No adverse reaction was recorded in any of the case mentioned at all study sites. Results suggest that NT as a meaning-making intervention could be a viable option for chronic pain survivors to enhance their well-being.