Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Abstract
Background & Objectives: Psychosomatic disorders are physical conditions closely related to psychosocial factors and can influence both the onset and the clinical course of the disease. Common complaints of psychosomatic disorders include nonspecific pain, fatigue, tachycardia, and tinnitus. One of the components studied in women with psychosomatic disorders is emotional distress. Emotional distress is a state of significant psychological distress or suffering that often results from challenging life events, mental health conditions, or interpersonal problems. The use of psychological approaches in the treatment of people with psychosomatic disorders seems very obvious. Hypnotherapy refers to the use of hypnotic trance and hypnotic phenomena in the fields of psychotherapy, psychosomatics, and medicine (including dentistry). In today's world, where anxiety and stress are an inseparable part of people's daily lives, psychosomatic disorders are highly prevalent, and solutions must be found to treat the problems of affected individuals. So, this study investigated the effectiveness of Ericksonian hypnotherapy on emotional distress in women with psychosomatic disorders referring to treatment centers in Yazd City, Iran.
Methods: The present study employed a quasi–experimental pretest–posttest design with a control group. The statistical population consisted of women aged 20–45 years with psychosomatic disorders who were referred to medical centers in Yazd in 2024. Among them, 40 eligible volunteers were recruited via convenience sampling, of whom 20 were randomly assigned to the intervention group and 20 to the control group. During the study, 1 person in the intervention group and 3 in the control group withdrew, resulting in a drop in the sample size. The scores of the emotional distress variable were compared using the Distress Tolerance Scale (Simmons & Gaher, 2005) at two time points, before and after the hypnotherapy intervention. The intervention consisted of 12 weekly 90–minute individual Ericksonian hypnotherapy sessions for the intervention group. Each session included inducing a hypnotic state through muscle relaxation techniques and focusing on breathing, providing therapeutic suggestions related to reducing pain and anxiety, increasing distress tolerance, and improving emotion regulation, and finally, a gradual return to a state of consciousness and exchanging feedback with the therapist. The control group received no intervention during the study. Information about the research results remained confidential, and only the researcher had access to the individual files for data analysis. The researchers pledged to provide free treatment sessions for the control group if the research results were significant. SPSS version 25 software was used to analyze the data. In the descriptive statistics section, the mean and standard deviation of the scores for each variable were extracted. In the inferential statistics section, data analysis was performed using the analysis of covariance statistical test. The significance level of the tests was set at 0.05.
Results: The analysis of covariance, adjusted for the pretest effect, showed that in the posttest, there was a significant difference in the mean scores for emotional distress between the group receiving Ericksonian hypnotherapy and the control group without any intervention (p<0.001). Also, based on the results regarding effect size, 60% of the difference between the intervention and control groups on the distress tolerance scale was due to the treatment.
Conclusion: According to the findings, Ericksonian hypnotherapy has a significant effect on reducing emotional distress in women with psychosomatic disorders. Therefore, individual Ericksonian hypnotherapy is suggested as an effective treatment to improve emotional distress in women with psychosomatic disorders.