An Eclectic Counseling Program for Enhancing Self-Compassion and Reducing Psychological Stress among Mothers of Autistic Children

Abu Hashish, Hassan Ibrahim Mohamed

doi:10.21608/jsrep.2022.236226

An Eclectic Counseling Program for Enhancing Self-Compassion and Reducing Psychological Stress among Mothers of Autistic Children

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Hassan Ibrahim Mohamed Abu Hashish

Mental Health at the Faculty of Education in Dakahlia, Al-Azhar University, Egypt.

10.21608/jsrep.2022.236226

Abstract

This study aimed at enhancing self-compassion among mothers of autistic children and reducing their psychological stress through an eclectic counseling program. The study sample consisted of 24 mothers of autistic children The participants were divided into two groups (experimental and control) with 12 mothers for each group. The experimental group received 24 counseling sessions for two months (3 sessions per week). The study used Neff, 2003 self-compassion scale (Translated by Muhammad Al-Sayed Abdel-Rahman et al., 2015), the psychological stress scale and the counseling program prepared by the researcher. The study results revealed that there were statistically significant differences at the level of (0.01) between the mean ranks of the experimental group scores in the pre and post measuring of the self-compassion scale in the direction of the post measuring, and there were statistically significant differences at the level of (0.05) between the mean ranks of the experimental group in the pre and post measuring of the psychological stress scale in the direction of the post measuring. There were also statistically significant differences at the level (0.05) between the experimental and control groups' scores on the self-compassion scale in favor of the experimental group, and there were no statistically significant differences between the average ranks of the experimental group in the post and follow up measuring on self-compassion and psychological stress scales.

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