Effectiveness of Cognitive Spirituality-Based Counseling of Demoralization in Elderlies

Objectives: Elders face existential issues such as death, a sense of losing, lack of life, last chances, and meaning of life. If people cannot confront it effectively, they may be lost meaning of life. They will suffer from a core of set of syndromes that are called “demoralization”. Cognitive spirituality-based counseling tries to correct beliefs and the human imagination of God via cognitive therapy concepts and techniques, because they prevent realistic and genuine attention to existential anxieties. Methods: A single case experimental plan, an A-B form, was used in this study. After determining the baseline situation, intervention started. 10 sessions of cognitive spirituality-based counseling were applied individually. A follow-up session including running inventories was conducted a month after the intervention. The participants were 3 elderly women who were deemed appropriate for this study on the demoralization scale. Then, a cognitive distortions inventory was employed to measure cognitive distortions that were related to demoralization. The statistical population included elder women who had been referred to Iran Alzheimer Association. Accessible and purposeful sampling method was used to select the cases. Result: The results of visual analysis of the data showed that cognitive spirituality-based counseling had a positive effective on two cases but not on the third one. Discussion: It seems that cognitive-spirituality counseling was significantly effective in demoralization in two-third of the participants.