Effectiveness of Spiritual Emotional Writing Therapy to Reduce stress on Broken home Teens

Abstract

Unharmonious family conditions to the tipped divorce give a considerable impact on adolescent development. The condition became a source of stress (stressor) for teenagers from the broken home family. The stress experienced by teenagers can have a bad impact on the youth's development. Whereas teens broken home must be able to pass through adolescence (storm and stress) well so as not to get lost and lose goals in the future. One of the interventions that can be applied to cope with the stress on broken home teens is Spiritual emotional writing therapy. Spiritual emotional writing therapy is one type of intervention designed to cope with negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors through writing involving the aspect of spirituality. So a broken home teenager will be better able with the stressor, be a more positive person, and focus on future. This research uses experimental approach with one group Pretests posttest design design. The subject in this study was class X MAN 2 Semarang, which amounted to 7 people. The data collection of this research to uncover the stress on the subject by using a stress scale DASS by Lovibond & Lovibond (1995) that has been adapted. The experiment Group subject will follow each spiritual emotional writing therapy session lasts for 3 days. The spiritual emotional writing therapy session in the study consisted of 4 sessions, namely thought catching sessions, reality testing, cognitive rehearsal, and the session of affirmations and spiritual contexts. The results showed that the experiment group subjects had a significant reduction in stress scores. This corresponds to the results of data analysis using the nonparametric statistics of the Wilcoxon Signed Rank, obtained by the results of pre-test and post-test values and pre-test and follow-up has z =-2.201 with a significant value of 0.028 smaller than Significant 5% (α 0.05). So it can be concluded that spiritual emotional writing therapy is effective for lowering stress on broken home teens.