Introduction: Girls with anxiety disorders face shyness and psychological helplessness in life. Therefore, the aim of this study was determine the effectiveness of intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy on shyness and psychological helplessness in 16-18 years old girls with anxiety disorders.
Methods: This research was a semi-experimental with a pretest and posttest design with a control group. The research population was 16-18 years old girls students with anxiety disorder who referred to counseling and psychological services centers of Ahvaz city in the summer of 2024. The samples of this research were 30 people were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly replaced into two equal groups. The experimental group trained 8 sessions of 50 minute individually by method of intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy and the control group remained on the waiting list for training. The data of this study were collected by the anxiety inventory, shyness questionnaire and stress, anxiety and depression scale and analyzed by Chi-square and multivariate analysis of covariance methods in SPSS-25 software.
Results: According to the results of this study, there was no significant difference between the 16-18 years old girls with anxiety disorders of experimental and control groups in terms of age and educational level (P>0.05). Also, intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy reduced shyness (F=194.06, P<0.001) and psychological distress (F=144.36, P<0.001) in girls aged 16-18 with anxiety disorders.
Conclusions: According to the results of this research, health professionals and therapists can use intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy along with other therapeutic methods to reduce shyness and psychological distress in vulnerable groups including patients with anxiety disorders.