Making Your Emotions Work for You: A pilot brief intervention for alexithymia with personality-disordered offenders

One strategy for reducing premature termination of therapy is to offer pre-therapy preparation. Here, we describe an intervention targeting alexithymia in offenders with personality disorders. ‘Making Your Emotions Work for You’ is a one-day group intervention consisting of four evidence-based components: Psychoeducation, Recognizing Emotions, Self-Awareness and Seeking Information. Pre-intervention and post-intervention scores on measures of alexithymia (Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20)) and psychological mindedness (Balanced Index of Psychological Mindedness (BIPM)) are presented for five male personality-disordered offenders. This small sample showed consistent scores in the dysfunctional direction on both psychometric measures, indicating that there does appear to be a need to address alexithymia in this group. Overall, participants reported positive experiences with the intervention. No reliable pre-intervention to post-intervention changes were observed on TAS-20 scores. On the BIPM Interest scale, reliable improvement was observed for three participants and reliable deterioration for one participant. On the BIPM Insight scale, one participant reliably improved, and one reliably deteriorated. While alexithymia may not be changed by this intervention, participants may become more interested in exploring their emotions, which may enhance engagement in therapy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.