Transcendental Meditation: An Intervention for Improving the Interpersonal Relationships of Adolescents’ Abused During Childhood

Adolescents with childhood histories of abuse have been found to have difficulties in the domain of interpersonal functioning, including how they relate with their parents, peers and teachers, and how they perceive the social world and in return how are they perceived by the others from social world. This investigation was an attempt to study the effectiveness of Transcendental Meditation (TM) in improving the interpersonal relationships of adolescents abused during childhood. Therefore, it was hypothesized that TM will be effective in improving the interpersonal relations with parents, peers and teachers, of adolescents abused during childhood. 600 adolescent boys and girls (aged 15–18 years) were screened for possible abuse during childhood (using Childhood Trauma Questionnaire). 25 adolescents with histories of childhood abuse were administered Clinical Assessment of Interpersonal Relationships (CAIR). During the later stages of study, the subjects learned and practiced the technique of TM for about a period of 3 months. After this phase the post-intervention scores on CAIR were obtained from subjects and were compared with the pre-intervention scores. The results obtained supported the hypothesis, suggesting that TM could be effective intervention for improving the interpersonal relationships of adolescents abused during childhood.