Abstract
Purpose: Females who are heads of households, due to considerable life difficulties, are a vulnerable population that needs more support, including psychological treatment and empowerment programs. The current paper aims at ego strengthening and decreasing negative self-talk as useful strategies to achieve this goal.
Methods: This paper was a quasi-experimental study that aimed to strengthen the ego and reduce the negative self-talk through hypnotherapy in female-headed households. In this study, a sample of 30 Iranian women were selected by purposive Sampling from all female-headed households who had been referred for treatment was randomly divided into two groups (experimental and control), and eight 45-minute sessions of hypnotherapy were performed for them. The ego strength and self-talk of the subjects were measured using Psychosocial Inventory of Ego Strengths and Self-Talk Inventory.
Results: Multiple Analysis of Covariance indicated there was a significant difference between the control and the experimental group in terms of ego strength Wilks’ Lambda = 0.29,F = 25.6,p < .001, and negative self-talk scores, Wilks’ Lambda = 0.49,F = 10.6,p = .001, on the posttest. And ego strength. In other words, after controlling the effect of pre-test or a covariate, ego strength was higher in the experimental group than in the control group, and the experimental group had less negative self-talk after treatment.
Conclusions: The result of this study indicates that ego-strengthening-based hypnotherapy can be effective in reducing negative self-talk.

Key words: ego, hypnotherapy, self-talk, female