Phase 1 Pilot of a Pragmatic Trial of EAET for Veterans With Chronic Pain

About one in three Veterans lives with long-term (chronic) pain, and many of them also struggle with past trauma and mental health issues like depression, anxiety, or PTSD. Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET) is a type of talk therapy that helps people understand and express their emotions, especially those linked to past trauma. This therapy has been shown to help reduce pain and improve mental health. So far, multiple studies have tested EAET in both Veterans and civilians, and the results have been promising. EAET has helped people feel less pain, move better, and experience fewer mental health symptoms. Because of these strong results, the U.S. Department of Health \& Human Services named EAET a Best Practice for managing pain in 2019. Two earlier studies at a VA hospital in Los Angeles found that EAET worked even better than another well-known therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy for chronic pain (CBT-CP) for older Veterans. However, those studies were done in tightly controlled settings. Now, researchers want to see if EAET works just as well when it's used in everyday healthcare settings, by different types of doctors and therapists. This new project will happen in two parts, but we will only focus on the first part in this entry: In the first part (a 1-year phase), doctors and therapists at up to 7 VA hospitals across the country will be trained to use EAET. They will then try it out with Veterans to see how well it works and how easy it is to use in real clinics. Veterans, doctors, and other staff will be asked for feedback to learn what helps or gets in the way of using EAET.

NCT Number	NCT07218757
Lead Sponsor	University of California, Los Angeles Collaborators: National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (South Texas) ADRC, University of Colorado, Denver, University of Utah, VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, Yale University, Greater Los Angeles Veterans Research and Education Foundation
Conditions	Musculoskeletal Pain
Enrollment	84 participants
Start Date	2026-01-02
Primary Completion	2027-07 (estimated)
Study Completion	2027-07 (estimated)
Updated on ClinicalTrials.gov	2026-02-24