The Effectiveness of Narrative Therapy on Increasing Couples Intimacy and Its Dimensions: Implication for Treatment

Intimacy is considered as a primary psychological need that is widely studied in social and clinical psychology. The research aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of narrative therapy on increasing couples intimacy and its dimensions. In this semi-experimental study that was performed using both experiment and control groups, 20 couples that due to marital problems had referred to the counseling center of welfare organization in Behshahr City were selected using of available sampling method and randomly were replaced into two experimental and control groups. With the help of marital intimacy questionnaire, first, the amount of marital intimacy were measured before intervention on both the experimental and control groups (pre-test) and after 8 session intervention for the experimental group, the questionnaire was performed both groups (post-test) again. Data were analyzed using of descriptive statistics and multivariate covariance method. The results showed that compared with the control group, narrative therapy significantly increased couples intimacy and its three dimensions namely emotional, communication and general intimacy in the experimental group (P<0.01). According to the findings of the present study, the investigation of effectiveness of narrative therapy on marital intimacy can provide valuable implications about the mental health of couples. The results and outcomes of this study will discuss and explain in this paper.