Effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive psychotherapy on the quality of love and alexithymia in the women with marital distress

Marital distress can destroy the family unit by destroying the couple's relationship. Accordingly, the present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive psychotherapy on the quality of love and alexithymia in women with marital distress. The present study was quasi-experimental with pretest, posttest, and control group design. The statistical population of the current study included the women with marital distress who were referred to consultation centers in the city of Hamedan in the winter of 2018-19. 30 women were selected through the purposive sampling method and randomly accommodated into experimental and control groups (each group of 15 women). Three people were withdrawn from both the experimental and control groups. The experimental group received eight ninety-minute intervention sessions of mindfulness-based cognitive psychotherapy for four weeks twice a week. The applied questionnaires in this study included quality of love (Sternberg, 1986) and alexithymia (Parker, Taylor, and Bagby, 1994). The data were analyzed through the ANCOVA method via SPSS23 and alexithymia in the women with marital distress (P<0.001). According to the findings of the present study, it can be concluded that mindfulness-based cognitive psychotherapy can be used as an efficient therapy to increase the quality of love and decrease alexithymia in women with marital distress.