Investigating the Effectiveness of the Relationship Enhancement program training in the Reduction of Covert Relational Aggression and Augmentation of the Relation-Maintaining Strategies

The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of relationship enhancement program training with solution focused brief tuning on relationship maintenance strategies. This experimental study was conducted with a pretest – posttest design with control group and followed – up for one and half months. The statistical population of this study included all couples referred to divorce in Karaj city in year 2020 – 2021 and 21 couple with low relationship maintenance strategies were considered as the sample size in two experimental groups (each group consists 7 couples). The experimental groups underwent Gurny’s relationship enhancement program (7 sessions,90 minutes long) and the solution – focused Brief tuning (7 session 90 minutes), but the control group received no trainings and remained on the waiting list to collect data relational maintenance strategies (RMSM) (Staford, 2000). Data analysis was performed using SPSS – 24 software in two sections: descriptive and inferential (analysis of variance with repeated measures and bonferroni). The results of the study shows that both types of treatment in post – test and the follow up had a significant effect on relational maintenance strategies (P<0/05). Also relationship enhancement training had stronger effects on covert relationship maintenance (P<0/05) based on the results of this study, it could be concluded, the relationship enhancement training and solution focused Brief tuning could be used as a treatment to improve covert relationship enhancement in family counseling and couple therapy settings.