The Effectiveness of self-compassion on psychological well-being, quality of life and resilience in couples with marital conflicts

Quality of life, psychological well-being and resilience are among the basic concepts in family studies that play a key role in the occurrence of marital conflicts and problems of couples. Self-compassion training is one of the approaches that can be used to improve couples' relationships. The present study was conducted to identify the effectiveness of self-compassion on psychological well-being, quality of life and resilience in couples with marital conflicts.

This was an experimental study of pre-test and post-test with control and follow-up groups. The statistical sample of this study included 40 couples who were randomly placed in the experimental group of self-compassion or control. The experimental group received eight 90-minute self-compassion training sessions and the control group received no training. Data were collected using the Conner –Davidson Resilience scale, the World Health Organization quality of Life scale and the Ryff Psychological Well-Being scale. Analysis of variance with repeated measures was used to analyze the data.

The results of repeated measures analysis of variance showed that self-compassion training has created significant increase in resilience (P<0.01), psychological well-being (P<0.01) and quality of life (P<0.01) of couples with marital conflicts and these results have remained constant in the two-month follow-up (P<0.05).

It seems that self-compassion training by focusing on accepting kind feelings and changing negative to positive emotions can affect the quality of life, psychological well-being and resilience of conflicting couples.