Comparison of the effectiveness of schema therapy and imago therapy on the failure and difficulty of emotion regulation in people involved in emotional divorce

Emotional divorce is a situation in which a couple is forced to live together and the emotional capital between them is reduced and they experience a cold and empty relationship. The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of schema therapy and imago therapy approaches on the difficulty of regulating emotion and failure in people involved in emotional divorce.

The present study was a quasi-experimental study with a control and follow-up group. The statistical population of this study was couples referring to Tehran Judicial Complex in 1398. Forty-five individuals were selected by purposive sampling according to the results of the Guttman Emotional Divorce Questionnaire, and were divided into three groups of 15, completely randomly. Each treatment was presented to two experimental groups for 12 weekly sessions and the control group was placed on a waiting list. Data collection tools included, the Guttman(1997) Emotional Divorce Scale, the Harrington Failure Tolerance Questionnaire(2005), and the Gretz & Romer(2004) Emotion Difficulty Scale. Multivariate analysis of covariance and Bonferroni post hoc test were used to analyze the obtained data using SPSS software version 24.

The results showed that no significant difference was observed between the groups in the pretest. In the post-test, there was a significant difference between the mean difficulty of emotion regulation(F = 323.23, P= 0.000) and failure(F = 96.48, P = 0.000) in schema therapy and imago therapy with the mean of the control group. There was p <0.01 There was no significant difference between imago therapy and schema therapy approaches. The results were stable in the follow-up phase.

The findings showed that the use of treatments in this study can be used in planning preventive interventions to promote and improve mental health and emotional relationships in people involved in emotional divorce.