Effects of Emotionally Focused Therapy on Sexual Assertiveness, Marital Forgiveness, and Marital Harmony in Maladjusted Couples

Marital maladjustment can have negative consequences for couples’ health and relationships. The present study aims to determine the effect of emotionally focused couple therapy (EFT) on sexual assertiveness, marital forgiveness, and marital harmony in maladjusted couples.

This was an experimental study based on a pretest-posttest design with control and experimental groups. The statistical population consisted of all maladjusted couples visiting the counseling centers of Behbahan City, Iran in 2020. A total of 30 couples were selected from this population as the sample through convenience sampling and were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups (15 couples in each group). The participants in the experimental group received eight 120-minute sessions of Greenberg’s EFT. The research instruments included the sexual assertiveness questionnaire, trait forgiveness scale, and marital harmony scale. The data were statistically analyzed using the one-way and multivariate analyses of variance via the SPSS software, version 25.

The results showed a significant difference between the experimental and the control group in terms of sexual assertiveness, marital forgiveness, and marital harmony (P<0.001). EFT significantly increased the sexual assertiveness, marital forgiveness, and marital harmony of couples in the experimental group.

The findings demonstrated the positive effects of EFT on sexual assertiveness, marital forgiveness, and marital harmony of maladjusted couples. Therefore, the EFT can be recommended as an effective intervention to improve sexual assertiveness, marital forgiveness, and marital harmony in couples with marital conflict.