The Effect of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Caused by Marital Infidelity

Family is the most important and basic foundation for creating a healthy society. If couples have a healthy and good relationship with each other, we will have a healthy family and as a result, a healthy society. Now, if couples have an inappropriate relationship with each other, problems will arise for them. One of the most important issues that, in addition to disrupting the family unit and the couple's relationship, aggravates the injury in the injured person, is post-traumatic stress disorder caused by marital infidelity. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of emotion-focused couple therapy approach on post-traumatic stress disorder caused by marital infidelity.

Methods and Materials: 

The quasi-experimental research method was pretest-posttest with a control group. The statistical population included all women affected by the phenomenon of infidelity in the winter of 2022. The number of 30 couples who visited the Education Counseling Center of the 2nd District of Tehran and had moderate to high symptoms in the scores of the FOA (2003) Emotional PTSD scale scores were selected by purposive sampling method and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The subjects in the experimental group participated in a group program of emotional couple therapy for 15 sessions, but the control group did not receive any intervention.

The results of the analysis showed that emotional couple therapy is effective in reducing the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in women affected by marital infidelity and this effect is stable in the follow-up phase.

Since emotion-oriented couple therapy regulates a person's emotions and due to the effectiveness of this approach in couples involved in marital infidelity, its use as a therapeutic approach in this type of issues is recommended.