Comparing the Effectiveness of Couple Therapy Based on Choice Theory With Spiritual Psychotherapy Based on Forgiveness on Life Expectancy of Women at Risk of Divorce

The most common state in the divorce period is the feeling of hopelessness and despair. Hope is a necessary and fundamental part of life that provides the necessary energy to realize goals and dreams. Counselors have used various packages and techniques in trying to resolve the marital conflicts of couples. One of the suggested approaches to couple therapy in recent years is the choice theory, which was created by Glasser. Reality therapy leads people to reality and effective interaction with all aspects of real life. On the other hand, neglecting psychological treatments based on forgiveness and spiritual and moral values in couple therapy has increased marital problems. Very little research has been conducted on the effectiveness of spiritual psychotherapy treatments based on forgiveness and couple therapy based on choice theory on couples or women facing divorce. So, the present study was conducted to compare the effectiveness of couple therapy based on choice theory with spiritual psychotherapy based on forgiveness on the life expectancy of women at risk of divorce.

This was a quasi–experimental study with a pretest–posttest and a two–stage follow–up design with a control group. The statistical population of this study included all women who were referred to the Marivan Dispute Resolution Council in the spring of 2021. Among these couples, 60 eligible women volunteered to enter the study and were randomly divided into experimental (couple therapy based on choice theory and spiritual psychotherapy based on forgiveness) and control groups (each group was 20 persons). The inclusion criteria were as follows: women with at least fifth–grade education, have a divorce case in court, and are willing to cooperate to receive couples therapy intervention. The exclusion criteria were not following the group rules stated in the first session and absenting more than one session in the intervention sessions. Couples in both groups answered the Life Expectancy Questionnaire (Snyder et al., 1991) in four stages of assessment (i.e., pretest, posttest, 1–month follow–up and 3–month follow–up). Couple therapy based on choice theory included 9 group couple therapy sessions in 120–min sessions and one session per week, over a period of 3 months. Forgiveness–based spiritual psychotherapy was performed in nine 60–min sessions. Descriptive statistics methods including mean, standard deviation and frequency distribution were used to describe the data. For inferential statistics, the analysis of variance with repeated measurements, the Chi–square test to compare the demographic characteristics of groups and Bonferroni post hoc test were used to compare the effectiveness in different stages of measurement. Data analysis was done in SPSS version 23. The significance level of the tests was considered 0.05.

The results showed that the effect of the measurement time (p<0.001), the effect of interaction between the measurement time and the group (p<0.001), and the effect of the group (p<0.001) on the mean scores of the life expectancy variable were significant. The mean scores of the life expectancy variable in the couple therapy group based on the choice theory and the spiritual psychotherapy group based on forgiveness were significantly higher than the control group (p<0.001). The mean scores of the life expectancy variable in the couple therapy group based on the choice theory were significantly higher than the spiritual psychotherapy based on forgiveness (p<0.001). In the two experimental groups, there were significant differences in the average scores of the life expectancy variable between the pretest and posttest stages (p<0.001), between the pretest with 1–month follow–up (p<0.001) and 3–month follow–up stages (p<0.001). Also, significant differences were observed in the mean scores of the life expectancy variable between the posttest with 1–month follow–up (p=0.004) and 3–month follow–up stages (p<0.001) and between the 1–month follow–up and 3–month follow–up stages (p=0.004).

Based on the findings of this research, the couple therapy group based on choice theory has a greater effect on increasing the life expectancy of women facing divorce compared to spiritual psychotherapy based on forgiveness.