The Effectiveness of Emotion-Focused Couple Therapy Approach on Improving Marital Burnout and Emotional Self-disclosure of Couples Applying for Divorce

Divorce is one of the social and family harms that all sections of society are somehow involved in its adverse effects. Divorced people face several individual and interpersonal conflicts, such as experiencing turbulent identities, hopelessness, lifestyle changes, and serious social and occupational problems. One of the important variables in marital relationships is marital burnout. Marital burnout is a painful condition of physical, emotional, and psychological exhaustion that affects those who expect dreamy love and marriage to give meaning to their lives. Emotional self–disclosure is the process by which we share information about ourselves with others. One of the effective therapeutic approaches in solving couples' marital problems is the emotion–oriented therapeutic approach that its emphasis is on the method of adaptive attachments, through care, support, and mutual attention for the needs of self and spouse. This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of emotion–focused couple therapy to improve marital burnout and emotional self–disclosure of couples applying for divorce.

The method of this study was quasi–experimental with a pretest–posttest design with a control group. The statistical population included all couples applying for divorce referring to the Marham Clinic of Sari City, Iran from September 2017 to March 2018, from whom 32 people were qualified individuals and then randomly divided into experimental and control groups. The inclusion criteria were as follows: couples applying for divorce who were referred to the Marham Clinic in Sari from September 2017 to March 2018, age range of 25 to 45 years, having more education than a diploma, not suffering from chronic physical diseases, not suffering from chronic mental illnesses, not taking medicines to cause interference in the treatment process, not having addiction, having average economic status. The exclusion criteria were the non–cooperation of the couples during the study, suffering from physical and mental illness during the study, absence of more than two sessions from the treatment process and giving up on the termination of the joint life.The experimental group underwent an emotion–focused couple therapy one 90–min session per week for 12 weeks, but the control group did not receive treatment. Data were obtained using the Marital Burnout Scale (Pines, 1996) and the Emotional Self–disclosure Scale (Snell, 2001). Data analysis was done using descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation and inferential statistics using univariate covariance analysis and SPSS version 22 software. The significance level of the tests was considered 0.05.

The findings showed that emotion–focused couple therapy was effective in decreasing marital burnout (p<0.001) and increasing emotional self–disclosure (p<0.001) in the experimental group. The Eta squared of the intervention on reducing marital burnout and increasing emotional self–disclosure was obtained as 0.77 and 0.68, respectively.

According to findings, emotion–focused couple therapy is effective in improving marital burnout and emotional self–disclosure of couples applying for divorce and can be used to improve marital burnout and emotional self–disclosure in these couples.