The Impact of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy on Improving Communication Patterns in Combat- Related PTSD Veterans & their Wives

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of emotionally focused couple therapy (EFCT) on the improvement of communication patt-erns in combat- related PTSD veterans and their wives. 28 veterans with PTSD psychiatric diagnosis and their wives were ran-domly selected and assigned to the two experiential and control groups. One group received 10 sessions of em-otionally focused couple therapy and the other group remained on the waiting list. Data gathering was carr-ied out through psychiatric diagnosis, PTSD interview and Christiansen & Sallavy’s (1984) communication patt-ern questionnaire. Analysis of covar-iate findings reveals significant diff-erences between the control and experimental groups, indicating the effectiveness of EFCT in the exper-imental group. The findings of the research indicate that the emotionally focused couple therapy results in an increase in PTSD veterans and their wives, using constructive communi-cation pattern; and a decrease in their using mutual avoidance, demand-/withdrawal. Generally, the clinical research in this regard is mostly focused on individual treatments and couple therapy is neglected, but see-mingly the increase in PTSD veterans and their wives, using constructive pattern will result in an increase in their mental health