Background & Objectives: Divorce tendency facilitates the breakdown of the most fundamental structure of society, the family. The social consequences of divorce cause various psycho–emotional impairments at individual and social dimensions. As a result of divorce, couples break up and their intimate relationship ends, love and affection lead to hatred, animosity, and unity, leading to loneliness and confusion. Divorce is the end of a disrupted and damaged life; it does not occur instantly and unexpectedly, and rather follows a clear and gradual process. An important factor associated with divorce tendency is marital burnout, i.e., a painful state of emotional and biopsychological exhaustion. Gottman enrichment model is among the most valid approaches in the field of marriage interventions. Therefore, the present study was conducted to determine the effect of couple therapy by Gottman on divorce tendency and marital burnout in married women.
Methods: This was a quasi–experimental study with a pretest–posttest and a control group design. The statistical population of this study was all married women referring to two counseling centers in Isfahan City, Iran, in 2018 (N=54). The study sample consisted of 32 women who were selected based on their willingness to participate in the study and through the convenience sampling method. The study inclusion criteria were an age range of 20 to 45 years, no mental health problems, at least one year of marriage experience, and achieving a lower score than the cut–off point for divorce in the considered scale (scores above 44). The study exclusion criteria included reluctance to continue meetings, and disruption during meetings (disorder, deviation from the main topic). The following ethical considerations were observed: providing written information about the research to the study participants; assuring them about the confidentiality of information obtained and use it only for research purposes; voluntarily participating in the study; not recording the study subjects’ surname to observe their privacy, and obtaining written informed consent forms the study participants. The study subjects were randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups (n=16/group). Then, the experimental intervention, i.e., Gottman's couple therapy (2010) was performed for 10 sessions of 90 min in the experimental group. At the end of the sessions, both study groups were re–evaluated. Data collection tools included the Couple Burnout Measure (Pines, 1996) and the Divorce Tendency Scale (Rusbult et al., 1986). The obtained data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (mean & standard deviation), and inferential statistics, including Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) in SPSS. Besides, p<0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Results: There was a decrease in the posttest mean values of divorce tendency and marital burnout in the experimental group. Accordingly, the MANCOVA results suggested that by eliminating the effect of the pretest, the presented couple therapy by Guttman’s method impacted divorce tendency and marital burnout in the study participants (p<0.001). Additionally, the MANCOVA data indicated a significant difference between the experimental and control groups in terms of marital burnout (physical, psychological, & emotional aspects) (p<0.001).
Conclusion: Gottman’s couple therapy approach could significantly reduce marital burnout and divorce tendency in the explored married women. Therefore, marriage counselors and therapists could use the findings of this research in the context of clinical and therapeutic interventions. Furthermore, this therapeutic, practical, and beneficial approach could be applied to resolve conflicts and help improve marital relations among individuals.