Comparison the Effectiveness of Couple Therapy of Emotional-Focused and Imago Therapy on Marital Burnout and Expectations in Couples with Marital Conflicts

Introduction: On the one hand marital conflicts between couples are a common phenomenon which led to weakness the relationship and increase marital problems, and on the other hand couple therapy is one of the effective ways to reduce the marital problems. Therefore, present research aimed to comparison the effectiveness of couple therapy of emotional-focused and imago therapy on marital burnout and expectations in couples with marital conflicts. Methods: Present study was a quasi-experimental with a pre-test and post-test design with control and experimental groups. Research population was the couples with marital conflicts that referring to counseling centers of first region of three district of Karaj city in 2017 year. Totally 45 couple (90 people) were selected by available sampling method and randomly assigned to three equal groups (each group 15 couple). The intervention groups separately trained 10 sessions of 90 minutes (weekly two sessions) by the methods of couple therapy of emotional-focused and imago therapy and the control group was placed on the waiting list for training. Data were collected with the Peinas' marital burnout and Omidvar & et al' marital expectations and analyzed by the methods of multivariate analysis of covariance and bonferroni post hoc test. Results: The findings showed that both methods of couple therapy of emotional-focused and imago therapy led to significant reduced the marital burnout and inappropriate expectations in couples with marital conflicts. Also, the couple therapy of emotional-focused method in compared with the couple therapy of imago therapy method led to significant reduced the marital burnout and inappropriate expectations in couples with marital conflicts (P<0/05). Conclusions: Regarded to results, it is suggested that to reduce the marital burnout and inappropriate expectations in couples with marital conflicts used from both methods especially the couple therapy of emotional-focused method.