The Effect of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Marital Burnout in Couples with Marital Conflicts

Burnout in couples is a gradual and rarely sudden process in which intimacy and love gradually fade and general fatigue becomes apparent. On the other hand, most marital therapy interventions seek to reduce marital conflict. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of acceptance and commitment therapy on marital burnout in couples with marital conflicts.

This experimental study was conducted with a pretest-posttest design and a control group with a 45-day follow-up. The statistical population included all the couple with marital conflicts referring to the counseling centers in Karaj city, Iran in 2019. The sample was a group of 14 couples who had got a score of over 111 in the marital-conflicts questionnaire, assigned randomly to an experimental (n = 7) or a control (n = 7) group. The experimental groups received an acceptance and commitment therapy (twelve 90-minutes sessions), but the control group received no intervention and remained in the waiting list. Data were collected using the marital-conflicts questionnaire of Barati and Sanaee (1994) and analyzed using analysis of variance with repeated measures and the Bonferroni post-hoc test.

Analysis of the data showed that the acceptance and commitment therapy significantly decreased marital burnout in the couples, and the results were found to be consistent enough in the follow-up period (P<0.05).

Based on the results of this study, it can be said that acceptance and commitment therapy can be used as an intervention option in decreasing marital problems.