Effectiveness of Group Imago therapy and Mindfulness therapy on the Attitude toward Extramarital affairs of Veterans in Mashhad City

 Extramarital affairs are one of the main reasons for diverse and psychological trauma in marital life. This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of group imago therapy (Imagery psychotherapy) and group cognitive therapy based on mindfulness on the attitude toward extramarital relationships in the marital life of veterans in Mashhad.

 This experimental study was carried out on all married veterans in Mashhad city in 2020-2021, of which 1250 of them had referred to this center during the first quarter of 2020-2021, based on the information available in the Shahid Counseling Center. Forty-five couples were assigned to 2 experimental and control groups. The data were collected by the Mark Whatley Attitude to Extramarital Communication Scale. The training sessions were provided to the experimental groups by online mode through the live feature of Instagram during eight sessions of 60 minutes. The research was conducted using the pretest and post-test methods. Data were analyzed by SPSS 22 software using the ANCOVA test.

 There was no significant difference between the attitude scores toward extramarital relationships in the pretest stage (p>0.05). There was no significant difference between the scores of the pretest and post-test stages in the subjects of the control group (p>0.05). Also, no significant difference was observed between the mean of imago therapy and mindfulness groups in terms of tendency to extramarital relationships (p=0.911).

 Both imago therapy and cognitive therapy based on mindfulness affect coupleschr('39') attitudes toward extramarital relationships, and the rate of this attitude decreases in the couples; however, there is no significant difference in effectiveness between the two treatments.