The Effects of Emotion-Focused Therapy on Post-Divorce Adjustment and Emotion Regulation in Divorced Women

Divorce can induce numerous social harms. Post-Divorce adjustment is an integral process experienced by a subject after divorce. Thus, after the death of the spouse, it is the divorce that requires the most change to readjust the involved individuals. Furthermore, the unpleasant views of society and the rejection of divorced women complicates adapting to these conditions for them. Besides, such conditions damage their mental health; thus, having adaptive Emotion Regulation (ER) skills can be helpful. Therefore, they must be equipped with ER skills to encounter the challenges of accepting and managing the created conditions. The current study aimed to investigate the effects of Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) on post-divorce adjustment and ER in divorced women.

This was a quasi-experimental study with pretest-posttest-follow-up (two-month) and a control group design. The research population included all divorced women under the auspices of social service bases in the second district of Tehran City, Iran, in 2019. The study sample included 40 women who were selected by the convenience sampling method; they were then randomly assigned into the experimental and control groups (n=20/group). The inclusion criteria of the study included providing informed consent forms to participate in the study, not being addicted to drugs and psychotropic substances, not consuming alcohol and psychiatric drugs, not having personality disorders or a history of hospitalization in psychiatric hospitals, the age range of 20-45 years, formal marriage, literacy, cohabitation with the spouse for at least one year, a formal divorce, the custody of at least one child, and 2-4 years passed since the divorce. The research tools, i.e, applied in the pretest, posttest, and follow-up stages were the Divorce Adjustment Scale (Fisher, 1976) and the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Garnefski & Kraaij, 2006). For the experimental group, the EFT (Mirzazadeh et al., 2012) was delivered in nine 120-minute sessions; however, the control group received no intervention. The collected data were analyzed by descriptive statistics (mean & standard deviation) and inferential statistics, including repeated-measures Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Bonferroni post hoc test in SPSS at the significance level of 0.05.

The present research results suggested the significant effect of the group on post-divorce adjustment (p<0.001), adaptive ER strategies (p<0.001), and maladaptive ER strategies (p=0.003). The effect of time and the effect of time×group on post-divorce adjustment (p<0.001), adaptive ER strategies (p<0.001), and maladaptive ER strategies (p<0.001) were also significant. Furthermore, the difference in the mean scores of all three variables between the pretest, posttest, and follow-up stages was significant (p<0.001); however, the difference in the mean scores of post-divorce adjustment (p=0.435), adaptive ER strategies (p=1.000), and maladaptive ER strategies (p=0.084) between posttest and follow-up stages was not significant, indicating the effect of intervention remained stable in the follow-up phase.

According to the research findings, EFT improved post-divorce adjustment and offer in the examined divorced women and this effect lasted over time.