divorce is a phenomenon which can be followed by different cognitive, emotional and psychological damages for the couples and avoiding it through applying appropriate therapeutic methods is a necessity. Therefore, the present study was conducted aiming to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive restructuring on the sense of coherence and marital interactions in the couples asking for divorce.
Methods: it was a quasi-experimental study with pretest, posttest and control group design. The statistical population of the current study was the all the couples asking for divorce from 2017 to 2018 who were referred to the department of consultation at the family court in the town of Tonekabon to investigate marital problems and conflicts. 20 couples asking for divorce were selected through purposive sampling method and they were randomly accommodated into experimental and control groups (10 couples in the experimental group and 10 in the control group). The experimental group received ten ninety-minute sessions of cognitive restructuring intervention (Sasan Pour, Azizi and Dehghan Menshadi, 2016) during two-and-a-half months. The applied questionnaires in this study included the questionnaire of coding system in Iranian couples’ interaction (Sadeghi, 2010) and the scale of sense of coherence (Antononski, 1993). The data from the study were analyzed through MANCOVA method.
Results: the results showed that the cognitive restructuring has significant effect on the sense of coherence and marital interactions in the couples asking for divorce (p<0.001) in a way that this method was able to lead to the improvement of the sense of coherence and marital interactions in the couples asking for divorce.
Conclusion: the findings of the present study showed that the cognitive restructuring can be used as an efficient therapy to improve the sense of coherence and marital interactions in the couples asking for divorce through applying techniques such as identifying the couples unrealistic beliefs, familiarity with reciprocal expectations and attending to positive features, creating the skills of empathic understanding and listening and training the skills of increasing intimacy.