Comparison of the Effectiveness of Two Family Therapy Approaches Based on Mindfulness therapy and Metacognitive therapy on Marital Intimacy among Divorce Applicant Clients

Objective: This study aims to compare the effectiveness of Family Therapy Based on metacognitive therapy and Mindfulness on Marital Intimacy among divorce applicant clients. Method: The design of the study is an experimental research with pretest and posttest with a control group. The study population includes all divorce applicant clients referring to well-being and counseling agencies of Sanandaj city, located in Kurdistan province, in 2011. Sixty-six clients were selected from among the population using random sampling and then, they were divided into three groups of 22 using random assignment method. The independent variable of marital intimacy was measured among divorce applicant clients (pretest) using the marital intimacy questionnaire (Oliya et al., 2006) and after intervening two experimental groups for 8 sessions, the dependent variable was again calculated for three groups (posttest). Multivariate analysis of covariance was used to examine the effect of pretest and treatment. Findings: The results of multivariate covariance analysis showed that there is a signifiant difference between divorce applicant clients in experimental and control groups in terms of the dependent variable of intimacy (P< 0/0001). Conclusion: Therefore, all hypotheses concerning the effectiveness of family therapy based on metacognitive therapy and mindfulness on marital intimacy among divorce applicant clients were confimed. The results also showed that the two methods of mindfulness and metacognitive therapy have almost the same effect.