The Effect of Group Forgiveness-Based Intervention on Marital Intimacy of Women Affected by Infidelity of Spouse

Aims: Infidelity is one of the important problems in marital life which is widely seen in disturbed families and families in which partners feel that they have to get divorced. This phenomenon mainly happens for the purpose of satisfying emotional or sexual needs of the person through extramarital relationships. The present research was conducted by the aim of determining the effect of group forgiveness-based intervention on marital intimacy of women affected by infidelity of  their spouse. Materials & Methods: This semi-experimental research was conducted by pretest-posttest with control group design. The research population included all the women who visited Aram psychological and counseling center in Gorgan city in 2016 because of infidelity of spouse. Among the applicants of participation in the sessions, 30 women (15 subjects per group) were selected by purposeful sampling method, and they were assigned into experiment and control groups through random assignment method. Thompson and Walker’s Marital Intimacy Scale (1983) was used for gathering the data in pretest and posttest stages. Group forgiveness-based intervention was delivered to the experiment group in nine 90-minute sessions. The control group was put on the waiting list. The data analysis was conducted by univariate covariance analysis (ANCOVA) in SPSS v20. Findings: Findings indicated that, after the posttest, there was a significant difference in mean scores of marital intimacy between the experiment and control groups.  In other words, group forgiveness-based intervention led to improvement in marital intimacy among the subjects of the intervention group compared to the control group (p<0.01, F=9.75). Conclusion: Group forgiveness-based intervention creates the ground for improvement in marital intimacy in the marital relationship through reducing negative emotions, increasing positive emotions, and also creating change in the attitude and behavior of the spouse affected by infidelity towards the infidel spouse.