Background & aim: Couple burnout is one of the phenomena which involve many couples, it is among the main causes of emotional divorce, and without proper management and treatment, and it can lay the ground for formal divorce among couples. Cognitive behavioral couple therapy is one of the existing approaches in the couple therapy field, the efficiency of which has been established for resolving many marital problems. The present study was designed by the aim of investigating the effect of group cognitive behavioral couple therapy on couple burnout and divorce tendency in couples.  

Methods: The present research was of applied research type. The research method was semi-empirical with a pretest-posttest with control group design. The research population included all the couples with marital conflict and problems who, after a recall announcement of the researcher, visited the counseling and psychological services center located in Gorgan city in 2014. By using the available sampling method, 20 couples were selected among the volunteer and qualified couples for the research, and they were assigned into experiment and control groups (10 couples per group) by random assignment. In the present research, the Pines burnout questionnaire (1996) and divorce tendency scale of Rouswelt, Johnson, and Mouro (1986) were used for gathering the data. After taking the pretest, the group cognitive behavioral couple therapy based on the couple therapy model of Baucom  and colleagues (2008) was held in 10 2-hour weekly sessions for the experiment group couples, while the control group couples received no intervention. The data were analyzed through descriptive statistics method and multivariate covariance analysis (MANCOVA) in SPSS v.20.

Results: The multivariate covariance analysis results for couple burnout (F= 28.80) and divorce tendency (F= 51.25) suggested that there was a significant difference between the couples of experiment and control groups (P< 0.01). According to the posttest scores of the experiment control groups for these two variables, it was recognized that the cognitive behavioral couple therapy has led to reduction in couple burnout and divorce tendency among the couples of the experiment group in comparison to the control group in the posttest stage.   

Conclusion: The research findings indicate that the cognitive behavioral couple therapy model can reduce marital problems, and using this couple therapy approach is recommended for working with the couples involved in marital problems with divorce demand.