An Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT)-Based Conflict Prevention Program: A Pre-Pilot Study with Non-Clinical Couples

Abstract

Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT) has demonstrated its efficacy treating severe couple conflict. Nevertheless, its capacity to prevent such conflicts before they appear has not been analyzed. The following empirical study examines the effectiveness of a conflict prevention program based on IBCT's main therapeutic strategies (empathic joining, unified detachment). A sample of 12 individuals (six couples) from the Community of Madrid completed the DAS (Spanier, 1976; Martín-Lanas et al., 2017), IBCTQ (Barraca et al., 2017), and ASPA-A (Carrasco, 1996) pre-treatment, posttreatment, and at a three-year follow up. Three of these couples were randomly assigned to the experimental group, in which they received five, 120-minute sessions of an IBCT-based conflict prevention program. The three remaining couples were assigned to a control group and received no treatment. Results indicated that the experimental couples grew in their acceptance of differences and significantly improved their level of empathic joining and unified detachment; they also manifested greater satisfaction in their total DAS score. At the three-year follow up, neither group showed significant changes with regard to their posttreatment scores. Although the data are based on a small number of couples and should be replicated, the results suggest that a program based on IBCT strategies can help prevent couple conflict up to three years after its application.

Keywords: Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy; couple conflict; couple therapy; prevention programs.