Editor-in-Chief Lecture: Empathy and Forgiveness as Facilitators of Resilience in Coping with Defections in the Domain of Spouses' Agreement

Being able to live a satisfactory life for young couples and couples with children in a society indicates the right functioning of the social system of this society. When the agenda and strategies for enhancing marital and family life are efficiently published as the report of the research in the specialized field of family counseling, we can remain hopeful that our scientific society has embarked on a transcendental process. Iranian families have experienced suffering and difficulties in life from psych-social problems, and they need the help of efficient researchers to develop the agenda and strategies of counseling for family life enhancement. Because one of the family counseling goals lists is the happiness of family members in a family atmosphere with marital satisfaction. A couple's agreement on some issues, as an important component of marital satisfaction, is necessary to achieve some of these goals. Individual differences in the phenomenal view and the way of describing lived reality are obstacles for spouses to fully agree on some issues. Spouses not reaching a complete agreement about the perspective of family life is a natural occurrence. Even the expectation of complete agreement of spouses is a type of perfectionism that is inconsistent with individual differences and inconsistent with the uniqueness of people's lifestyles and causes disruption in family functions. Empathy deepened with understanding, and forgiveness are abilities that compensate for the defect in the spouses' agreement; empathy, as a communication skill, improves and facilitates the acceptance of differences in the spouse's attitude and performance, and forgiveness, as a component of the ability to love, is a strong obstacle to the tensions and conflicts caused by selfishness and an obstacle to the experience of tension caused by the struggle for power and control. Basic and applied research about empathy and forgiveness in couples' lives, in addition to identifying and explaining the effect mechanism of their role in marital satisfaction and marriage stability, can facilitate the better performance of family counselors in providing marital counseling. The view of Carl Rogers, who was the pioneer of humanistic counseling and psychotherapy, is worth remembering: "Effective empathy is like walking in someone else's shoes and experiencing and representing his/her perspective on the world". Achieving maturity and achieving marital satisfaction requires the experience of agreeableness resulting from empathy in the context of love, acceptance of suffering, and forgiveness.