Emotionally Focused Therapy
WHAT IS EMOTIONALLY FOCUSED THERAPY?
Emotionally focused therapy is a form of marriage and family therapy available in Chiang Mai that has been around for over thirty years. It focuses on the emotions and the patterns that those emotions help to create within the family. Within its history is a great amount of scientific research supporting that this form of therapy helps alleviate a lot of stress within a family unit.
Families will come in all shapes and sizes. For some families, people may not even be related to one another. What comes naturally with couples and families in conflict. It is quite a normal experience to have fights.
Like all families, however, there comes a time when the fights are not going anywhere. Or they are happening every day. Or it is simply getting too much for one or more in the family to bear. That is the time to reach out to a counsellor, and in Chiang Mai, a marriage and family therapist can help you and your family learn to talk more and fight less.
In emotionally focused therapy, the feelings people have guide and shape patterns of behaviour and communication, These become regular patterns and habits that we have. For example, we may simply get into the habit of when our child questions why we do things to react with anger and hostility to shut that down. This can grow into more and more complex habits and behaviour patterns within the family that are not only unhelpful but downright unhealthy.
In EFT, the counsellor will look at the ways that each person attaches others. This form of bond impacts how we interact with them, and how we interact with the world. The earliest attachments we have come from being an infant and bonding with our parents. The emotions that come from attachments, more specifically how secure or insecure we may feel to people we bond with, lead to ways we act and react to them.
The goal of EFT is to help people identify their emotions, and communicate them in a clearer, and more effective way. With this, a couple or family can create a safer and more secure bond, overcoming all of the old information about the world that we may have learned when we were just infants.
How Can Emotionally Focused Therapy Help?
Emotionally focused therapy focuses on patterns of behaviour with other people and the bond that we may feel or create with others. EFT helps by increasing security and helps create a more secure bond and emotional stability.
In counselling the therapist would be working with the whole family, not just one or two people, to try to recreate the patterns that they have. By watching these patterns, the counsellor will then begin to help change the patterns and the emotions into something more helpful in the long run.
Usually, push-pull dynamics or aloof and unavailable partners are what is seen. These are old wounds that need a little help to heal. The emotions drive how the person interacts with others, and they create these negative interpersonal dynamics, that in the end, just cause stress and conflict.
Learning new ways of interacting, slower ourselves down so that we can act in a different and better way will help us feel more secure and attached to the other family members. The stronger attachment will lead to better and healthier family life.
Benefits of Emotionally Focused Therapy
Following the research we have available, EFT can help reduce the intensity and quantity of the fighting and discord that any family has. Fights will become less painful and more productive.
As everyone knows, fighting and disagreements are very common in any group of people, but families seem especially susceptible to this. By creating more secure bonds and helping people attach in healthier and more productive ways, these disagreements will be less common and the couple or family will find relief.
Another benefit to using EFT to help with a marriage or family issue is that since it focuses on attachments, it works with the emotions of the individual as well. The benefit here is obvious. Each person in the family will find their moods and emotional states improving as a happy side effect of going through this therapy.
Where to Find an Experienced Marriage and Family Therapist in Thailand
If you find yourself pushed to a point where you feel like you need someone to talk with about family or marriage issues, then please visit our counselling team page
Our counsellors are very experienced in couples therapy and Thai /Western relationship counselling. We provide professional help and support in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and online.
Please contact us in confidence about any family or marital issues that you may be having. We are here to help you and can provide the counselling that you need to help with your situation.