EMOTH 4 pager
EMOTH / Emotional Map of the Home
a new therapeutic tool to explore family relationships
https://emoth.experimaps.com/en/
"Home is like a mirror."
Indeed, the home reveals much about the history and current life of a person, couple, or family. If we dare to look into this mirror, it shows us the joys, the sorrows, the difficulties, and the resources.
EMOTH is a toolbox that can be used to visualize and discuss the emotional experiences of individuals
and families in the home. We designed EMOTH to support the everyday work of helping professionals:
room cardsin three sizes, furniture markers, individual emotion markers, and colored pawns to represent
family members.
How is EMOTH used during the consultation?
- Build the layout of the home using the room cards. Use the furniture markers to furnish the home.
- Find the places of emotional experiences and place the experience markers.
- Participants Interpret the emotional map together with the professional. Engage in interviewing
using question cards. Use also the pawns representing the family members. - Specific life situations and relationship patterns can be explored by moving the experience
markers and the pawns.
How does the EMOTH contribute to achieving the aim of the consultation? The mapping of experiences and the interview linked to emotionally meaningful home scenes make it possible to articulate hard-to-verbalize, unconscious relational events. The display of an emotional map using EMOTH cards also engages visuality in the process of understanding. In this way, EMOTH makes the consultation experiential for both family members and the professional.
“Where is the place of security for you in your home?” This is the first question we ask when we talk
about the emotional map of the home.
How do we create our sense of security at home?
How do family members’ experiences of security diverge or converge?
Do they share their place of security at home?
What is the role of family members’ separate “safe refuges” at home?
From our therapeutic experience, we know that exploring the emotional context of the home environment can provide important insights for family members. This can lead to new understandings. This is precisely the change that can become the primary outcome of a therapeutic process.
The EMOTH tool opens the door to stories 💬 that help us understand the relational processes behind the
perceptions of security.
Let’s see how it works 👀
👉 Working with adolescents can be challenging at times. For example, how does the adolescent's
emotional isolation show up on the emotional map of the home? Precisely this is what is shown in the
picture below:
Using the EMOTH toolkit, you can invite adolescents to visualize their emotional experiences.
In family therapy, you can do this in the presence of their parents, where parents can also show their
emotional maps to their children. Emotion markers can help even adolescents who are reluctant to talk
about their feelings express their distressing or reassuring experiences. Once a child's emotional map
becomes visible to parents, a new understanding is triggered in parents: they see a picture of experiences
that have never been expressed, even though they are present every day.
At this point, the consultation process takes a quick and effective turn!
👉 How can the EMOTH tool support your work with couples?
The partners' emotional map of the home also reveals the resilient and the vulnerable aspects of the
relationship. Look at the two pictures below. What are the signs of relationship resources?
The couple has a shared safe space (in the living room), which is also linked to the well-being of both of
them. They have a shared experience of togetherness in the kitchen area, which suggests positive daily
rituals.
Vulnerability may be indicated by the fact that the mother experiences tension/suffering in the middle of
the home (the hallway), while the father does not perceive tension/suffering at all (he has placed the
suffering marker outside). The bedroom is emotionally empty in the father's map, and can only be a place
of well-being for the mother.
These observations open the door to a shared understanding of the different realities of the partners and
the dynamics of the couple relationship.
👉 How to use the EMOTH tool with families?
Where do you feel safe and secure at home? Where do you feel tension or suffering? Is there togetherness
for you at home? Too often, family members misunderstand each other because they don’t ask each
other these questions. With the EMOTH tool, we can invite family members to talk about their emotional
experiences that are otherwise hidden.
Look at the emotional map of a patchwork family:
The moment was striking when we grouped their emotional experiences together on the same layout of
their home. They could readily see why they had so many conflicts. There was no room in their home
where they could have shared feelings. Instead, they had clashing experiences everywhere: the parents’
well-being meets with the insecurity of the adolescent. And the adolescent’s room, the only place of his
security and well-being, was filled with the insecurity of the parents. The adolescent had no place to
experience togetherness with the parents. As painful as the insight is, looking at each other’s genuine
emotions can open a route to a deep conversation.
👉 You can check out our research article where we interviewed couples using the previous
(drawing) version of EMOTH (EMHI). We explored dyadic processes in coping with chronic illness:
Sallay, V., Martos, T., Chatfield, S. L., & Dúll, A. (2019). Strategies of Dyadic Coping and Self-Regulation in the Family Homes of Chronically Ill Persons: A Qualitative Research Study Using the Emotional Map of the Home Interview Method.
Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00403/full
👉 In case you are interested in the English/French version, please email to pre-order:
sallay.viola@gmail.com.
We invite you to join the community of professionals using emotional mapping and the EMOTH method. Looking forward to meeting you soon 🤗 🤗