Emotion-Focused Therapy in Newmarket
Emotions are not problems to be managed. They are information — the most important information we have about what matters, what hurts, and what we need. Emotion-Focused Therapy helps you access, understand, and work with your emotional experience rather than around it. For individuals and couples, in person in Newmarket and online across Ontario.
What is Emotion-Focused Therapy?
Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) is an evidence-based, experiential psychotherapy developed by Drs Leslie Greenberg, Sue Johnson, and Robert Elliott in the 1980s and 1990s. It is grounded in research showing that emotions are central to who we are, what we need, and how we change — and that change happens most powerfully when emotion itself is engaged in the therapeutic process.
EFT works directly with the felt sense — the body's emotional experience — rather than only thinking about emotion at a distance. Through a structured, attuned therapeutic relationship, your therapist helps you access emotions that have been pushed aside, understand what they are telling you, and transform painful emotional patterns at their roots.
EFT exists in two main forms: EFT for individuals (sometimes called Process-Experiential Therapy) and Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT). Both are practised at Newmarket Therapy Centre, often integrated with IFS, somatic approaches, and EMDR.
The six phases of EFT
EFT follows a structured but flexible progression — meeting you where you are emotionally, then gently helping the deeper, transformative work unfold.
Building safety & attunement
The work begins with a therapeutic relationship of warmth, attunement, and safety. Without this, deeper emotional work is not possible. Your therapist takes time to genuinely meet you where you are.
Identifying emotional patterns
Together you begin to identify the emotional patterns that have been quietly running your life — the avoidance, the chronic reactivity, the feelings that have been pushed underground.
Accessing primary emotion
Underneath the surface emotion — often anxiety, anger, or numbness — is the primary emotion: the deeper, more vulnerable feeling that has not had space to be felt. EFT helps you access it safely.
Working with painful emotion
Rather than avoiding or controlling difficult feelings, EFT helps you stay with them — long enough to receive their information and let them complete. This is where transformation begins.
Generating new emotion
EFT understands that emotion is best changed by emotion. New, healthier emotional experiences are accessed and built in session — replacing the old painful ones at the level where they live.
Consolidation & integration
The shifts that happen in session are integrated into daily life — into relationships, into how you respond to yourself, into how you move through the world. The change becomes who you are.
Emotions are not the problem. The problem is what we have learned to do with them — push them down, leap over them, manage them at arm's length. EFT helps you meet them, finally, and let them complete.
Newmarket Therapy CentreHow EFT works at Newmarket Therapy Centre
EFT at Newmarket Therapy Centre is collaborative, paced, and deeply experiential. Your therapist works carefully within what your nervous system can manage, never rushing toward difficult emotion before there is sufficient safety to meet it.
- 1
A free intake call with Susan
Our Client Care Manager will listen to what is bringing you in and match you with an EFT-trained therapist whose style fits what you need.
- 2
Building the therapeutic relationship
Early sessions are about building safety, trust, and attunement. This relational foundation is not preliminary work — it is what makes everything else possible.
- 3
Working with emotion in session
Through guided experiential exercises, focusing techniques, and chair-work, your therapist helps you engage with emotion directly — not only talk about it from a distance.
- 4
Transforming emotion with emotion
EFT is built on the principle that emotion is best changed by other emotion. New emotional experiences accessed in session reshape the old painful patterns at their root.
What EFT helps with
EFT is used for a wide range of individual and relational difficulties — particularly those where emotional experience has become blocked, overwhelming, or central to the suffering.
The benefits of EFT
- Genuine, durable change at the felt-sense level
- Reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety
- Healing of unresolved emotional injuries
- Greater capacity to feel emotion without overwhelm
- Improved emotional regulation in everyday life
- Deeper connection in close relationships
- Increased self-compassion and self-acceptance
- Strong results for couples through EFCT
Our Registered Psychotherapists and Social Workers are trained in EFT for both individuals and couples, as part of an integrative, personalised approach to care. EFT is available for individuals, couples, and adolescents, in person in Newmarket or online across Ontario.
Frequently asked questions
Ready to work with what you feel?
Start with a free 20-minute call with Susan, our Client Care Manager. She will listen to what is bringing you in and personally match you with an EFT-trained therapist best suited to you — for individual work or for couples (EFCT).
- 1 Book a free call
- 2 Talk with Susan
- 3 Meet your therapist
Prefer to call? (289) 500-8039 · [email protected]