Emotion-Focused Therapy is built on a simple but powerful idea: 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. EFT helps you access, understand, and work with your emotional experience rather than around it.
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 just 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.
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A free intake call with Susan
Our Client Care Manager Susan will listen to what is bringing you in and match you with an EFT-trained therapist whose style fits what you need.
- 02
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.
- 03
Working with emotion in session
Through guided experiential exercises, focusing techniques, and chair-work, your therapist helps you engage with emotion directly — not just talk about it from a distance.
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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.
The Benefits of EFT
EFT has strong empirical support across individual and couples work, with substantial evidence for depression, anxiety, complex trauma, and relational difficulties.
- Genuine, durable emotional change at the felt-sense level
- Reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety
- Healing of unresolved emotional injuries
- Greater capacity to feel and tolerate emotion without overwhelm
- Improved emotional regulation in everyday life
- Deeper connection in close relationships
- Resolution of long-standing emotional patterns
- Increased self-compassion and self-acceptance
- Powerful results for couples (EFCT) — 70-75% significant improvement
- Suitable for combining with trauma-focused and parts-based work
What EFT Is Used For
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.
EFT at Newmarket Therapy Centre
Our Registered Psychotherapists and Social Workers at Newmarket Therapy Centre are trained in EFT for both individuals and couples. EFT is available for individuals, couples, and adolescents.
Sessions are available in person at Newmarket Therapy Centre or online for clients anywhere in Ontario. If you are looking specifically for Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT), please mention this when you contact us so Susan can match you with an EFCT-trained therapist on our team.
Ready to Get Started?
Our intake team is here to answer your questions and match you with the right EFT-trained therapist at Newmarket Therapy Centre. No commitment required.