Emotion-Focused Therapy
Feel Your Way Forward: How Emotion-Focused Therapy Supports Healing
Emotions can be messy! Sometimes they come rushing in—overwhelming, confusing, hard to untangle. Other times, they feel distant or muted, like something inside has gone quiet.
Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) offers a compassionate, structured way to explore and make sense of your emotional experience—especially when things feel confusing, stuck, or out of sync. It’s a gentle but deeply transformative approach that helps you move through emotions, rather than around them, so you can reconnect with what truly matters to you.
What Is Emotion-Focused Therapy?
Developed by Dr. Leslie Greenberg and colleagues, Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) is a research-based approach that views emotions as essential guides. Rather than problems to fix, emotions act as signals—leading you toward what you long for, what’s been missing, and the pain that quietly marks where care or protection was needed.
EFT invites a compassionate, curious engagement with your emotional experience. Instead of pushing feelings away or getting stuck in overthinking, the work involves moving through emotions—so they can do what they’re meant to do: guide, protect, and connect.
This process unfolds within a supportive, collaborative relationship. Together, you and your therapist shape the pace, focus, and goals of therapy in a way that feels attuned, meaningful, and manageable.
Over time, EFT fosters greater emotional awareness, self-compassion, and the emergence of new, empowering emotional experiences. As this unfolds, what once felt heavy or unreachable can begin to soften—making space for clarity, connection, and a renewed sense of purpose in your life and relationships.
Whether you’re navigating a difficult life transition or feeling stuck in painful relationship patterns, EFT offers a way forward—grounded in emotion, guided by connection.
Curious how EFT supports couples in reconnecting? Learn more about Emotion-Focused Therapy for couples here.
How EFT Helps in Individual Therapy
Sometimes it’s hard to make sense of what you’re feeling—or you might not feel much at all. Maybe your emotions come on too strong, or not at all. Maybe you feel disconnected from yourself, uncertain about why you’re reacting the way you are, or just stuck in patterns you can’t quite shift.
EFT helps make sense of your emotional world. It offers a structured way to explore your inner experience and begin to move through what’s been overwhelming, confusing, or shut down.
Together in therapy, we slow down and tune in—gently exploring not just what you feel, but what those feelings might be protecting, pointing to, or calling for.
In session, we might:
Explore what’s happening for you in the present moment
Unpack entrenched patterns like self-criticism, emotional numbing, or always being the ‘responsible one’—adaptive responses that may have once helped but now keep you stuck
Work through long-held emotional pain—such as the ache of feeling fundamentally alone, the shame of not being enough, or the fear that it’s not safe to trust or need others
Gently explore the impact of painful past experiences or early relationships that still shape your present
Strengthen access to inner emotional resources—like self-compassion, strength, protective anger, or clarity about what you truly need
This work unfolds at your pace. It’s guided, not prescriptive. You bring your experience; we shape the process together.
Is EFT Right for Me?
EFT may be especially helpful if you:
Struggle with anxiety, emotional overwhelm, or chronic low mood
Feel cut off from your emotions, or unsure what you’re really feeling
Carry past emotional wounds that still impact your present life or relationships
Feel stuck in patterns of self-criticism, or have been told you’re “too sensitive”
Have tried other therapies, gained insight, but still feel emotionally disconnected or unchanged
Whatever your starting point, EFT helps you listen to what your emotions are trying to say—and transform them in the process. It’s not just about understanding your pain, but beginning to move through it with new emotional clarity and strength.
Let’s Begin the Work Together
Emotion-Focused Therapy offers a supportive, practical approach to understanding your emotions and moving forward with clarity.
If you're curious about how EFT might support you, feel free to get in touch. Together, we can explore what is right for you.
