The Greenberg Institute of Emotion Focused Therapy is one of the training centres of the International Society for Emotion Focused Therapy (ISEFT) which was founded in 2011.

Dr. Serine Warwar is the Director and Founder of The Greenberg Institute of Emotion-Focused Therapy. This institute is committed to therapy practice, education, training, research, and the development and dissemination of Emotion-Focused Therapy.  

Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) is an evidence-based, integrative, experiential, humanistic therapy which incorporates person-centered, gestalt, and existential therapies and was originally known as process-experiential therapy.  The goal of EFT is to help clients enhance their emotional processing which, in addition to resolving pain and suffering, promotes a type of emotional competence as it allows individuals to live more vitally, guided by their adaptive emotions, and in turn assists clients in developing more secure relationships. Emotional processing is defined as: approaching, accepting, symbolizing, tolerating, regulating, making meaning of, and utilizing or transforming emotions. Using a diagnostic emotion system that differentiates emotion types and how to work with each, EFT targets maladaptive emotion schemes, related to the underlying painful causes of clients’ issues, using evidence-based marker-guided interventions to facilitate emotional processing. EFT involves a therapeutic style that involves following and guiding the client’s experiential process, with an emphasis on providing an empathic relationship and facilitating therapeutic work focused on emotion. Through the therapeutic process, adaptive emotions are accessed to transform maladaptive emotions, and the therapist helps clients to develop positive identity and relationship narratives.

EFT was originally developed to treat depression by Dr. Leslie Greenberg, in collaboration with Dr. Robert Elliott and Dr. Laura Rice (for individual therapy) and Dr. Sue Johnson and Dr. Leslie Greenberg (for couples' therapy) and has since evolved into an evidence-based approach for treating a wide range of client populations (couples, families, individuals) and emotional issues (social anxiety, generalized anxiety, depression, trauma, emotional injury, eating disorders). EFT has had a significant impact on the field of psychotherapy and has generated considerable research on in-session processes and outcomes and has contributed significantly to our understanding of the in-session mechanisms of change that alleviate pain and suffering. It is viewed as a transdiagnostic psychotherapy approach that has developed systematic and flexible principles and methods focused on working with core underlying, painful emotions to transform emotional pain and suffering. It has evolved into a comprehensive theory of functioning and clinical practice, which asserts that emotional change is central to enduring change. Providing an empathically, attuned therapeutic relationship that is facilitative to working with emotions is central to this approach.