Book excerpt: Through Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), clients learn to rule their emotions, instead of letting their emotions rule them. With guidance from a skilled EFT therapist to help them identify, experience, accept, and tolerate difficult emotions, people can learn to regulate, explore, make sense of, transform, and flexibly manage their emotions. As a result, they become more skilled in responding adaptively to situations as they arise. EFT therapists help individuals and couples engage in productive emotional processing. They also offer methods to help clients become aware of their emotional needs. In this book readers will learn to: conceptualize clients' core emotions in order to form a focus of therapy guide clients through the process of emotional change, and structure therapy in an ongoing fashion, recognize key emotional markers, and facilitate the tasks needed to move to the next phase. This handbook offers a comprehensive tour of EFT research and applications for all common mental health issues including depression, anxiety, interpersonal trauma, personality disorders, and eating disorders.