Dr. Tara Gralnick, Ph.D., C.Psych
Co-Founder • Director of Clinical Training • Clinical Psychologist
Dr. Tara Gralnick, Ph.D., C.Psych
Co-Founder, Director of Clinical Training, Clinical Psychologist
Dr. Tara Gralnick is a co-founder of eFIT Institute, Director of Clinical Training, and a registered clinical psychologist. At the heart of Tara's work is the belief that meaningful psychological change happens when people feel sufficiently understood and supported to move beyond talking about their difficulties and begin working with the deeper emotional experiences underneath them.
Tara's primary therapeutic approach is Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT). She has completed all three levels of advanced EFT training with pioneers in the field and brings this depth of training to both her clinical work and her leadership of psychotherapy within the Evolve Therapy Program. EFT helps people understand how emotions, particularly those shaped through painful or unmet experiences earlier in life, can continue to influence how they see themselves, relate to others, and respond to situations in the present. Therapy involves not simply understanding these patterns intellectually, but working directly with the emotions themselves so that longstanding experiences of shame, fear, sadness, anger, or inadequacy can begin to change.
This approach is particularly well suited to Tara's clinical interests. She has extensive experience working with anxiety, depression, PTSD and complex trauma, low self-worth, self-criticism, relationship difficulties, perfectionism, OCD, psychosis, and overwhelming emotions. She has a particular interest in interpersonal trauma and in helping people understand and transform the shame and self-stigma that can develop when painful experiences become internalized as beliefs about who they are.
Tara earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Toronto and completed her pre-doctoral residency through the Calgary Clinical Psychology Residency Program, with specialized rotations in hospital-based mood disorders, psychosis, and community mental health. She subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton, where she co-developed and evaluated a novel group Cognitive Behavioural Therapy intervention for people experiencing both social anxiety and psychosis. Her broader clinical experience includes work at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), DBT Hamilton, and West End Psychological Services.
Research has remained an important part of Tara's work. Her doctoral research examined how people can better understand and intentionally shape aspects of their personality as part of psychological growth. Today, she and Dr. Katherine Gardhouse are conducting research through McMaster University on the group therapy model developed at eFIT, supported by research grant funding through Mitacs Accelerate. This work reflects an important part of eFIT's approach: the therapeutic models developed within the Evolve Therapy Program are not intended to remain static. They are being systematically studied and refined as the team works to better understand how intensive emotional processing and integrated care can support meaningful psychological change.
Tara brings this combination of emotional depth, scientific curiosity, and clinical rigour to her leadership within the Evolve Therapy Program.
As Director of Clinical Training, Tara provides EFT supervision to therapists across the eFIT psychology team and clinical guidance to the integrated Evolve Therapy Team. An important part of her role is helping ensure that psychotherapy within the Evolve Therapy Program remains rigorous, ethical, client-centred, and grounded in a sophisticated understanding of how psychological change occurs. She supports therapists in looking beyond symptoms toward the emotional processes, histories, relationships, unmet needs, and protective strategies that may be organizing a member's difficulties.
Tara and Katherine also co-created the InnerMap and emotional processing group therapies that form the core group psychotherapy model within the Evolve Therapy Program. Together with the psychology team, they co-lead and supervise the group therapy program. InnerMap helps members develop a clearer understanding of the emotional patterns, formative experiences, unmet needs, protective strategies, and ways of relating to themselves and others that have developed across their lives. Emotional processing groups then help members move from understanding these patterns toward working directly with the emotions underneath them, creating opportunities for deeper and more enduring change.
Tara's presence as a therapist is genuine, thoughtful, and deeply attuned. She approaches difficult psychological patterns with curiosity rather than judgment and recognizes that many of the ways people learned to protect themselves developed for understandable reasons. Her work is also informed by cultural humility and an intersectional perspective, with attention to how identity, culture, relationships, inequality, and lived experience can shape both psychological suffering and the therapeutic relationship.
Within the Evolve Therapy Program, Tara helps protect something central to eFIT's philosophy: comprehensive care should never come at the expense of therapeutic depth. Her role spans treatment, clinical supervision, program development, and research, helping ensure that the psychotherapy at the centre of the Evolve Therapy Program continues to be thoughtful, evidence-informed, emotionally precise, and held to a high standard of clinical care.