Leanne Sawchuk, Psychotherapy & Counselling Services, 276 Frederick Street, Kitchener, ON (2026)

01/18/2026

Any questions?

Just a gentle reminder that feelings, yours or another's, are not a group project or a debate. People are the experts on their own internal experience.

“You shouldn’t feel that way” has never regulated a nervous system or repaired a relationship, nor has "calm down".

Consent applies to emotions too, not just to bodies.

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01/15/2026

I have a new group supervision cohort for Ontario therapists starting in March and wanted to share a bit about the offering.

I’m a Registered Psychotherapist and clinical supervisor, with 13 years in private practice, working with individuals and couples. My clinical work is grounded in a relational and psychodynamic lens, with extensive training in trauma and somatic therapies.

How I approach supervision is shaped by how I practice therapy. I’m interested not only in what we do with clients, but in what the work brings up in us as clinicians. I value spaces where we can think carefully about clinical responsibility while also being honest about uncertainty, countertransference, and the emotional weight of the work. I believe supervision is most effective when it is reflective, relational, and human.

This group supervision will focus on:

*Clinical case consultation
*Relational and countertransference dynamics
*Trauma-informed and somatic perspectives
*Ethical and professional considerations
*Integrating theory with lived clinical experience
*The human lived experience

All supervision hours count toward CRPO requirements. This group is Open to early-career and more experienced therapists. I offer a small group format that supports connection and depth. Each group session is 90 minutes.

If you’d like more information about me, my work, or this group, you can find details here:
https://www.leannesawchuk.com/services/clinical-supervision/group

Feel free to comment or message me with any questions.

01/12/2026

Everyone has moved on. You haven't.
Maybe that isn't the point.
And maybe you're tired of pretending you have too.

Grief doesn't follow rules. It doesn't care that the world kept spinning or that people stopped asking how you're doing. It settles into the body and the breath, into the space between thoughts. It becomes part of how you move through the world, often without language, often alone.

We carry so many kinds of grief. Not just the grief of death, but the grief of endings that were never acknowledged. The grief of relationships that required too much of us. The grief of who we thought we'd be by now. The grief of what happened and the silence that followed.

Grief Untethered is an 8-week online group for adults carrying loss, whatever form it takes. Whether you've lost a person, a relationship, or a version of your life you thought you'd have.

This isn't about fixing your grief or rushing toward some imagined finish line. It's a space to be witnessed. To sit with others who understand what it means to still be holding something the world expects you to have let go of by now.

You don't need the "right" kind of loss. Just a willingness to show up as you are.

📅 8 Mondays beginning February 9, 2026
🕡 6:30 to 8:30 PM Eastern
💻 Online via Zoom, open to all Ontario residents
✨ Covered by most extended health benefits

Limited to 12 participants.
The last three cohorts filled quickly.

If something in you is stirring as you read this, even quietly, you don't have to talk yourself out of it.

Link to learn more -->
https://www.leannesawchuk.com/services/group-therapy/grief-untethered

01/09/2026

We talk about abandonment a lot. About who didn’t show up, who left, and who failed us when we needed them most.

What we talk about far less is when we leave ourselves.

Most people don’t realize they’ve abandoned themselves, because it often doesn’t feel like abandonment. Maybe it feels like maturity, “being the bigger person,” or being so good at anticipating everyone’s needs.

Self-abandonment is what happens when being yourself becomes unsafe. When your feelings were met with silence, tension, or withdrawal. When your needs created distance instead of care. When your truth cost you connection.

So you learned to disappear selectively.

At some point you started editing your reactions, diluting your wants, swallowing the words you really wanted to say. You learned to survive by becoming smaller than your instincts. No one called it harm. They called it maturity. Selflessness. “Emotional control.”

Something I explore often in my work is watching people trace their pain back, not just to who abandoned them, but to the moment they realized staying with themselves was too costly.

At some point something inside you learned a brutal equation early on:

If I stay with myself, I lose you.
So you left.

You left your body by overriding exhaustion, hunger, dread. You left your anger by turning it into self-doubt, silence, shame. You left your knowing by questioning your truth until it went quiet.

This didn’t come from weakness.
It came from a nervous system that learned "connection" required sacrifice.

So you became functional, reliable, and needed, instead of truly known. And now you may wonder why you feel empty in full rooms, why intimacy feels exposing but never relieving, or why your life looks fine but feels hollow.

That’s the residue of self-abandonment.

Healing doesn’t start with self-love.
It starts with grief. With rage. With realizing how long you had to disappear to survive.

Coming back to yourself feels like betrayal at first. But self-abandonment ends the moment you stop negotiating your existence for belonging.
And that moment is rarely gentle.

01/07/2026

I just found out my therapist died.

No warning. Just a single sentence that landed in my chest and refused to move. A sentence that landed me back in that room immediately. The chair I always chose. The way I sat, half braced, half hopeful. The pauses that stretched just long enough for something real to surface. The space between us that somehow felt steady, intentional, and alive.

I have been reflecting on the way she didn’t rush me and the way silence wasn’t empty with her. It held me...she held me. There was this way she held eye contact that felt comforting, not threatening. The way I learned, slowly, that I didn’t have to fill every quiet moment to survive.

She always reminded me of lilies and the colour purple.. Soft, but not fragile, deep, grounded, and unmistakable. That’s where she lives in me now.

She helped save my life. And the truth is, I don’t know if I would be here today if it weren’t for her. As cliché as that sounds, it’s true.

I don't say this because she fixed me, but because she stayed.
Because she never turned away.
Because she made space.
Because she believed I could survive myself before I did.

This is a strange kind of grief. There’s no current relationship to reference. No funeral I will attend. No obvious place to put the gratitude that has nowhere to go, except for here, perhaps.

I’m grieving her, the version of me who once sat across from her, which was raw and unsure, but doing the bravest thing she knew how to do at the time. I’m grieving the fact that I will never get to tell her who I became. I am also aware of the ways in which I carry her with me in the work I do now and how I try to show up.

Her death made me think about my own clients and about the space we share. The chairs they choose and how they sit. The pauses they may carry long after our work ends. The ways therapy, and the therapuetic relaitonship itself, lives inside people quietly, invisibly, sometimes for years.

I wonder how grief shows up when the helper is gone. When the guide becomes a memory. When the person who once helped hold you cannot be found again.

Grief like this can be layered and even arrive late. I’m reminded (again) that grief does not follow rules. And neither does healing.

01/06/2026

Embrace your grief, for there your soul will grow." — Carl Jung

01/05/2026

Grief does not always arrive in tears.
Sometimes it arrives as numbness.
As relief you don’t feel allowed to name.
As guilt that settles heavy in the chest.
As isolation, when the world keeps going and you’re still standing in the wreckage.
As grief for someone who is still breathing, but no longer reachable.

Some grief is loud.
Other grief is quiet, hidden, misunderstood....even by the person carrying it.

If your grief doesn’t fit into a neat box, if it doesn’t look the way you thought it should,it is still grief.

And it still deserves space.

A space for the grief that doesn’t have words yet.

💚 Grief Untethered is an 8-week online grief group for adults in Ontario, beginning February!

Registration is opening soon!
🔗 Link in bio to be added to waiting list.

01/03/2026

Grief does not always arrive in tears.
Sometimes it arrives as numbness.
As relief you don’t feel allowed to name.
As guilt that settles heavy in the chest.
As isolation, when the world keeps going and you’re still standing in the wreckage.
As grief for someone who is still breathing, but no longer reachable.

Some grief is loud.
Other grief is quiet, hidden, misunderstood....even by the person carrying it.

If your grief doesn’t fit into a neat box, if it doesn’t look the way you thought it should,it is still grief.

And it still deserves space.

A space for the grief that doesn’t have words yet.

💚 Grief Untethered is an 8-week online grief group for adults in Ontario, beginning February 2026!

Registration is opening soon!

01/02/2026

A new year doesn’t erase grief, or anything, for that matter.

It doesn’t soften it or tuck it neatly into last year’s calendar. The numbers change, the days keep moving, and still grief comes with you faithfully, quietly, sometimes unbearably. It settles into the body and the breath, into the here and now, into the space between thoughts. It becomes part of how you move through the world.

We carry so many kinds of grief, often without language for them, often alone. Not just the grief of death, but the grief of endings that were never acknowledged. The grief of relationships that required too much of us. The grief of losing parts of ourselves just to belong. The grief of carrying expectations we never agreed to, never chose, but somehow learned to hold anyway.

There is also the grief of being hurt. The kind that leaves you searching for words while the world grows quiet around you. The grief of what happened and the grief of the silence that followed. The grief of contorting yourself to fit into spaces never designed with you in mind. The grief of being judged, misunderstood, seen through someone else’s unhealed lens and having that version of you stick.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on how grief reorganized my life into befores and afters.
Before I knew what it cost to keep the peace.
Before I understood how deeply disrespect erodes the soul.
Before I stopped abandoning myself in small, quiet ways.

And alongside that reflection, something else has emerged - clarity. While many things will never be what I imagined, I now sit with different questions. Not what did I lose, but what do I want the after to feel like?

There are answers I didn’t have then. Hard-earned ones. I know what matters. I will always carry grief, but I’m learning to carry it with intention, honesty, and dignity.

If this resonates, you’re not alone.

💚 Grief Untethered is an 8-week online group where grief in all its forms is welcomed and witnessed. You don’t need the “right” kind of loss, just a willingness to show up as you are.

🔗 in bio.

01/01/2026

A new year doesn’t erase grief, or anything, for that matter.

It doesn’t soften it. It doesn’t tidy it up or tuck it neatly into last year’s calendar. The numbers change, the days keep moving, and still, grief comes with you faithfully, quietly, sometimes unbearably. It settles into the body and the breath. Into the here and now. Into the space between thoughts. It becomes part of how you move through the world.

We carry so many kinds of grief, often without language for them, often alone. Not just the grief of death, but the grief of endings that were never acknowledged. The grief of relationships that required too much of us. The grief of losing parts of ourselves just to belong. The grief of carrying expectations that were placed on us...expectations we never agreed to, never chose, but somehow learned to hold anyway.

There is also the grief of being hurt. The kind that leaves you searching for words while the world grows quiet around you. The grief of what happened and the grief of the silence that followed. The grief of contorting yourself to fit into spaces that were never designed with you in mind. The grief of being judged. Of being misunderstood. Of being seen through someone else’s unhealed lens and having that version of you stick.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on how grief has reorganized my life into befores and afters.
Before I knew what it cost me to keep the peace.
Before I understood how deeply disrespect erodes the soul.
Before I stopped abandoning myself in small, quiet ways.

And alongside that reflection, something else has been emerging - clarity.

While there are so many things that will never be what I once imagined, I find myself sitting with a different set of questions now. Not what did I lose, but what do I want the after to feel like? What has been revealed? What do I see now that I couldn’t see before?

There are answers now that I didn’t have then. Hard-earned answers.
I know that doing my best is enough, even when it disappoints others.
I know what matters. I know who matters.

I feel like integrating grief and the clarity that has been revealed as made me a living archive of love, loss, endurance, and truth. Grief has sharpened my discernment and clarified my values.

I will always carry grief.
But I am learning how to carry it differently.
With intention. With honesty. With dignity.

If this resonates and if something in you tightened or softened while reading this, you are not alone, even if it has felt that way.

💚 Grief Untethered is an 8-week online group where grief in all its forms is welcomed and witnessed. This is a space for the grief that was never named, the harm that was followed by silence, and the parts of you learning how to live in the after.

You don’t need the “right” kind of loss to belong here.
You just need to be willing to show up as you are.

12/31/2025

Grief is not reserved for death alone.
That’s just the kind we’re most comfortable naming.

But grief lives in quieter places too.
In endings that didn’t come with casseroles.
In losses that no one gathered around us for.
In moments where life simply… changed....and never changed back.

We grieve relationships that ended without closure.
We grieve people who are still breathing, but no longer reachable.
We grieve the version of a parent, a partner, or a friend who slowly disappeared before our eyes.
We grieve the life we were building and the one we were sure was coming.

We grieve our health.
Our identities.
Our sense of safety.
The timeline we trusted.
The dreams we quietly released because holding onto them hurt too much.

Some grief is loud and undeniable.
Other grief is invisible, even to ourselves at times.
It shows up as heaviness, irritability, numbness, exhaustion.
As the sense that something is wrong, but you can’t quite point to where it broke.

If you’ve been carrying something heavy and telling yourself,
“I shouldn’t feel this way,”
or “Others have it worse,”
or “This doesn’t count as grief”....

Maybe this is the permission you didn’t know you were waiting for.

Grief is the reflection of connection.
Sometimes it reflects what was lost.
Sometimes it reflects what never got the chance to exist.
Both can ache just as deeply.

And none of it needs to be rushed, minimized, or carried alone.

If something in this stirred recognition, if your body softened or your chest tightened, you’re not imagining it. There is room for what you’re holding.

📣Grief Untethered is back - this time as an 8-week online group for adults in Ontario who are ready to tend to their grief with honesty, gentleness, and depth.

You don’t need the “right” kind of loss to belong here.

Registration opening soon. Limited spots available.
Get yourself added to the waiting list --> https://forms.gle/yHkboPMsNSL9wopa7

12/15/2025

Amongst other things, I am a Relational Psychotherapist and I am often asked what that means, exactly. Here's the coles notes version.

Being a relational psychotherapist means I don’t just listen to *what* you say. I pay attention to *how* you say it. I notice when you pull away, when you perform, when your voice softens right before you tell the truth. I’m listening for what lives underneath the words, because that’s often where the real story is.

I’m also paying close attention to the space between us. In relational work, that space matters. It often mirrors the ways you’ve learned to connect, protect yourself, brace for loss, or long for closeness in every other relationship you’ve had.

What unfolds between us isn’t incidental, it’s information.

While all psychotherapists are trained to support insight, healing, and symptom relief, relational psychotherapy places the relationship itself at the center of the work. I don’t believe pain lives in isolation. It lives in patterns and attachment wounds shaped in relationships that were inconsistent, conditional, or unsafe. Those patterns don’t just get talked about; they show up in real time, in the room.

I have no interest in sitting outside your experience pretending to be neutral or untouched. I will show up with you. Not to rescue. Not to fix. But to notice, together, how closeness feels, how conflict lands, how abandonment echoes, how love gets negotiated when it’s uncertain or hard. The therapeutic relationship becomes a living space where these dynamics can be seen, named, and slowly transformed.

Sometimes that means gently naming what’s happening right here. Sometimes it means noticing when you expect me to leave, or when you brace for rupture. Sometimes it means being upset with me and naming that, and holding steady when old patterns are asking for a familiar ending. And yes, occasionally it means pointing out that the way you’re relating with me is the same way you relate everywhere else, always with care, timing, and compassion.

Relational therapy isn’t about becoming “better.” It’s about becoming aware. about It’s deep work. Messy work. Human work.

It’s not quick. It’s not tidy. But it’s real.

Leanne Sawchuk, Psychotherapy & Counselling Services

01/18/2026

01/15/2026

01/12/2026

01/09/2026

01/07/2026

01/06/2026

01/05/2026

01/03/2026

01/02/2026

01/01/2026

12/31/2025

12/15/2025

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