What slows the spiral: being witnessed

Tending Notes · Issue 03 · August 25, 2026

Tending Notes is a monthly field note for therapists building a practice, solo, in a group, or in some other form. This one is about witnessing and why "good enough" may be easier to accept when someone we trust, or who holds similar values, is in the room.

The Field Note

I've been reflecting on a conversation about consultation I had a few weeks ago, sparked by the question I'd left you with last issue: where do you feel you are on the path right now, and what is that one quiet thing in your practice that is worth noticing? It touched on both clinical consultation and administrative consultation, but we kept circling back to something simpler: the importance of just asking about someone's progress. How is this landing? How are you doing? What's new?

What we were reaching for was more than the drive-by of pleasantries. "How you doing?" "Good." Both parties move on. As a born and raised New Yorker, I've seen this art perfected; the exchange happens, and you only really get to follow up if you happen to land in that same social situation again a month or a year later.

To ask someone, or yourself, how what you're producing is landing requires a different kind of presence. A presence that involves real curiosity and some form of shared, ongoing connection.

As therapists, we do this naturally with our clients. We commit to the work, engage with curiosity, and maintain connection through the frequency we agree to meet, but what is really happening within that structure is something more human, attunement, or at the very least, regard. As supervisors, we help new therapists attune to the subtle shifts that happen while holding the relational field with care. As practice consultants, we help therapists attend to the business side of their work, too, knowing that this side shapes how clients feel about the practice and how we feel about it ourselves.

We write our websites, posts, and flyers to attune to prospective clients. What we're really communicating is our willingness to witness their self-discovery and growth regularly. As leaders of a practice, solo or otherwise, how do we witness ourselves? How do we answer the question, how is all of what I'm building landing, against the vision I set out with?

I think about a younger version of myself here, researching and developing experiential learning programs, feeling like I just wanted to get there already, past the mess of the process and into some version of myself that had finally arrived. It took years to find compassion for that anxious part of me, and to be willing to just be in the space of the journey instead. To work within good enough.

I wonder if what we call the spiral of thoughts during the creation phase, the one where we can't stop turning over what needs to happen next, is partly what happens in a chamber with no other voice answering back. In that kind of system, the volume of the question has nowhere to go but up, because the need to be heard, witnessed, or responded to hasn't been met.

Perhaps what actually slows the spiral is being witnessed by another, and it's that slowing down that makes it possible to accept good enough, rather than reaching for whatever the spiral is demanding next.

I recognize I may be speaking from a biased place here, shaped by both AEDP and DBT, where growth and healing seem to happen in the presence of another, not in isolation, and where learning and discovery often come from the dialectical process of communing with someone else.

One thing worth tending to

Even writing this, I found myself trying to remember who once said, or maybe only implied, that witnessing involves the other regarding you regarding yourself. If that rings a bell for anyone, send me the source; I'd genuinely appreciate it.

Opening the Tending Circle is an invitation for other therapists and for me to witness ourselves and each other as we show up in the process. This coworking initiative is fully exploratory; there's no formal consultation group attached to it, but I hold real hope for what it might grow into, formally and informally.

A question worth sitting with

Zoom out: think of a time when a simple validation of your experience pulled you out of the spiral. Now zoom in: who witnesses you in the business side of your practice, and who, in turn, do you witness?

Something worth knowing

In the spirit of witnessing, the Slack space is quietly being built out, hopefully with a handful more of us joining over the next couple of weeks. My hope is that it grows into a place to share resources and start threads together, colleague to colleague.

And for anyone interested, the Tending Circle opens September 8th, meeting Tuesdays from 10 to 12, a professionally held space for therapists navigating the business side of their work, whether in solo practice, group practice, or something in between. The first Tuesday of each month is a check-in; the remaining weeks are dedicated coworking time, space to engage with the business side of your work, or anything adjacent that supports it, studying for a certification, working toward licensure, whatever that looks like for you. If Tuesdays don't work, let me know what would; there may be others in the community interested in starting a second group on a different day and time.

Checking the Compass

Tending Notes · Issue 02 · July 21, 2026

Tending Notes is a monthly field note for therapists building a solo practice. This one is about pausing mid-year to notice what your practice already reflects about your values, and whether the shape of your week matches what you actually meant to build.

The Field Note

I keep thinking about summer the way I used to think about it in school, less as a break, more as a season for exploration, reflection, and planning before fall and winter arrive, and eventually the new year.

In private practice, the things we plant now, marketing, new partnerships, the slow work of networking, tend to take about six months to actually bear fruit. Which means much of what shapes next January is being decided right now, even quietly.

And in those six months, we're still in it. Billing. Documentation. The ordinary upkeep of running a practice. All the systems of accountability that, however necessary, can pull our attention away from checking our own compass.

With clients, we often start with values, and from there, almost alongside it, we move into goals. I think it's worth asking whether we extend ourselves the same process. Vision, I think, is values given shape over time, often with some hope folded in too, hope for what the work could become, for who we're becoming inside it.

Sometimes that shows up as confirmation if we stop to notice it. Balance has been a value I've worked toward throughout my career, as a program director and as a business owner. It was a few years before the pandemic when I actually stopped and felt grateful that the balance I wanted was already there, built into the shape of my week, the same rhythm that's followed me since my days in community-based case management.

That moment of noticing did something. It let me feel the ease that comes with effort that's actually aligned, and it gave me a clearer sense of exactly where my boundaries were. So when something came along that didn't match my values, I could recognize it and actually pivot.

Maybe that's what checking the compass actually is. Not an audit. Just pausing long enough to notice what's already true. If you're on the path, let yourself feel that. If you're not, that's information too, the kind that only means something once you actually stop, be with it, and let yourself see where that wave of experience takes you. My hope is that something in that noticing can be transformative, simply because we finally let ourselves be present for it.

I don't know that I have it fully figured out for myself either. I'm just sitting with it this summer, and wondering if you might be too.

One thing worth tending to

Checking the compass offers real opportunities in both directions. If you confirm you're on the right track, how might you celebrate that, or simply let yourself feel the recognition? And if you notice you've drifted further from your values than you realized, how do you honor yourself for taking the time to notice at all?

Anyone who knows compasses well knows that even the slightest shift, left uncorrected, can lead you far astray over time. That's exactly why checking in regularly matters. Both directions are opportunities.

If checking the compass surfaces something, it might look like a fee that hasn't moved in years, even though you no longer feel undervalued the way you did when you set it. It might look like spending hours each month untangling your own bookkeeping, when what you actually value is protecting your time for clinical work, and the misalignment isn't the bookkeeping itself; it's that you've been doing it alone instead of bringing in a CPA who actually understands therapy practices. Or it might be marketing yourself broadly because a wide net used to feel safer, even after you've learned which clients you actually do your best work with.

If you notice these subtle shifts, positions that aren't quite pointing toward your values, or in some cases pointing in the complete opposite direction, you don't have to do anything about it yet. Just let yourself know it's there. That alone is a form of honesty most of us don't get much credit for.

A question (or two) worth sitting with

Where do you feel that you're on the path right now? And where, if anywhere, do you feel something quieter, not wrong exactly, just worth noticing?

Something worth knowing

In September, I'm opening something I've been building for a while, The Tending Circle, a small community for therapists in solo practice. More on that as it gets closer.

In the meantime, I started a small Slack space a few weeks ago. It's quiet, in the best way, a place where a handful of us drop in with whatever we're noticing, sometimes a sentence, sometimes nothing at all. No pressure to post, no pressure to perform insight. Just a door that's open if you want it. Come knock.

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A. Meliora Relational Wellness · www.ameliorawellness.com

Written by Jennifer "Ajen" Busher, MBA-HCA, MA, LMFT, founder of A. Meliora Relational Wellness and an AEDP and Brainspotting therapist.

From a place of noticing

Tending Notes · Issue 01 · June 10, 2026

Tending Notes is a monthly field note for therapists building a solo practice. This one grew out of conversations about leadership, hierarchy, and what happens when the structures around a person stop giving witness to therapists and their craft, or perhaps never did.

The field note

Over the last several months I have been party to very rich conversations about what happens to people in leadership when the structures around them create the kind of environment that causes a person to wonder whether their integrity, their whole self, is recognized within the work they are doing.

From what I have been observing, it seems like the flattening of hierarchies has dismantled something that many leaders did not know they were relying on. The peer layer that once made the role bearable. The colleague who understood the weight of the position. The senior relationship that offered context and containment. What remains is a leader surrounded by people who need things from them, with increasingly few who can simply be present to what the role costs.

Rather than offer this from a place of knowing, I offer it from a place of noticing. And what I am noticing in peer conversations is that some therapists in solo private practice may be living a version of the same thing. I wonder if the peer layer is being impacted, and whether this might be exactly the moment to tend to it deliberately.

Many of us chose solo practice deliberately. The autonomy of solo practice is not incidental. It is often the point. The freedom to set your own hours, hold your own caseload, build something that reflects your values without committee approval. That choice is worth honoring.

And yet even a chosen structure has costs. Choosing solo practice does not mean choosing solitude and it does not necessarily mean choosing aloneness. Those are different things. One is a preference. The other is something that happens to us inside the structure we chose, often without our noticing, and sometimes because the structures we align ourselves with, however pragmatically, do not fully honor the values that brought us to this work in the first place.

Some systems, depending on how they are constructed, may quietly overlook those values altogether. I am thinking that this is not necessarily by design, but by indifference. And what moves into that space is often something evaluative, extractive, and entirely indifferent to the person doing it. What fills it may be tokens or productivity points, the kind of recognition that measures output rather than witnesses the person producing it.

Accountability has a watcher. Someone or something is checking. Even when it is self-imposed, there is a quality of surveillance in it. It is useful. It produces results. But it does not change anything at the level of identity or meaning. And when the system does not know you, it cannot witness you. It can only measure you.

Witnessing is different.

Being witnessed is so different from being held accountable. Witnessing is inherently relational in a way that accountability is not. Many of us learn, grow, and find ourselves thriving when we commune with another. It is an adaptive form of validation. At its most affirming, we are telling the other: I see you. And as I see you, you see me.

The tension between accountability and witnessing is what I have been sitting with. A question worth sitting with together. What would it mean for our professional wellbeing to actively seek out spaces where we are not just held accountable but genuinely witnessed in our work?

Sometimes one's energy is best directed toward something they want to create. I hold hope for professional communities that say, simply and without agenda: I see you doing this work. And it matters. I look forward to exploring these communities alongside you and sharing what we find.

One thing worth tending to

We all have the ability to reflect on our achievements, big and small, outside the context of evaluative systems. Those systems come at a cost. There is very little room for honest self-examination within them. The natural tendency in those situations is defensiveness or compliance. When we show up in our own power to recognize our work, we can afford to look honestly at ourselves with curiosity.

I like to think that recognition creates safety first. And in spaces of safety, we can begin to reflect.

So here is my question to you, as I shift gears: As we enter the summer months, how will you plan to recognize yourself and create moments of reflection?

Summer has a way of shifting the rhythm of daily life, sometimes speeding things up and sometimes slowing them down, and with it can stir up feelings that deserve a little extra attention. This season also brings a natural invitation to tend to the behind-the-scenes work that supports meaningful care, the kind of tending that happens quietly but makes everything else possible. It is also, perhaps, an invitation to practice the very thing we have been exploring here: to turn toward yourself with the same recognition and curiosity you would offer a colleague whose work you genuinely respect. However this summer feels for you, it is a beautiful time for renewal at every level.

A question worth sitting with

As you tend to yourself this summer, what is one resource, a book, a tool, a person, a community, that has made your private practice more sustainable? Reply to this email. I would love to know. If you are willing, I will add it to a resource list I am building for our colleagues.

Something worth knowing

In September, I am launching The Tending Circle, a professionally held virtual community rooted in relational practice for licensed therapists in solo private practice. A space where the work of your practice gets dedicated time, consistent structure, and the quiet presence of people. No pressure. This letter stands on its own.

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A. Meliora Relational Wellness · www.ameliorawellness.com

Written by Jennifer "Ajen" Busher, MBA-HCA, MA, LMFT, founder of A. Meliora Relational Wellness and an AEDP and Brainspotting therapist.