Kindling

Care work, redefined.

Hi {{ first_name }}, I've been paying attention to what feels like aliveness lately. Not what makes me productive. Not what keeps the wheels turning. Not the systems or routines that make it do my work in the world and write here every week. People sometimes ask what that's actually like, as thou...

Jul 27, 2026

Terrifying and right

There are things I built this year, I could not have described to you last year. Not the shape of it, not the nerve it took, none of it. Which is to say: the fear was never the thing standing in my way. I used to treat it like a signal to wait. Get it quieter first, then move. Feel ready, then sh...

Jul 20, 2026

Developmentally appropriate, for once

A lot of my therapist friends can recite Erikson's eight developmental stages from memory. Trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame, all the way out to integrity versus despair. We built entire clinical frameworks on the premise that development isn't linear and we agree that a person is mov...

by Hilary Kinavey — Jul 13, 2026

What if the hardest parts of building your practice aren't personal?

I get to talk with a lot of practitioners. In office hours. In coaching sessions. On calls that a pracitioner intends to be about pricing, website choices, or whether to call something a group, a course, or something else entirely. And underneath almost every conversation, I hear the same quest...

Jul 06, 2026

What grief asks

There is a version of my work where I stay moving. Back to back sessions, a full calendar, the rhythm of holding space so constant that it becomes its own kind of anesthesia. I know how to do this. Most of us do. We learned it early in training, in the culture of care, in the particular way helpi...

Jun 29, 2026

Making space for inefficiency

There is a particular kind of tired that comes from moving at a pace set by external circumstances and structures. You know the one. The day chopped into fifty minute blocks. The note that has to be done before the next person walks in. The quiet arithmetic running underneath everything, how many...

Jun 29, 2026

Unsubscribes. Here's why I trust them.

I don't look at them. I never have. When someone leaves this list, that's a boundary, and I trust it completely. I don't treat it as a verdict or go hunting for the sentence that lost them. They made a choice about where their attention goes, and that's theirs to make. But I can definitely feel ...

Jun 22, 2026

How We Get Paid: On care work, fee-for-service, and the costs we don't talk about

On care work, fee-for-service, and the often unspoken costs of clinical work This is not a guide for fixing your practice. It's not a productivity framework. And it's not an argument for coping better inside conditions that may be doing you harm. This is an inquiry. It asks a different question...

by Hilary Katherine Kinavey — Jun 22, 2026

The empty chair

In the early days of Center for Body Trust, before I had the structural language for any of it, Dana and I used to teach a version of this to anyone who'd sit still long enough to hear it. We'd watch people — smart, careful, deeply good clinicians — stand at the edge of something they wanted to ...

Jun 22, 2026

Kindling

Care work, redefined.

Kindling

Care work, redefined.

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