What Washington Taught Me About Intimacy

On discomfort, connection, and the teachers who quietly set us up for this. Notes from a week in Washington with five thousand therapists, who all, in the end, arrived at the same quiet conclusion.

Halfway through a very large conference in Washington, in front of five thousand colleagues, Orna Guralnik, the psychoanalyst behind the documentary series Couples Therapy, did something I was not expecting. She brought one of her most difficult moments from the screen. Not as a teaching case, not polished for presentation, but offered with genuine vulnerability. Here is where it was hard. Here is where I was not sure. Beside her, Eyal Rozmarin, her colleague and long-time collaborator, held that space with her.

It was a small moment in a very big week, and it was the most important thing I witnessed all week. I will come back to it, because everything else I brought home folds into it. But first, how I got there.

They say travelling opens your horizons. What actually does the work, I think, is leaving your comfort zone; travel is just one reliable way of getting there. And therapists are creatures of habit. We love structure, repetition, consistency, the monotone backdrop against which we quietly foster change. We arrange our beliefs into neat shelves and can be surprisingly reluctant to let anyone rearrange the furniture. We love thought-provoking environments. We just prefer to feel quietly in control of them.

And yet we know, professionally and personally, that growth lives just past the edge of what feels comfortable. It is where real learning happens. It is also, as I have been exploring in my writing on intimacy, where genuine connection becomes possible. In the not-knowing. In the willingness to be uncertain together. Intimacy is not built in grand leaps. It is built in small acts of presence, in the moments when we choose to stay open rather than retreat to the familiar.

Well. That is exactly where I found myself in Washington.

Across the Pond, despite everything

Despite the political climate at the time, and it did give me pause, I flew to Washington DC to join thousands of colleagues at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium. One of the largest, most celebrated gathering of psychotherapists in the world. This year’s theme: Braving New Conversations, From Problem Solving to Deep Healing. I went to listen to the greatest voices in our field, to soak up their thinking, to have my paradigms challenged.

Why travel all that way, you might reasonably ask, when so much is available nearer afield and online? Partly because I am an immigrant, and after giving up my home some twenty-odd years ago, I have made a strange kind of peace with feeling like the odd one out. It orients me. And partly because our American colleagues have a particular extroversion in professional spaces that makes connection genuinely easy. Sometimes you need a room full of strangers who are already leaning towards you.

The conference did not disappoint. But the gift I had not anticipated was this. I made a new friend. Someone I had known for perhaps two minutes before I understood, with the quiet certainty that sometimes arrives without explanation, that in some way she would be in my life for the rest of it. She, in herself, is the argument the whole week was making.

Braving new conversations

The symposium’s theme lands differently when you are sitting in a room of five thousand therapists, all of whom have spent their careers facilitating exactly that. New conversations. Brave ones. The kind that shift something. What struck me most, across multiple sessions and multiple voices, was not any single neuroscientific discovery or clinical framework. It was the convergence.

Everything, ultimately, pointed to the same place. Human connection is the mechanism. Not a nice-to-have. Not a backdrop to the real work. The relationship itself is the intervention. We’ve known this for a long time. And it cannot be said often enough.

Terry Real, in his first ever keynote, put it starkly. The wound is disconnection, and reconnection is the healing. We self-medicate, we withdraw, we manage one another rather than meet each other, and all of it, he argued, is a state of disconnection. The antidote is not grand or complicated. It is relational. It is the micro-moment of turning towards. The question asked because you want to hear the answer in their words. The conversation you stay in when every part of you wants to leave.

He also made a distinction I keep returning to. Between gratification and relational joy. Gratification is surface-level pleasure, the kind that keeps us briefly satisfied and reaching for more. Relational joy is something older and quieter. The deep contentment of being truly present with another person, of being known and knowing them in return. Parents often recognise it before they have language for it. It does not announce itself. It hums.

The wound is disconnection. The healing is reconnection.

Terry Real, Psychotherapy Networker Symposium, Washington DC

When the science and the soul meet

We spent a great deal of the week in the territory of neuroscience. Regulation, the window of tolerance, the polyvagal system, how the brain is shaped and reshaped by relationship.

Dan Siegel was there, as generous and meticulous as ever. His command of interpersonal neurobiology is extraordinary, his knowledge vast and carefully curated for the audience in front of him. And yet what stays with me is not just the content but the man himself. Openness. Humility. Generosity. Kindness. Authenticity. Everything, in other words, that we might hope for in a leader and so rarely find. Dan embodies the very qualities he teaches. In a field built on the belief that how we are matters as much as what we say, that is not a small thing. It is the whole thing.

And then the moment I opened with. Orna Guralnik bringing her hardest hour of Couples Therapy to the stage, unpolished and unsure, and Eyal Rozmarin holding that space with her. Watching it, I kept thinking of my own consulting room: the sessions I turn over on the drive home, the hours where I too was not sure. Two serious, rigorous clinicians, in difficulty and in mutual support, modelling the very thing they spend their professional lives helping others find. The wound is disconnection. And here, in front of five thousand people, was the cure.

What settled, when all of it came together, was deceptively simple. It is the being with each other, therapist with client, colleague with colleague, human with human, that does the work. The finding of help in one another, in the shared pursuit of helping others.

The wringer was worth it

Here is what I came home wanting to say, and perhaps the real reason I am writing this.

Sitting in that auditorium, listening to frameworks I recognised, concepts I had been trained in, approaches that felt like home, I felt something I can only describe as retrospective gratitude. Because my training was not easy. My teachers put us through the wringer. The relational training I received was demanding in the way that only the best training is. It required us to do deep personal work alongside the complex theoretical, to sit with our own material, to be genuinely changed by what we were learning rather than simply informed by it.

There were moments I found it frustrating. Moments I questioned the relentlessness, the insistence that the therapeutic relationship was not just a container but the whole point.

Washington answered that question.

What I saw in that room, surrounded by thousands of colleagues, many encountering this territory for the first time, is that I was not catching up. I was already there. The fundamental relational knowledge I had been given. The nuanced understanding of subjectivity, interpersonal dynamics, and the relationship as the central healing mechanism. The capacity to sit with a client’s discomfort without needing to fix or manage it. The embodied attunement that comes from this challenging training. All of it had prepared me not just to keep pace with where the field is going, but to meet it with something already in my hands.

My teachers gave me that. And in that room it became undeniable.

And then there was my new friend

When you are in your thirties, building a career, you expect to find people at similar crossroads. The older you get, the rarer that becomes. The margin thins. So there I was, thousands of miles from home, and within two minutes of meeting someone, I knew. The quiet kind of knowing that does not require explanation and does not need to be rushed into language.

Relationship cures, Terry Real said.

I agree. I have seen it in myself and in my clients for years. I felt it again in Washington. In an auditorium, in a corridor, in the space between two people who had only just met and somehow already knew.

Our greatest resource is one another. It always has been. The neuroscience is finally catching up with what the heart has always known.

Written with AI support for grammar and clarity. All editorial ideas and authorship remain fully human.