The Web and the Tether: Community as Distributed Attachment

Who is your person? For some of us, that question is easy. For many of us, it asks us to shrink a whole life of care into a single name.

The Web and the Tether is a two-hour experiential laboratory that asks what happens to belonging when we stop treating the romantic couple as the default container for adult care. Through short talks, gentle somatic practice, and structured conversation, we will look at how mononormative assumptions shape our experience of attachment, intimacy, and jealousy — and at what becomes possible when love and support are understood as a network rather than a single tether.

This is not an argument for any particular relationship structure. It is an invitation to notice how our bodies register relational threat, how belonging actually gets built and sustained, and how a community can hold more than one form of care as legible and real. The evening closes with an Offers and Needs exchange, a simple mutual-aid practice that sends participants home with named connections rather than abstractions.

This event is educational. It is not therapy, not a substitute for therapy, and not a dating event. Nothing shared in the room is observed, recorded, evaluated, or connected in any way to academic standing. You choose your own depth of disclosure throughout, and you may pass on any prompt or step out at any time. Stories stay; learning travels.

CIIS Students & Prospective Students - email transformation@ciis.edu for free tickets to this event.

WHO SHOULD COME

Everyone in the CIIS community is welcome. This evening will speak especially to:

• Students who want an embodied, non-didactic entry point into attachment theory and relational psychoanalysis

• Clinicians, faculty, and supervisors curious about how mononormativity operates as a clinical and theoretical default

• Anyone who sustain care networks that a single-partner model does not describe — solo and single people, elders, single parents, disabled community members, aromantic and asexual folks, chosen-family and diasporic kinship networks

• Staff and community organizers interested in practical, repeatable belonging practices that require no facilitator to sustain

• People in relationships of any configuration — partnered, uncoupled, polyamorous, monogamous, or undecided

WHAT TO EXPECT

• Brief talks on the developmental and cultural roots of mononormativity, distributed attachment, and the difference between relational multiplicity and pathological splitting.

• Grounding and gentle somatic practice before every exercise — you will be invited to notice settling and mobilization in your own body, not to perform anything.

• Structured dialogue in pairs and in threes, with prompts you may decline at any time using a pass card, no explanation needed.

• A closing whole-group reflection and Offers and Needs exchange — participants leave with concrete commitments to and from others in the room.

• Refreshments, a designated quiet space, seated-participation options for every exercise, and clinical support present throughout.