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.

Who Should Attend

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.

Meet the Speakers

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Gila Ashtor is a psychoanalyst, critical theorist, and writer whose work brings psychoanalysis into direct conversation with queer theory, affect studies, and cultural criticism. She teaches Clinical Psychoanalysis at Columbia University and is on the faculty of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, NYU's Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), where she trained.

She is the author of three books, including Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia (Fordham, 2021), winner of the MLA's Alan Bray Memorial Award and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Exigent Psychoanalysis: The Interventions of Jean Laplanche (Routledge, 2022). She serves as an editor at Studies in Gender and Sexuality and maintains a private practice in New York City.

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Dr. Chris Walling is a psychoanalyst and somatic psychologist whose scholarship sits at the intersection of embodiment, affective neuroscience, and relational psychoanalytic theory. He serves as Associate Professor and Program Chair of the Research Psychology Department in the School of Consciousness and Transformation at CIIS, where he oversees the doctoral concentrations in Integral and Transpersonal Psychology and in Somatic Psychology.

He is a Fellow of the International Psychoanalytical Association and of the American Board of Psychoanalysis, Co-Treasurer of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, and Vice President of Education and Outreach at the Alzheimer's Research and Prevention Foundation. His teaching and writing center on how attachment, affect, and meaning are held in the body.