On making contact

I'm on the train, phone in hand. The carriage is full but somehow also empty. The person opposite me is on FaceTime, half-present, their gaze moving between the screen and the middle distance. The person at the ticket office serves me whilst scrolling - and I notice, as they do, that I'm doing exactly the same thing. We are both somewhere else. I wonder about these passing moments - these brief, unremarkable contacts between strangers - and what happens to them when attention is already somewhere else. Including mine.

We are relational beings. We make and break contact continuously. We cannot be in full contact all the time - withdrawal is necessary too. Time for reflection, independence, solitude, rest, recuperation, protection. And yet contact, when it happens, can bring us closer to one another. Closeness, intimacy, desire, connection, community, belonging. Both things can be true simultaneously, and in gestalt therapy we pay attention to both: the reaching toward, and the moving away. Gestalt therapy is, at its heart, a relational approach - interested not just in what happens inside us, but in what happens between us.

More and more I notice relational distance. Not just on trains or in shops, but in the texture of daily life. The attention economy - the proliferation of screens, platforms, apps, data - has reshaped how we meet one another. There is something convenient and even wonderful about being able to ask questions of the ether and receive immediate responses. But I find myself wondering: what do we lose when we stop asking of each other? When a bot can respond, and affirm what it is we need or want to hear - where does that leave the person in front of us?

These questions feel particularly resonant for communities who have always had to be more intentional about how they make contact - because they couldn't take it for granted.

On connection and community:

LGBTQ+ people and communities have a particular history with contact and solidarity. When marginalisation, pathologisation, and systemic exclusion push people to the edges of society, community becomes both necessity and lifeline - a rallying together, a reaching toward one another across shared experience.

This history has also shaped how many LGBTQ+ people approach relationships more broadly. Having been pushed to the fringes, and having had to navigate life more creatively in order to survive, queer communities have often led the way in redesigning relational structures. We see this in polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy, and other alternatives to heteronormative relationship models - ways of organising intimacy and connection that centre communication, consent, and choicefulness rather than inherited assumptions, roles, and expectations.

These ways of living are not exclusively queer - and they're not a prescription for anyone. But they offer something: a model for what becomes possible when we stop taking relationship structures for granted and start asking, consciously, how we actually want to organise our relational lives.

Whatever your relationship structure - monogamous or non-monogamous, partnered or single, navigating open relationships or relationship anarchy or simply trying to understand your own attachment patterns - it can be useful to ask: what is my communication style? How am I when talking about sex, about conflict, about needs? What do I find easy to say, and what gets left unsaid?

On choicefulness:

We are continuously in contact - or withdrawing from it. The invitation in gestalt therapy is toward choicefulness: contact not as something we get swept up in, or that happens to us, but something we make and organise. Sometimes withdrawal is exactly right. Sometimes we have more immediate needs of others. The quality of that contact, the attention and presence we bring, matters.

In gestalt therapy, we sometimes talk about the contact cycle - the natural rhythm of how a need arises, how we reach out to meet it, make contact, and then withdraw to integrate the experience before the next need emerges. It's a cycle we move through many times a day, often without noticing. What's interesting is where that cycle gets interrupted, where we pull back before making full contact, or stay in contact past the point of nourishment, or lose track of what we actually needed in the first place. These interruptions aren't failures. They're usually very good reasons that made sense at some point. But noticing them is often where the most interesting therapeutic work begins.

In relationship counselling, this is often where the work begins: not with what went wrong, but with how contact is being made, and where it breaks down.

How do you organise your relational field?

What is working for you - and what might be getting in the way of the contact you actually want?