Review of EFTA-RELATES Conference – Lyon 2025

Rivers and Crossroads
Lyon is a city that thrives on crossroads. Where the Rhône and the Saône meet, the landscape is constantly reshaped. The rivers divide the city, yet they also bring it together: water as boundary and as connection, as separation and as confluence.
That image stayed with me during my days in Lyon at the EFTA-Relates Conference. A city of crossings, just as the conference itself became a place of crossings: of people and stories, of research and practice, of theory and improvisation, of Europe and Latin America, of controversy and confluence.
The theme — “Confluences and Controversies in Systemic Practice, Theory and Research” — found a tangible embodiment in this environment. Just as rivers first search for their own course, with force and resistance, and then merge into a larger stream, the same we did as systemic therapists navigating a world that iwas at once fractured and interconnected.
Like the rivers that divide and connect the city, the environment itself helped us live the theme. We moved together through buses and streets, we ate and danced together, we lost and found each other again. The conference was not a closed event, but a living process extending into the city itself: a system within other systems — open, fluid, organic, in motion.

Controversy and Connectedness
In our time, there is no shortage of controversies. Climate, migration, social inequality, wars, political tensions — they move like turbulent currents through our shared world. Sometimes they divide us, hardening into polarization. And yet, there are also places where unexpected confluences appear, where difference and connection flow together.
The congress invited us to practice precisely there: in the ambiguous space between divergence and unity. To find one another, to connect, and at the same time to dare to differ. For, as Gregory Bateson taught us: information is the difference that makes a difference.
Arriving in Lyon, I carried a quiet unease, a question. Would the organization — EFTA — have the courage to name the chaos and horrors that surge through the world around us: the many faces of the epistemological crisis, the danger of dichotomy and splitting — I and you, I and my environment, I and the other? We live in times of poly-crises: climate, migration, genocide, wars. I wondered how, or if, these would be acknowledged.
But already on the first day I felt reassured. The opening by Vassilis Charalambopoulos and his colleagues, performing Sting’s Fragile with images from today’s world, touched me deeply. It was as if the music itself braided together our fragility and our strength, our grief and our hope — like rivers finding their confluence.
And then came Umberta Telfener’s lecture on activism and systemic thinking — brilliant, essential. She invited us to step into activism, to allow ourselves to feel vulnerable as our clients do, and to understand our therapeutic acts and positions as ethical, aesthetic, and political gestures.
Thus the congress began, and I could truly enter it — not only with my mind, but also with my heart. I was carried, like water, into the flow of a living system.

Magnitude and Chaos: A Weaving of Worlds
With more than 1,600 participants from 66 countries and over 500 contributions, the congress was vast and richly diverse. It was organized by EFTA in collaboration with RELATES – Red Europea y Latinoamericana de Escuelas Sistémicas.
Abundance of perspectives and practices was guaranteed.
Not only the people and nationalities brought diversity — the presentations themselves flowed with variety in both content and form. Research met practice, and theory joined hands with lived experience. We discussed training standards, systemic supervision, and social justice. We returned to deep and time-tested epistemological riverbeds, while also exploring new streams of therapeutic approaches and movements. At times it felt like drinking old wine from new bottles, others new wine from old ones — currents intertwining, renewing, and reshaping the flow of our field.
The formats were just as diverse: workshops, round tables, symposia, discussion tables, poster sessions, clinical case discussions, video consultations — and even dance. One thing they all had in common: they were interactive. Each contribution had gone through careful preparation and screening at the abstract stage. The result: no static lectures ex cathedra, but living, participatory learning moments.
With that abundance inevitably came chaos. Yet the organization proved excellent. The online agenda, the mobile app, and regular email updates made the whole experience manageable. Within the multitude I found unexpected encounters, spontaneous conversations, small discoveries.
Learning happened not only in the workshops, but just as much in between. The congress was a living laboratory of second-order learning — learning in and from a new context, together.
What made this congress truly special was that it became a place where worlds intertwined. Donna Haraway speaks of worlding: a process in which people, places, relationships, ideas, and practices shape one another in real time. That was exactly what I experienced.
Colleagues became friends. Research became story. Spaces became places of meaning. And differences — between languages, traditions, styles — became sources of learning.

Personal Reflection
For me, this was the third EFTA Congress, and again a profound learning experience. I have learned that chaos is not something to be avoided, but a necessary ground for discovery — something to be welcomed. That learning lies not only in the content of presentations, but above all in the encounters around them. That second-order learning invites us to discover ourselves and one another in new contexts.
I return home with gratitude: for the many encounters and conversations. And with inspiration: to continue building a field that is constantly in motion. Just as the Rhône and the Seine keep flowing and converging, the same we do, we keep moving, connecting, and transforming. Since the congress was not just an event, but a weaving of worlds.

About the Author
Cinthe Lemmens works as a systemic therapist in Belgium. She is a board member of BVRGS – Belgian Association for Relationship and Family Therapy and Systemic Counselling, and serves on the EFTA/NFTO board, as well as on the Task Force on Social Justice and Systemic Thinking within EFTA. She also works as a freelance trainer, is an editorial board member of the journal Systeemtherapie, a member of the collective Systemic Voices for Peace, and co-founder of Metaloog, a knowledge network for systemic practices.