Description
Radical Empathy – Tools for Togetherness
Relationships and Partnerships with neo seefried & Maximilian Popp
This Month’s Guest: Maximilian Popp – Systemic Couples Therapist
Relationships and Partnerships
In this workshop, guest Maximilian Popp offers a practical mix of a short talk and an exercise. Together, we’ll explore what conflicts in close relationships can bring to the surface—and how queer experiences can shape our patterns around closeness, arguments, and withdrawal. The session also introduces everyday tools to help us stay more regulated, clear, and connected in difficult moments. We’ll close with space to reflect on our own strategies and try out new possibilities for deeper connection.
About Radical Empathy
Radical Empathy – Tools for Togetherness builds on Radical Empathy – Queer Storytelling for Connection (2025) and further develops the format: from collective storytelling to collective practice. The workshop series strengthens queer solidarity in all its diversity and asks: How can we stay connected, especially when things get tough?
Hosted by Neo Seefried, the series combines collective storytelling with somatic, communicative, and creative tools to remain capable of acting in queer contexts when faced with conflicts, emotions, and differences—without avoiding or escalating them, but rather with greater clarity, care, and relational competence.
Each session has its own thematic focus (including grief & death, relationships, migration, HIV/AIDS, club culture & substances, trans/inter/non-binary) and is complemented by a guest who explores the respective topic in depth. At the center is the Resonance Circle: a space for shared stories, mindful listening, and resonance—empathy as a practice that we train together and carry into our daily lives.
neo seefried (*1995)
Maximilian Popp is a systemic couples therapist based in Berlin-Neukölln, working primarily with queer couples. As a gay man, he brings both professional expertise and lived perspective to questions of queer relationship, conflict, intimacy, and desire. He’s interested in what conflicts reveal—needs, power, fear, longing—especially when things get hard: when closeness meets distance, security meets freedom, and expectations collide with what’s actually there. In therapy, he helps couples neither avoid nor escalate conflict, but use it consciously for more honesty, clarity, and real connection—while also asking the uncomfortable questions. www.paartherapie-popp.com
With the support of the Senate Department for the Interior and Sport – Berlin State Commission against Violence, we have developed the program “Conflicts as a Starting Point – Resilience as a Community Experience.” The project opens respectful, dialogical spaces for queer people in Berlin. It makes differences visible, invites individuals to endure them, and creates opportunities to address them productively and creatively. The aim is to overcome social fragmentation within queer communities and to strengthen new forms of exchange, cohesion, and mutual participation.
General information
Participant: this workshop series is open to LGBTQIA+ people, with particular encouragement for those holding multiple marginalizations.
Language: Depending on the group’s needs, sessions will be held in German and/or English.
Cost: Free of charge, registration required.
